Fifty shades of Braun

This afternoon’s Off Centre concert at the Glenn Gould Studio was structured around three pairs of composer friends; Mozart/Haydn, Schumann/Brahms and Wolf/Mahler.  It was a mix of lieder, opera excerpts and piano pieces and was pleasantly varied.

Things kicked off with Russell Braun singing a number of songs from Schumann’s Liederkreis accompanied by his partner, Carolyn Maule on the piano.  This was maybe the third time that I’ve heard Russell in recital and he really is impressive.  He has a really good command of a wide range of dynamics and tone colour and lovely floaty high notes.  If I was being hyper critical I’d say I think there’s a point in the middle voice though that can’t quite sustain the volume he sometimes tries to get.  He has quite an operatic approach to lieder (compared to, say, DFD) but that’s quite fun in its own way.

Upcoming events

There a couple or three things coming up in Toronto that might be of interest to readers.

On Sunday 27th January at 2pm Russell Braun and Rihab Chaieb are giving a recital of German songs in the Glenn Gould Studio.  Tickets are $60 but only $25 for under 25s.

The following evening Peter Sellars is giving a talk on his production of Tristan und Isolde at the Toronto Reference Library.  This one is free but ticketed.  Tickets are available from the TPL website.

And in free RBA noon concert news, on 24th January Sasha Djihanian and Cameron McPhail with pianists Timothy Cheung and Jenna Douglas are offering up Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées and Schumann’s Dichterliebe.

Fifty shades of grey

Verdi’s Il Trovatore notoriously has an episodic and highly improbable plot.  It’s also famously difficult to cast.  Creating a compelling production and staffing it with capable singers therefore presents a formidable double challenge.  The current Canadian Opera Company production gets it half right.  The problem is Charles Roubaud’s much travelled production.  There’s not an idea in it.  It’s not surprising that the director’s programme notes run to three short paragraphs.  Roubaud sets each scene in a sort of grey box of towering walls.  Unfortunately each grey box is just different enough that that the curtain comes down at the end of each scene and the stage crew spend what seems like an interminable amount of time setting up the next grey box.  We just aren’t used anymore to sitting quietly through interminable scene changes.  We expect slicker stagecraft and in a modern opera house there’s really no excuse for this 19th century approach.  Within in each grey box the grey clad cast come and go and in between mostly stand around.  Blocking is perfunctory, acting superfluous and old fashioned “park and bark” the order of the day.  It’s the sort of production that might have passed muster thirty years ago but really doesn’t cut it in 2012.

Russell Braun and friends

The free concert series that the COC puts on in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre often has interesting programs and frequently the performances are very good indeed. It’s also pretty good value for money. It’s not often though that the line up is as starry as today’s gig. Baritone Russell Braun was joined by his L’Amour du Loin costars Erin Wall (soprano) and Krisztina Szabó (mezzo) plus Ensemble Studio tenor Chris Enns.  On the piano were COC Music Director Johannes Debus and Carolyn Maule.

They kicked off with Brahms’ Liebeslieder-Walzer.  They were performed with verve and skill and quite a bit of humour but I’m afraid it was still Brahms.  In my book Brahms should be loved from afar.  I much preferred the selections from Schumann’s Spanische Liebeslieder which followed.  I particularly liked Russell’s rendering of Flutenreicher Ebro which showed great feeling for the words and real skill in articulating different moods through voice colour.  Krisztina also gave us a ravishing version of Hoch, hoch sind die Berger.

The revelation for me though was John Greer’s settings of Canadian folk songs; All Around the Circle.  Looking at the words I thought this was going to be really hokey but in fact both the vocal arrangements and piano accompaniments are really pretty sophisticated and right up there with better known English and Australian folk song settings for voice and piano.  The quartet gave them all they had.  Lots of attack, good ensemble work and tons of humour.  (One needs humour with a line like “She’ll be waiting for me there with the hambone of a bear”!).  Terrific piano playing here too from Johannes and Carolyn.  It was fun!  (And great value for money)

Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin at Canadian Opera

Last night we saw Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin at the Four Seasons Centre. It was really, really good. It’s a very unusual piece. There’s not a lot of action in the libretto, despite, or perhaps because of, which Daniele Finzi Pasca devised a most spectacular production (more below). It’s an opera about ideas; love, duty, honour, death, faith, God. The characters spend far more time debating what to do and why than doing it. The plot is very simple. Jaufré Rudel, prince of Blaye, tired of a life of meaningless pleasure, yearns for real love. The Pilgrim tells him of an ideal woman, a countess in Tripoli. devotes Jaufré devotes his life to writing love songs to his “Love from Afar”. The Pilgrim tells Clémence of Jaufré and she falls under his spell. Jaufré decides he must cross the sea and meet Clémence but in doing so falls mortally ill. They meet and throw caution to the winds but Jaufré dies. Clémence decides to take the veil but her attitude to God is ambiguous at best. To who is her finally ecstatically beautiful prayer directed; the deity or her “Love from Afar”? It’s not the easiest piece to engage with. It has something in common with other meditative operas like Dialogues of the Carmélites and Pelléas et Mélisande and it’s rewarