Youthful leader inspires TSO

Posted on April 14, 2019 by barczablog

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Kerem Hasan is 27 after all, and we aren’t supposed to be ageist anymore in the 21st century. The conventional wisdom says that an experienced maestro is the ideal leader of an orchestra.

Kerem Hasan_c_TristanFewings

Conductor Kerem Hasan (photo: Tristan Fewings)

But tonight I saw the best Toronto Symphony concert I’ve seen in a long while, led by a very young conductor. I’m sorry I can’t suggest you go see him because it was the final one in the series. I understand that Hasan stepped in at the last minute, a replacement at the podium for an indisposition.

That seems even more impressive, don’t you think?

Perhaps the program helped. All three items represent compositions that were revolutionary works in their time.  Hasan brought an urgency to each one, a kind of excitement as if the music were brand new, no matter what century it was composed.

I wonder if Hasan has conducted them before?

  • Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
  • Szymanowski’s first violin concerto
  • Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony

This was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen from the TSO. Young Maestro Hasan inspired the orchestra, drawing committed playing every moment, and intriguing readings, well-thought out and impressive.

It was a fast but tight reading of the Debussy which is how I like it. The ensemble responded to the conductor’s every gesture after allowing the flute solo to unfold.  Every player paid close attention to his every gesture.

The concerto was well played by soloist Christian Tetzlaff. But Hasan kept the orchestra out of the way, never letting the ensemble get too loud when the violin was playing. There was one huge climactic explosion of sound in the leadup to Tetzlaff’s cadenza near the end of the work (a marvelous creation from the soloist), but otherwise this colorful piece was gently expressive.

I wondered as we came to the main work on the program after the interval, namely the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven: what was Hasan’s secret? All three pieces were approached with great energy, care, sensitivity. Inner voices were clear, and the phrasing made everything very coherent.  You would think their lives depended on it, the way they followed the conductor.

Hasan led a crisp energetic reading of the Eroica, among the best playing by the TSO that I have ever heard in all my time attending Roy Thomson Hall.

I wonder if the TSO will try to bring him back? I hope so!

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Boisterously brilliant Bigre

Posted on April 12, 2019 by barczablog

Watching people tortured can be funny.

Bigre, a Compagnie le fils du Grand Réseau Production, presented by Canadian Stage in collaboration with Théâtre Francaise de Toronto, opened tonight at the Berkeley St Theatre. In our modern gentrified cities, the impossibly tight spaces people are being forced to live in present the opportunity for phenomenal physical comedy.

It’s co-written and co-created by Pierre Guillois, Agathe L’Huillier & Olivier Martin Salvan, directed by Pierre Guillois, and performed by Guillois alternating with Bruno Fleury, Eléonore Auzou-Connes alternating with Agathe L’Huillier, and Jonathan Pinto-Rocha.

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Agathe L’Huillier, Jonathan Pinto-Rocha and Pierre Guillois (photo: Fabienne Rappeneau)

By accident I watched the recent film Stan & Ollie earlier this week, a bio-pic about the latter years of Laurel & Hardy that reminds you of some of the simplest tropes in comedy. Ditto tonight, including some gags that are literally centuries old: and still getting laughs. Guillois, Auzou-Connes and Pinto-Rocha each had moments of genuine brilliance.

It’s one of those shows that I watched, envying the performers, wishing I could be up there on that stage.  You could see how much fun this was, although the work is hard, not for the faint of heart.

The space –letting us peer into three tiny adjacent apartments—is really a pretense for humour.  The seeming impossibility of life inspires the ingenuity of each of them in different ways, like little flowers that insist on bursting out of the dirt.   Lighting, sound & music help segment the sequences, some long, some short, as we get deeper and deeper into the world of this fascinating trio. I defy you to see this show and not fall in love with them. While there’s pain there is also pathos & vulnerability. The emotional range is surprising.

The laughter moves around in the theatre. I found myself fascinated that at times people near me were guffawing, at other times they were silent when it was my turn.  Sometimes it’s painful, nervous laughs, sometimes pure fun.

Glimpsing three people living in the tiny space, tripping over one another, driving one another nuts? Yet life happens. They eat, they sleep, they have all their bodily functions (yes all of them), desperately human and totally hilarious.

While there’s an enormous amount of sound and noise, we’re not hearing words. Mouths move. Hands & legs gyrate. Hair gets very messed up. The wind blows. But especially bodies, three bodies sometimes discreet and separate, sometimes interacting.  All three performers show genuine physical eloquence.

This is one of those inspiring shows that reminds you of the possibilities of live theatre & creative performance. You will likely hear people telling you to go see this, and I’d echo that sentiment.

What is it exactly? There are elements of burlesque, of Commedia dell’Arte, clowns, comedy. Knowing what to call it is not important. It’s funny. It’s not verbal but physical. And it’s truly magical.

Bigre continues at the Berkeley St Theatre until April 28th.

TUTSONDE

L’Huillier, Pinto-Rocha & Guillois (photo: Fabienne Rappeneau)

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Questions for Sky Gilbert: Shakespeare’s Criminal

Posted on April 8, 2019 by barczablog

I’m a great admirer of Sky Gilbert, the playwright, performer, professor, and activist: and I didn’t nearly cover it all. You can read his Guelph university bio here …where they list him as an expert in Canadian theatre, Creative writing, Drag queens and kings, Gay, lesbian, and transgender politics, Noel Coward, Poetry, Queer theatre, Queer theory.

I discovered that Orpheus Productions will present three performances, in a workshop presentation, of Shakespeare’s Criminal: a new chamber opera with music by Dustin Peters and libretto by Sky Gilbert, starring Marion Newman, Dion Mazerolle and Nathaniel Bacon, April 26-28, 2019 at Factory Theatre.

I was thrilled to ask Sky some questions, especially about Shakespeare’s Criminal.

1. Are you more like your father or your mother?

My mother. I wrote a book called The Mommiad, about my mother and her influence on me. She was an amazing person; she ran for political office in Buffalo in the 60s, started her own business and raised two children. But more than that she nourished my creativity — I remember that as a teen I was torn between music and theatre as professions and she had an upright piano installed in our tiny flat in East York just so I could practice. It’s a long story, but let’s just say that her beauty and her wit were what inspired me; her dark sense of humour about the world is probably also mine today.

2. What is the best or worst thing about what you do?

Being alone. Both best and worst. I am oddly misanthropic — I don’t really like people sometimes, but I love being around them, and especially love being anonymous in crowds. I value being alone and need it to write — but that’s also lonely sometimes.

resized Sky Gilbert headshot

Sky Gilbert

3.Who do you like to listen to or watch?

I’m a narrative junkie, love stories. I see at least three movies at theatres a week, and a few on Netflix. I’ve just discovered Dorothy B. Hughes and Arnold Bennett, two great novelists. I’m particularly fond of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British novels and novels written by women (a real fan of Barbara Pym, my play A Few Brittle Leaves was inspired by her work — as well as of Barbara Comyn).

I love art films, but usually quirky ones with a sense of humour or a dark sort of compassion. I think remaining in the past — old novels and films with narratives — means I don’t feel threatened by modern art and can create my own reality/fantasies of what novels and poems and movies might be. The opposite is true when it comes to theatre. I recently saw Milos Rau’s Five Easy Pieces in New York City, a play that features children acting out scenes from the history of a child serial killer — it inspired me to develop a play called Kink Observed. In theatre I am all about challenge, viewing it and creating it.

4. What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?

I would say that my imagination fits in the category of something that I love about myself but is dangerous. I have trouble sometimes separating reality and fantasy (I know critics of my non-fiction essays will say — he certainly does!). This means that I can write a novel — I can’t stop imagining. In real life it can be frightening.

5. When you’re just relaxing and not working, what is your favourite thing to do?

Play Emily’s Delicious computer games and watch CNN Trump news. I admit it.

More questions about Shakepeare’s Criminal, workshop performances at Factory Studio April 26, 2019 @ 8pm and April 28 @ 2 pm. And on April 27th the workshop also includes a fund-raiser (more info below…)

1. With over 30 plays, 5 novels, 9 films listed on your Wikipedia page you’re an extraordinarily prolific artist. But I didn’t see any opera librettos listed. Will Shakepeare’s Criminal be your first attempt at an opera libretto?

I have been trying to put together an opera for years. I wrote a couple of finished librettos in the past and started working with composers who dropped out somewhere in the process. I understand why now; working with Dustin I have learned that the composer/librettist process is collaborative.

Dustin Peters headshot

Composer Dustin Peters

I have written this opera ‘song by song’ with Dustin, and his input has been invaluable; I have learned from it. I’ve been particularly passionate about opera since about 1998 and I’ve always been obsessed with music in general and classical music. I have written many musicals and starting in 1998 when I left Buddies my ‘hobby’ became listening to opera. I went from Donizetti to Massenet to Rossini and Bellini to Verdi and finally to R. Strauss — my interest is in Bel Canto and Romantic. Though how I am listening to Gretry and Wolf-Ferrari — so my tastes are becoming more rarified. I think for me it’s a combination of the two things I have been most passionate about — music and theatre, and also, as I’ve explained above, opera is pretty queer.

2. The press release for Shakespeare’s Criminal includes the following exciting idea:
The structure of Shakespeare’s Criminal is inspired by musicologist Ellen T. Harris’s notion that male composers were able to ground the emotional core of their operas through the wild, uncontrolled female voice (something which eventually led to the tragic romantic heroines of Verdi and Puccini).  Should we expect to see that kind of dynamic between male and female enacted in your opera?

The short answer is yes and no. The opera is about males and females interacting, but even though I am a male writing a female role, I’ve done my best to show a new twist and I’ve tried not to ‘objectify’ the female. True my female lead is something of a sorceress, but she is a desiring woman (as opposed to being a sex object) and also an intellectual and I think, wholly sympathetic.

The only thing that will be challenging for some audience members who are misogynist (and many people are, I think) is that they will have prejudices against a woman who is intellectual, sexual and has magic powers. The play is almost like peering into the brain of one of the ‘witches’ on the heath in Macbeth.

3. What’s the difference as you understand it, between a play text and an opera libretto?

Huge. My favourite thing is dialogue; love writing it, thinking it, imagining it. There is no dialogue in a good opera, in my view. There is only singing, showing off, spinning into emotion — I.e. Massenet’s WERTHER —.
Anyway, I have to think poetically rather than in dialogue, and this is something I have learned working with Dustin. I have written some songs as poems, and others I have written as prose. — but tried to make them as little like dialogue as possible. A couple of comic songs involved ‘dialogue’ but that is me indulging myself.

4. One of the promotional texts for Shakespeare’s Criminal says the following
“Shakespeare’s Criminal celebrates the eternal bond between gay men and the women who love them. As long as gay men have been looking for sex and romance, their best female friends have been supporting them. What’s that about? What is the special relationship between gay men and their BFFs?”
Please talk about that “eternal bond”. Do you feel that it goes far beyond any particular decade or century?

In Ellen Harris’s book the phrase is  ‘rake, whore, catamite’ and it is intended to refer to a straight young man, a sexual woman and a man who desires other men. She suggests that the triumvirate — this friendly gang of three is transhistorical, going back to the 17th century. In other words there is something archetypical, in western culture at least, about a ‘catamite’ inserting himself into a relationship with a man and a woman — as friend. I have switched that slightly in my opera, and there is a song entitled ‘rake, whore, voyeur, in which Shakespeare is the rake, the young man the whore, and the woman the voyeur. So I am fashioning a new variation on an old trope. But I would say that straight women and gay men have a special bond, which I suspect is transhistorical — even though ‘gay’ is a relatively new phenomenon — there have always been men and women who desire men, and that bond they share both oppresses them in a sexist, homophobic society, and liberates them to share their loves, fantasies and desires, in a creative friendship.

5. I always felt there was a natural affinity between gay men & opera divas, because they appreciated larger than life emotions & gestures. I associate the use of the word “diva” in popular culture with the operatic world, a conservative community that welcomed gay people both in the audience & onstage long before mainstream acceptance. When we speak of the phenomenon of the drag queen I feel a natural affinity with the larger than life features of the opera diva. Does anything in Shakespeare’s Criminal draw upon the drag world?

As Susan Sontag says in ‘On Camp’ Bellini has for a long time been accepted by gay men as a camp figure. It’s important to remember that this does not mean that Norma is a laughing-stock, in fact the most misunderstood aspect of camp is that it is as serious as it is funny. Drag queens adore the women they portray, because they have a little bit of women in them, and there is a lot of ‘their mothers’ in them, that they can’t rid themselves of, no matter how hard they try. At any rate, Wayne Koestenbaum has written extensively about the relationship between camp and opera in a book called The Queen’s Throat. Belllini was being quite serious when he wrote Norma. But the fact that she is a tragic sorceress in a kind of prehistoric culture is a little funny — partially only because we have the distance of years to look at that, and also aesthetic distance because we don’t write bel canto anymore in the same reverent way. Camp gives us the opportunity to enjoy melodrama again, as we can be both serious and funny about it at the same time. Dustin has provided Marion Newman with a ‘curse song’ that I think is camp. On the one hand it is all about a woman’s fury at a closeted gay man (ie a ‘straight’ man), on the other hand it is all about two gay men revelling in that fury. And frankly, I think that’s okay.

6. You have been around long enough to remember when homosexuality was illegal & covert, when it was a threat to at least some in the establishment, when many chose to be in the closet for fear of violence, reprisals or worse. Your gay theatre was an activist theatre, perhaps captured in that name “Buddies in Bad Times”, an organization you founded. The word “gay” is safer, less threatening and perhaps a reflection of our times. I read a wonderful comment on your blog, observing the
“mega-musicals that celebrate tolerance. Funny, but I personally have never been very fond of being tolerated.”
Writing an opera in 2019, does your work still seek out edginess, activism & revolution rather than to aim for being tolerated?

I have to take issue with the first part of your paragraph. All of this is not over, we are still suspected of converting people, people are still in the closet, there is still fear of violence, and not only in Brunei. The problem is that young gay men are in a trap; many have turned to drugs as a way out. They have been told the lie (and I am not accusing you of this, it’s out there) that there is no more homophobia. And yet they are still terrified to tell their parents, and eventually some of their acquaintances out in the world, that they are gay. How does one live with that terrifically discomfiting irregularity between truth and the general discourse —with having to pretend that everything is alright with gay men in our culture, but knowing it’s really not? At any rate, I do the antique thing of writing about gay men because gay men still exist and are still oppressed. Period. Up until recently, HIV positive gay men (and others who were HIV positive too) were jailed simply for being a possibly ever present ‘danger’ to society.

The criminal in my opera is an HIV positive young man who loves to spread the liquids around. We are not ‘over’ AIDS. Does any group ever get over a holocaust? I don’t think so. We will never forget that we were blamed and shamed for this tragic illness, and many died overwhelmed with that shame and blame. THAT will never go away.

7. Two of the works in the current Canadian Opera Company season (Hadrian & Eugene Onegin in the fall) came from homosexual composers, but that’s hardly surprising considering how many great gay composers there have been (in the last century: Britten, Barber, Bernstein, Cage, Copland, Adès, Hoiby, Poulenc, Menotti, and before, Schubert, Tchaikovsky perhaps Handel & Lully, and many more I didn’t mention). Will the music of Shakespeare’s Criminal sound anything like the music of a gay composer (listed or otherwise)?

The first one that comes to mind is Samuel Barber. I am fond of his opera Vanessa believe it or not, and the denseness of the quintette in that is not unlike his famous adagio. Here is an intensity of sound and a beauty, of course in the trio for our opera that reminds me of Barber. I think Dustin’s music lives in that area between Barber, and R Strauss and Wolf-Ferrari — he might not agree but that’s my take.

resized Dion Mazerolle headshot

Baritone Dion Mazerolle

8. Please talk about the team presenting the workshop of Shakepeare’s Criminal.

It would be better to ask Dustin this. I am not incredibly familiar with Dion Mazerolle’s work — though I’ve heard him sing and he sings and performs beautifully. I’m eager to start working for him.

The part of ‘The Academic’ was written, to some degree for Marion, that is Dustin and I both had her in mind when we were writing the opera. Of course that means that we have all her technical facility to work with, and the chance to show off her beautiful voice had to be utilized to the fullest.

She also radiates integrity and strength, both qualities which are needed for the role.

resized Marion Newman headshot

Soprano Marion Newman

We decided to cast a musical comedy singer, Nathaniel Bacon — in the role of the Young Man, and I had worked with Nathaniel before. He was in a play I directed My Dinner With Casey Donovan, and a play of mine that was produced at 4th Line Theatre called St. Francis of Millbrook. I only became aware that Nathaniel was a singer when I heard him sing Hedwig so beautifully at LOT (Lower Ossington Theatre). We think the young handsome gay musical comedy singer will be a nice contrast to the more classically trained opera artists and will say something about one of the themes of the play ‘earthy vs arty’.

Shakespeare's Criminal - Nathaniel Bacon

Nathaniel Bacon

9. What’s your favorite opera (the one you like most) & your ideal opera (the one whose structure / dramaturgy you would put on a pedestal as the best)? In writing Shakespeare’s Criminal would we see anything that resembles or imitates features of either your favorite or ideal opera?

Probably R. Strauss’s Arabella. I think what I love most about that opera is the wistfulness with which he flirts with waltz music. Recently I’ve been trying to appreciate German operetta without much success, and then I realized that it was R. Strauss that led me to this stuff, because the beautiful waltzes that he gives us glimpses of in Arabella and Rosenkavalier that so charmed me. Then I realized that Strauss’s music is nostalgic, and of course camp in this way, it is about wanting to hear beautiful melodies but only getting a taste of them. But Strauss’s flirting with these melodies from operetta is actually more beautiful and compelling and profound than these waltzes in the old operettas themselves. A reviewer of Massenet’s Griselidis once said of one of the melodies in that work that it was not the melody itself that was so beautiful but what how we missed it when it was gone. The last lyric in our opera is ‘gone’ and there is some of this wistful nostalgia, I think , in our opera for the beauty of melody, without always being melodic.

10. Is there a teacher or influence you’d care to name that you especially admire?

I want to mention Robert Spergel in this context. When I played in a quartet workshop at the Royal Conservatory back in — oh this would be probably 1970? — our teacher was Robert Spergel. I was playing the cello, badly, in the quartet, and he was always very annoyed with me. He of course had been a child prodigy (his sister was Mildred Kenton) and he had written a quartet and two symphonies — he played the Kol Nidri on the cello with Ernest MacMillan and the Toronto Symphony when he was 10. Anyway when I worked with Robert Spergel I was scared of him, and I thought he was kind of mean, but now I realize — no, he just loved music more than anything else more than people, and more than anything he wanted to see music done RIGHT. I have to respect this in a teacher, however tyrannical! And now that I have seen photos of a young Robert Spergel, it’s especially charming to see that he was at one time a very beautiful, petulant looking young man! Always a surprise, to learn this about the old!

*****

All Tickets for regular performances $35:
Friday April 26th, 8:00pm
Sunday April 28th, 2:00pm
https://www.factorytheatre.ca/what-s-on/

On April 26, 1977 Studio 54 opened in New York City.
On April 27 2019, Orpheus Productions will have a wild fundraising party to celebrate the venerable sex-positive, party-positive New York City hangout from the disco era and honour our new Chamber Opera ‘Shakespeare’s Criminal’.

All April 27th Tickets $80
Includes the workshop presentation, pre-show talk with the creators, post-show cocktail party with disco deserts, and scandalous performances for your voyeuristic pleasure by Hélène Ducharme and Shane MacKinnon! Dress in your favourite 70s outfit and dance the night away Studio 54 Style!

Buy tickets NOW and take yourself back to Studio 54
Saturday April 27th, 8:00pm https://shakespearescriminal.brownpapertickets.com

This is a Canadian Actors’ Equity Association production under the Artists’ Collective Policy.

Posted in Interviews, Music and musicology, Opera, Politics, Popular music & culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Against the Grain: Vivier’s Kopernikus

Posted on April 6, 2019 by barczablog

Claude Vivier’s Kopernikus has been promoted on social media as “Canada’s most famous unknown opera.” And Joel Ivany is quoted saying “I think this is Canada’s greatest opera ever written.”

After seeing what Against the Grain did with Vivier I’m a believer.

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Composer Claude Vivier

I think I drove Joel Ivany & Topher Mokrzewski a bit nuts talking their ears off after the performance tonight, Kopernikus in the intimacy Theatre Passe Muraille. Joel is the stage director, Topher the music director, and they’re keys to Against the Grain Theatre’s continuing excellence. It’s almost a decade isn’t it, that this young group have been dazzling Toronto audiences. While there have been several moments to identify as highlights, here’s another one that might be the greatest yet, possibly their most ambitious project of all.

Any interpretation is a kind of solution to the challenges posed by a text. Any score is a kind of puzzle that can be solved in more than one way. When something becomes part of standard repertoire, when a composer becomes known, those pathways are less mysterious, indeed we may err in forgetting to properly interrogate the page when we may become accustomed to the way others have answered the implicit questions in a piece. But when something is new and/or unknown you are truly face to face with enigmas.

Vivier doesn’t make it easy. On the one hand his music emulates the adventures one might call “modernist”, sometimes tonal, sometimes dissonant or ambiguous.  But on the other hand sometimes he asks his performers to deconstruct that modernist surface, giving us self-references bordering on parody, approaches to vocalization by the singers that might seem to mock the whole process.  Is he kidding?

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Claude Vivier

But having died in his mid-30s back in the 1980s, Vivier couldn’t be reached to answer the questions.  The mysteries of his scores will persist.  Indeed his short life with its violent ending is a fascinating additional subtext for his works, especially those such as this one with metaphysical overtones.

How serious is the tone of this work, I wondered, addressing the two creators: who were very polite with my questions. There’s a solemnity to the subject, the passage from the material world to the realm of spirit. I was reminded of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, another opera raising spiritual questions (and another opera that has been presented by Against the Grain) that is serious all the way through without any humour. Perhaps it depends on the audience, Joel suggested, as to whether they laugh. I recall a comment from the theorist Tzvetan Todorov, who noticed that some works are received with great enthusiasm during one cultural epoch, when that culture is willing to make a special effort to meet the work on its own terms; and without the special effort (corresponding to the beliefs etc of that group) the work fails or leaves people mystified. It strikes me now in hindsight that what Ivany & co. achieved was to bring most if not all of us to a place of commitment, without any requirement that we truly buy into this world or share a cultural consensus.  Indeed I was persuaded without any idea of what it might mean. While much of it is deliberately nonsensical or unintelligible in an invented language yet we buy into it all the same.

AtG’s achievement tonight, building on a workshop of this work at the Banff Centre in 2017, is to make sense of something extremely challenging, a score that problematizes signification with a text that is full of complex sounds to go with the nonsense syllables (I wasn’t sure until I asked them about it, but they confirmed this), a musical inkblot connoting the blurriness of dreams & the surreal.

I wondered about the concluding image, which reminded me of an interpretative choice from Robert Lepage: but Joel showed me that it’s right in Vivier’s score. Powerful as the piece is, its final minute is especially compelling, and might remind you of something you’ve seen; but I won’t spoil it for you by spilling the beans, except to say that it’s very simple and totally remarkable.

The ensemble includes some wonderful talents, all working as a team. I was amazed by the precision of their response to Topher’s conducting. Bruno Roy created a fascinating characterization that seemed like a cross between Cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies and Dracula. Dion Mazerolle had some beautiful moments when his lovely baritone filled the space. There are many more I could name, both onstage and working as part of the creative team.

The main thing is to recognize that this score is full of stunning moments, indeed gorgeous from beginning to end especially in this reading in this tight little space.  The intimacy of the venue magnifies the effect. This gif from their website gives you some idea.

website_gif

I hope they record it. I need to hear it again and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Kopernikus continues this weekend & next, closing on April 13th.

Posted in Dance, theatre & musicals, Music and musicology, Opera | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Idomeneo: Marshall Law

Posted on April 5, 2019 by barczablog

The question running through my head as I watched tonight’s opening of Opera Atelier’s Idomeneo at the Ed Mirvish Theatre was: “who is the star?”

In this their first performance in a new venue I could say “it’s the space”.  Although it has a slightly larger capacity than the Elgin, from where I sat the acoustics seem far better than at the Elgin, where things always seem to be soft & fuzzy. Tonight things sounded crystal clear in comparison, which is surprising considering the size, bigger than the Four Seasons Centre, at 2200 (or so says the oracle according to Google). But there was a crispness to the orchestral sound, a precision to the voices that we never heard in the Elgin. Everyone sounded better as a result.  And so I’d pronounce the debut of Opera Atelier in the new space as a definite triumph.

It was a curious experience all in all. The nice ladies sitting beside me brought in beer that they sipped after intermission. A seller came around with ice cream bars. Wow! (and of course I ate one!) Before you ask me if I think this is in some sense a violation? No! This is much more in the tradition of opera in the 18th century & before, when you might have wenches hawking oranges, when the lights were up. Arguably it would be entirely appropriate to let people have their mobile phones on (and I say this having heard plenty of buzzes from those nearby). I still dream of someday seeing a Handel opera done with the lights up and the free-and-easy audience deportment that would be an emulation of that time. We are weird, in our 21st century lights out try to keep a lid on it repressed approach to theatre. I wish people would be less inhibited about showing appreciation, as that too would not only be more authentic but a whole lot more fun.  But in other words, letting people have beer & ice cream is a step in the right direction.

There are things about this production that are historically informed and other aspects that are decidedly modern or at least new, brainchildren of the director Marshall Pynkoski. We get a curious mix of the two that might best be understood as the Opera Atelier brand. Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra + the interpretive brilliance of music director David Fallis give their operas legitimacy even when there are liberties taken, extra dance numbers that I can’t find in the score (although perhaps there’s a different version? I wonder); but at least they sound like Mozart. Nobody minds if there is an aura of historicity. And so while there were no strobe lights in Mozart’s time (an effect used several times in the opera), we accept it because the set, costuming and movement vocabulary mostly connote an earlier time. I say mostly because at times dancers of the Opera Atelier Ballet offered some spectacularly romantic moves, particularly in the last hour. But I’m not complaining.

And so, while you’re probably waiting for this review to declare that Measha Bruggergosman or Colin Ainsworth or perhaps someone else was the star, I’m not going to say that. The two biggest stars for me were 1) The Ed Mirvish Theatre, blowing me away with the acoustic, & the intriguing experience of beer & ice cream, and especially
2) Marshall Pynkoski, getting his singers to dance more than ever.

It’s funny, I had the funniest thought, reminded of Robert Lepage. You may recall that he faced a rebellion from his Brunnhilde a few years ago, when Debbie Voigt refused to climb onto the machine in her portrayal, although she did eventually relent. Directors sometimes push the envelope with their performers. Lepage has sometimes asked a great deal of his singers, as Julie Taymor did with the performers in Spiderman. Is anyone revolting against Pynkoski? Not that I can tell. But wow he demands more and more of his singers with every show. A few weeks ago I watched Mireille Asselin—one of the finest young singers in this country—dancing as part of a show at the ROM. Tonight every one of the principals was being asked to dance.

I have to wonder, too, as Measha Bruggergosman seemed to be limping. I wonder if she was injured in rehearsal? My heart went out to her, as it’s hard enough singing the role of Elettra without the additional choreographic challenges imposed by the director, or perhaps in collaboration with the choreographer Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg.

Colin Ainsworth was very sympathetic in the title role, showing us more power than ever: or is that just the acoustic of the theatre? I heard an interpolated high C in one of the arias, and it seemed he was bringing a more dramatic sound than usual most of the way, even if he did take something off the sound when he was engaging in fast coloratura. It’s a huge sing.

Wallis Giunta (Idamante) & Meghan Lindsay (Ilia) were a great pleasure to watch, a romantic couple who worked entirely within Pynkoski’s scheme even as they gave us their stunning Mozartian vocalism, perfect intonation, while honouring the physical demands. At one point Ainsworth throws Lindsay across the stage, a bit of stage fighting that was delightfully fluid, and as much a dance move as a real fight. I’ve missed Giunta’s presence on Toronto stages, and it’s clear she’s developed a great deal in her time overseas, perhaps the most cojones of anyone onstage tonight in a swaggering trouser role.

While we didn’t hear as much of Douglas Williams wonderful voice as I might have wished he was arguably the most important figure onstage, unless one includes the massive trident he wielded.  Whoever you want to call “the star”, Opera Atelier depends upon conductor David Fallis, whose baton even commands the gods of this story.  The orchestra, chorus & soloists sounded wonderful, sometimes soft & delicate, sometimes terrifying.

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Douglas Williams as Neptune, wielding a bigger baton than David Fallis conducting in the pit: but we know who the orchestra will follow don’t we…! (photo Bruce Zinger)

Idomeneo continues until April 13th at the Ed Mirvish Theatre.

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887: a quest for redemption for Robert Lepage

Posted on April 2, 2019 by barczablog

There is some irony that Canadian Stage are bringing back Robert Lepage’s 887, both because it’s a powerful piece of theatre that you must see if at all possible, but also as an exploration of memory. Throughout the work Lepage is asking himself what he can remember, what anyone can remember.

And then there are the more recent events for Lepage.  They say that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. I wonder if Robert Lepage believes it, after the controversies of 2018, his annus horribilis.

If people are talking about you it’s supposed to be a good thing, right?

  • In the summer it was SLAV, a show including white people singing the songs of black slaves. After protests it was cancelled amid charges of cultural appropriation.
  • In December it was Kanata, a show scheduled for Paris about the settlement of Canada. After protests from the Indigenous community it was cancelled when the backers backed out.

And now in the spring of 2019, Lepage’s Ring des Nibelungen is being revived at the Metropolitan Opera, with some phenomenally negative reviews. They only seem to have positive words for the singers:

I wrote about this production (really four productions, given that the style varies from one opera to the next) at great length as each of the operas appeared, both as high-definition broadcasts and from attending two of the four operas in the house. From the intensity of my enjoyment my American friends might think I drank some sort of kool-ade, perhaps because I’m Canadian. Yet my scholar friends speak the name “Robert Lepage” with a kind of reverence that might puzzle Americans who only know him from his work with Cirque du soleil or the Metropolitan Opera.  Lepage is taken seriously in Canada.

This is from the rave review I wrote about 887 back in April 2017:

887 is a play that is at once, a meditation on memory, an auto-biographical testimonial by Robert Lepage himself, a funny two hours, and a highly political study of recent history. Several times I thought I saw the kernel, the main well-spring of Lepage’s inspiration: and yet so thoroughly are the different threads sewn together that I can’t really say for certain.

  • There’s the poem “Speak White” by Québecoise Michelle Lalonde, a text with which we’re teased throughout as Lepage shares the challenge trying to memorize the poem (and we wonder just how much of it he will eventually retain), which he has been invited to read at an event. As we shall discover, the poem is like the cri de coeur of an underclass seeking equality. This year especially the poem is must reading for any Canadian.
  • There’s the Québec motto inscribed on their license plates, namely “je me souviens”, or I remember. But what do we –or does Lepage—actually remember?
  • I couldn’t help thinking that at one time separatism was such a threat to confederation that every day we heard something in the news, about possible referenda, about the polling numbers for the Parti Québecois. As Lepage gives us his one-man show, I felt the subtext could have been that collective memory lapse, as the once powerful and threatening movement seems to have faded away to nothing.
  • And memory is personal for Lepage. The set is ostensibly a model of his childhood apartment home, but in a real sense it’s a model of himself, of his brain and his influences (and while this thought may seem wacky or strange to say, at one point Lepage made it literally so, allowing the diagram of the apartment to morph into cerebral hemispheres, complete with a bit of explanation about what the different mental apartments might be good for).
  • When he briefly alluded to his grandmother and her struggles with dementia, I wondered if I was the only one in the place suddenly uncontrollably crying –stifling sobs actually—in the way we were suddenly at a bedside. It’s still killing me hours later that the ambiguity of what we were seeing and discussing let the association come up. I thought I heard someone else audibly crying too at that moment. Mercifully we segued to a childhood scene of theatrics, the study of memory both enacted and analyzed.
  • And there’s probably more. Lepage joked about the whole process of memorizing, which may have been a personal subtext for the show.

I want to recall what I said about 887 as I think about what Lepage chose to do with Wagner’s Ring cycle. There is again a kind of literalness in the design concept, a concrete focus that is easy to underestimate.  I like simplicity especially when it works.

  • In Damnation de Faust, Marguérite sings of the flaming ardor of her love: and her CGI projected image seems to catch fire on the big screen behind her onstage.
  • For much of the Ring cycle we are seeing the events exactly as specified in the score, and sometimes for the first time in decades. In Das Rheingold we see the Rhine-maidens swimming in the river (usually impossible to do), in Götterdämmerung when Siegfried travels on the river with his horse, we actually have a horse signified, at least in a puppet version.
  • In 887 we see a model of Lepage’s childhood home (the title refers to his street address) as he contemplates his/our past.  (AND as I wrote: “The set is ostensibly a model of his childhood apartment home, but in a real sense it’s a model of himself, of his brain and his influences (and while this thought may seem wacky or strange to say, at one point Lepage made it literally so, allowing the diagram of the apartment to morph into cerebral hemispheres, complete with a bit of explanation about what the different mental apartments might be good for).“
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Robert Lepage and Ex Machina: 887 (Photo: Érick Labbé)

Lepage will be back to remind us what he can do, as he performs 887, an Ex Machina Production May 3-12 at the Bluma Appel Theatre.

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TCO Traviata

Posted on March 29, 2019 by barczablog
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Giuseppe Macina

Toronto City Opera? While the name is new to me, reading the history I see the lineage, going back over forty years to the legacy of Giuseppe Macina’s Toronto Opera Repertoire.

You can read more of their history here.

This continues the tradition of building an educational experience from out of music & theatre, singing & staging an opera. There are lots of people in the chorus having the time of their lives, while a few soloists enact the actual story.

Tonight they opened their production of La traviata at the intimate Al Green Theatre, the first of three performances led by the team of Artistic Director & conductor Jennifer Tung, pianist & music director Ivan Jovanovic, and Alaina Viau as Stage Director.

After reading TCO’s mission from their website I’d have to say that they have fulfilled their goals.

Toronto City Opera is passionately committed to opera for everyone. We give young professionals a chance to perform principal roles with coaching in musicianship and stagecraft. We give our amateur choristers inspiration and skills, so that they too can perform in a fully staged opera. And for our community we provide affordable access to this grand synthesis of music, drama, dance, and design to raise up the human spirit of everyone it touches.

The production is somewhat modernized, but without harming the story. While I was caught up in the happy vibe during the two party scenes (including a large and enthusiastic chorus), we still achieved the tragic effect at the end. Most importantly everyone seemed to have a really good time, and Verdi was along for the ride.

If you’re looking for a good community theatre experience, I recommend this without reservation, especially if you’d rather sing Verdi or Mozart instead of Rogers & Hammerstein. Soloists have to audition, and are on a different educational level than the chorus members.  I was pleasantly surprised that the music was presented with a great deal of cohesion & discipline.

For further information, including pictures from past productions and contact information, here’s their website.

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The Woods are Dark and Deep: is good

Posted on March 25, 2019 by barczablog

You will laugh, you will cry, and you will certainly enjoy The Woods are Dark and Deep, a new work I have just seen today at the Factory Theatre, from Pulse Theatre.

When you go see a new work performed there are at least two options available:

  • talk about the new creation & its creator
  • talk about performances & performers

But the new play from Mladen Obradovic suggests a third topic required in this case, because it’s a play about a historical event that’s never really had any attention. Why don’t I start with that first.

Did you know that Eastern Europeans were interned in work-camps in the First World War? We hear lots about the way Japanese Canadians endured being displaced and re-settled in the Second World War because they were identified as the enemy.

But it’s news to me that it happened in the earlier war too.

And even more disturbing to me is the discovery that the groups singled out were from the Balkans, the Ukraine and Hungary, speaking as a Hungarian.  But of course these were  countries identified as “the enemy”. Presumably the same would have happened with Germans, although that’s not part of this story.

You have to hand it to the planners, the powers that be in Canada during WW I, who conceived this idea. They made good use of our landscape, which has everything to do with the title. You can’t escape if you fear barren forests & the wild animals that live there, never mind the added charms of our winters.

This is a different world from our own, before the kind of medical care we take for granted. When people got sick in those days? There was a huge influenza epidemic towards the end of the war, killing millions of people. If you broke a bone or had a concussion, no one received the kind of care we now get.

Now imagine that you have an injury while you’re in a prison camp..!

I saw The Woods are Dark and Deep as the finale to a kind of birthday celebration, believe it or not.

  • I saw the St Matthew Passion on JS Bach’s birthday (Thursday)
  • I took my wife to see The Empire Strikes Back with live accompaniment from the Toronto Symphony on my own birthday (Friday)
  • I saw the New Wave Workshop last night, five excerpts from pieces that will be produced in the coming year from five teams of women (directors, composers & librettists), and women performers at the piano and singing: the birthday of Musique 3 Femmes, a new force as Yoda might put it
  • And this afternoon was for me a celebration of a brilliant new talent. I find it hard to believe that this is Mladen Obradovic’s first play. And it was back to the same kind of gender balance as Friday; just as Star Wars is mostly boys playing at sci-fi complete with Princess Leia as the exception that proves the (gender) rule, so too in this visit to a prison camp.

Let me repeat what I started to say above. The debut of Mladen’s play is an event. I laughed a lot but shed tears in a few places. There’s a boy- girl drama at the centre of the story, told in a style that’s a cross between epistolary romance and 20th century authoritarian. So while there are letters going back and forth, they get censored.

Mladen’s handling of these devices is masterful, very economical considering how much story he’s telling.

We’re visiting a very different world. I can’t emphasize this enough. I go CRAZY watching drama at our major theatres or feature films that are replete with anachronism, errors in the cultural reference points, likely caused by actors improvising with their 21st century millennial sensibilities, polluting whatever accuracy the writers may have created.

But for once it’s done right. There’s a fair amount of music in this show, too. It’s not only that it’s source music (aka diegetic music), performed by people onstage (as opposed to non—diegetic music as we see so often in film scores: from an invisible source outside the world of the play) but with authenticity. I don’t know Serbian culture, I only know that when someone onstage is singing and half the audience joins in? it’s profoundly stirring.

Oh yes, there’s also the matter of the performances / performers. Sorry to sound like a broken record, but there’s Mladen again, who plays Nebojsa, a troubled / troubling character. I think if you see the show you’ll be like me, liking everyone onstage: except the one that’s played by Mladen, a totally miserable SOB. In his defence, he’s in prison, so no wonder he’s unhappy. But I am intrigued that Mladen wrote this part for himself, wondering if he played it because he wouldn’t visit this upon any other actor, or because he truly understands the character. Mladen gets these wonderful moments when he can go completely against the grain of everyone else onstage, although he is often arguing or fighting with the others.

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Nebojsa (Mladen Obradovic) fighting with Janko (Dewey Stewart).

When was the last time you saw a new play with nine characters in it? Everything new these days seems to be for four or fewer: because of budgetary pressures naturally, not due to any creative reasons. In Shakespeare’s time everything was for huge casts (double- and triple-cast likely), so there’s a wonderful weight to this simply from the number of people onstage, each fully fleshed out.

I can’t decide who’s my favourite although there are several candidates. Janko (Dewey Stewart) is your classic romantic lead: but thwarted by the simple fact he’s imprisoned, far from the girl he loves. Will he be able to marry Claire (Sophie McIntosh), the girl who loves him back? In the meantime we get to see their correspondence written with the dubious assistance of the prison censor.

Then there’s the family of Oleksa (Ratko Todorovic) & Anya (Biljana Karadzic) plus their children Olessya (Mila Jokic) & Oleh (Simeon Kljakic), who figure in the story in so many ways. Olessya has a crush on Janko, helps him write his letters to Claire because her English skills are so much better than Janko’s. Nebojsa is teaching Oleh guitar. Oleksa is the strongest man at the physical labour necessary in the camp: but he’s disabled in other ways.

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L-R Biljana Karadzic, Mila Jokic, Jake Zabusky, Dewey Stewart, Mladen Obradovic, Ratko Todorovic and Simeon Kljakic

I don’t want to give the story away, so I’ll simply say that as in Shakespeare, everyone’s part is significant whatever its size. The strengths of the cast come at you from all sides at every moment. Some of that is likely the writing, some of that is the performances.

I should mention too director Sandra Cardinal who made it all flow, kept it cohesive. While there is no dramaturg credit given, Cardinal likely had a hand in bringing the new play into the world, bringing this fascinating group of characters to life.

It’s a very romantic tale that surely will bring you to tears in places, sometimes from what an individual faces, sometimes from the politics & the struggles confronting everyone on stage.  I wonder if there’s any thought of adapting this into a film? I hope so.

But for now, your best chance of seeing this wonderful show is at the Factory Theatre until March 27th. You won’t regret it. Go see it.

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Musique 3 Femmes – Next Wave Workshop

Posted on March 24, 2019 by barczablog

The Wednesday March 20th noon-hour sample of Next Wave was a small sample of the riches we encountered in tonight’s Workshop, presented with the support of Tapestry Opera & hosted at their Ernest Balmer Studio. And there was a social component that I skipped to get home to write this; but when you have to drive home to Scarborough one can’t surrender to the temptation of a free bar.

Five teams of librettist / composer / director with a pianist or two + singers gave us three samples before intermission and two after, prize winners of the Inaugural Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes ( “a new $25,000 award in Canada supporting the creation of operas by emerging female and female-identifying composers and librettists”). All five were absorbing pieces of music theatre. If every text is a kind of puzzle that can be solved in a multitude of ways, I was aware that we were watching, not only the new works, but the fruits of the creative labour of singers & directors, working with a pianist seeking to wrap their heads & their creative chops around the new shows, making choices, experimenting, trial & error. Our responses are valuable feedback.

We were listening to the pianism of Jennifer Szeto, joined by Natasha Fransblow for one of the excerpts.  The musical direction was transparent and supportive, never noticeable except as an addition to the evening.  I’m not properly reviewing the performances, hoping they’ll forgive me in my choice to focus on the new creations.

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Standing front row: Naima Phillips, Margareta Jeric, Cecilia Livingston, Alaina Viau, Monica Pearce, Jennifer Szeto, Lindsay Connolly, Kristin Hoff; back row: Pascale St-Onge, Alice Abracen, Laurence Jobidon, Michelle Telford, Kendra Harder, Amanda Smith, Aria Umezawa,, Suzanne Rigden

The first excerpt was from The Chair (composer Maria Atallah, librettist Alice Abracen, director Anna Theodosakis). We’re watching a young person who has endured the loss of a friend, and now must endure the additionally harrowing experience of the various expressions of sympathy. It’s a wonderfully layered text as we go from the banal expressions constrained by the political correctness of the situation (numb thank yous) to more ironic ejaculations of the underlying truths.

I’m reminded of some of the falsehoods surrounding disability & age. That we all seek to signify normalcy & competence even when we may be losing our sight or our hearing or our ability to walk without limping. How much truth is permitted or sanctioned? Music theatre is helpful, as the departure from normalcy makes more sense when you’re singing, whereas the same lines delivered straight without music might seem crazed or surreal. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we enter into an alternate world via music where we don’t have the same trouble suspending disbelief, as we read various layers of the young woman’s feelings & responses.

The second excerpt was from Singing Only Softly (composer Cecilia Livingston, librettist Monica Pearce, director Alaina Viau). Based on redacted texts from The Diary of Anne Frank, the excerpts had me asking some pointed questions about music theatre, in response to Livingston’s form that she calls “song-cycle opera,” at least for today. Tomorrow I may again crave Parsifal & Pelléas but in 2019 I have to question the efficacy of operas requiring big orchestras, and all the challenges that entails for dramaturgy & knowing what the piece is really doing. The expressive possibilities of this scale of work, with a couple of singers & a piano are enormous, the clarity one gets in a voice singing (excuse me for suddenly remembering their title) “only softly” make me recall the usual success rate of larger scale works. How often do they work? Rarely it seems. It’s just so much harder, the expressive power of singer + text becomes like a shotgun, spraying effects & impressions but imprecise. Viau / Pearce / Livingston gave their creation the precision focus of a laser.  Yes I know that the title likely begins in the furtive nature of the story (a family who must hide for fear of discovery): but there’s no loss of power due to the size.

I was reminded of Reviving Ophelia, a book I read long ago that I sometimes cite as a grandpa, recalling the issues as parent of girls, concerning the hazards in adolescence to the authentic self of the girl. I was thrilled to hear this (meaning the conflict, not the book) mentioned by the creators (in their intro before the excerpt), as one of the sites of the drama, a kind of drama of the unfolding development of a young girl. I was also delighted to see the use of a personage signified with multiple performers, something that I hope we see more often.

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Composer Cecilia Livingston

The third excerpt was from Book of Faces (composer Kendra Harder, librettist Michelle Telford and director Jessica Derventzis). The wonderfully flamboyant little example on Wednesday brought the house down, as I mentioned in that write-up. Tonight’s larger example showed us a much more complex piece, a comedy with darker nuances. While we still have the comedy of Facebook & Tumblr, we also get the subtext, the desperate struggle of a generation seeking to make a living that makes social media so addictive.

I can certainly identify. Confession. When I post a lot of blogs –as I have this month—it’s usually a sign that I am avoiding something in my life.

In passing –as we come to intermission—I have to wonder, did anyone miss men at all on this evening? Oh sure, there are a few of us in the audience (eating it up btw), but there’s no shortage of talent onstage, a very satisfying image of reality.

After intermission, two more extraordinary pieces.

First we came to the fourth item on the program namely Suite d’une Ville Morte (composer Margarete Jeric, librettist Naima Kristel Phillips, director Amanda Smith). Where the small sample of this Wednesday was particularly electrifying, I was surprised at how much further it went in the staged version tonight, an overpowering piece that bowled me over completely. I feel moved to remind the creators that while they may want to “finish” this piece, it’s totally legitimate to offer up a fragment. There’s certainly a tradition of this in the late 19th century for instance, thinking of Mallarmé’s unfinished dramas, Debussy’s unfinished operatic fragments, and poems one could name. The torso of something else can be almost more powerful than the finished piece, its incompleteness an invitation to the imagination to run wild. We had text & music with hints of possible mise-en-scène, but did not require closure or even precision.

Imagine a piano as the remnant of a dead city. Please note, too, that phrase “dead city” is itself a symbolist trope, if we recall the opera Die tote Stadt (edit the morning after: I should mention the source novel Bruges-la-Morte by George Rodenbach is symbolist, not the opera). Is the piano broken? We hear in the text of a burning piano. The thing is, pianos are always breaking (alas as we know too well), somewhat mortal themselves as extensions of a person. A pianist with a piano is a bit like a cyborg, in the sense that the hammers & strings extend a person’s expressiveness, a synthesis of human & machine (not to be confused with the Terminator of course). Yet we are all a bit broken, using eyeglasses, bicycles, smartphones, and various other tools to compensate for what we can’t do, especially as we age. When we do it to ourselves through war it’s that much more painful in its poignancy but still, an extension of the usual self-destruction. In this piece it’s especially clear, as we see a pulse emerge from the foot-pedalling of a piano, the thump thump rhythm that resembles our own internal pumps, emulated by the singers. There’s a kind of chicken & egg thing going on here, where we can’t quite tell which came first, the song or the singer, the human or the machine, the pulse or the instrument on which to pound that pulse. And the distinction is problematized, as we wonder which is the machine, which is the living thing.

I’m reminded to of the sci-fi trope of wrecked civilizations, as in Ballard’s Crash, or the Mad Max series, destruction that might be war or just the devolution of our species, losing its way. The words are on the boundary between mind and mindless, repeated utterances that resemble something animal or intuitive, meaning collapsing in the face of the unbearable.

I was reminded of Pan’s Labyrinth, a film you may admire, but one that I had trouble with because it was in places so very powerful. Would a person who has lived through the siege of their city be able to stand this? What sensitizes urbane effete listeners like you and me, might be too traumatic for someone who has lived this in real life. I don’t mean that to be a critique necessarily, so much as a reminder of how lucky we are to be able to ask these questions in a city that has not been bombarded or destroyed.

The fifth and last piece tonight was the consummation of the questions I had after Wednesday’s concert, when I wondered about the idea of solidarity & resilience in a story of women fleeing abuse en route to a remote shelter in Québec in L’hiver attend beaucoup de moi (composer Laurence Jobidon, librettist Pascale St-Onge, director Aria Umezawa). There was a very Canadian moment when they look fearfully at the sky, wondering if the weather will prevent them from traveling. But again as with the previous one, by singing we transcend this world,  straddling the boundary between reality & something mythic, larger than life, and not necessarily rooted in quotidian matters. By singing it we’re taken into an affirmation of something larger and life-affirming. Jobidon’s vocal writing is very good –how else do I say it? –in giving us two women singing together a great deal of the time. I can’t recall hearing anything like this from a recent composer, that works so well as an enactment of this idea –solidarity?– yet is simply good vocal writing, beautiful to hear, and genuinely operatic.

Afterwards, I wondered, why is it that the question is asked of music, as to why something is adapted or set as opera.  Did anyone ever challenge Van Gogh or Picasso over their subjects? Perhaps it’s a male question, to ask if something can work without the music, and therefore doesn’t need that operatic treatment. But it’s so good that I don’t detect any anxiety in these pieces, no existential challenge that would undermine the serene confidence of these creators. They don’t just have a right to be there.

They’re very good indeed.

And look around. Each of these operas will be presented in a more complete form somewhere in the months ahead.  Perhaps you’ll be able to see & hear them.

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The Empire Strikes Bach?

Posted on March 23, 2019 by barczablog

I didn’t get enough sleep last night.  I got home from the epic St Matthew Passion I wrote about from March 21st aka Bach’s birthday at roughly 11:30 pm, had some vino & pizza with the Mrs and only finished writing at about 1:30 am.  I’m always up at 6:30, being both a morning person and someone who loves to stay up late. I had all sorts of things to do today on March 22nd, which is not Bach’s birthday, but is birthday for Stephen Sondheim & Andrew Lloyd Webber (isn’t it curious, that the two most popular recent music-theatre composers share a birthday?), William Shatner, Dave Keon and also me. That’s why we had the vino & the pizza.

On a day when I was tired all day, the highlight was getting to see The Empire Strikes BacK (spelled correctly this time) with its score played live by the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall. Sarah Hicks conducted in high heels, coming in to begin with Yoda (or a good facsimile thereof) riding on her back.  While she may not be Ginger Rogers I’m reminded of a saying about the dance partner of Fred Astaire, something about doing it backwards and in high- heels.

The TSO now have a devoted following for these events. It was all but sold out, one of four showings, and greeted with rapturous applause.  Hicks encouraged us to be vocal, so it was. No we didn’t boo and hiss for Darth Vader. But there were marvelous moments when a scene ended and the audience erupted.  Famous lines drew applause.  I couldn’t resist joining in with Princess Leia, telling C3P0 to “shut up”.

They’re all so young.  You see it even more when they’re on the big screen, accompanied by that big vivid score performed live.  We just saw Singin’ in the Rain on TCM last week, a reminder of Leia’s mom aka Debbie Reynolds.  Carrie Fisher never had the innocence of her mom, especially the freshness we see in her debut opposite Gene Kelly & Donald O’Connor.  Carrie’s Leia is already world-weary when she tells Obe Wan that he’s her only hope.  When she’s instructing he rebels during the siege that opens the film, she’s already full of gravitas beyond her years.

This is the first time I understood some of the lines of the film, thanks to the subtitles. I suspect that if I had bought the DVDs I could have done the same thing, to solve the mystery of those lines spoken quickly by Yoda in the forest.  For someone who has seen this film dozens of times, it’s ridiculous that I didn’t know these lines.  I’m not really a devoted fan of the Star Wars franchise.  I love this film and mostly dislike the others. Episodes seven and eight are my next favourites after this one (episode five).

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And even so there are parts of episode V that I still dislike with a passion.  The last five minutes are the worst.  Never mind the repeated  “Ben why didn’t you tell me”, a line that’s repeated.  Did he have to say it? couldn’t it have been the voice inside his head? It’s something decidedly operatic, and I say that in an attempt to apologize for what they’re doing, at a moment that is all but indefensible as good dialogue, but might just work as melodrama.

And those shots at the end, where they’re looking out the window of a space-ship, and all the other ships are like boats, aligned the same way as though there were a mysterious source of gravity creating up and down for people who –as far as I know—should be weightless.  It’s very odd, perhaps the creators seeking to give the story something like a warm fuzzy ending, to offset the darkness of the story. Meanwhile, the darkness is what makes it so wonderful.

Any scene with Yoda is pure gold.  The scenes between Luke & his father (hopefully you don’t need a spoiler alert… oh well too late)? wonderful.  Hamill transforms his character in this film, and if only the other films could have stayed at such a high level of intensity.  The big powerful orchestra changes the experience so that even the weakest scenes acquire luster in the presence of all that music. I think Williams raised his game for this film, because it has so much genuine emotion, so much authenticity, especially when the tiny 900 year old master is onscreen.

I will be interested to see what other films the TSO offer next year. But I do know that we’re getting more Star Wars.  Return of the Jedi (aka Episode VI) is coming at the beginning of October 2019, while The Force Awakens (aka Episode VII) will be shown in May 2020.

For tickets click here.

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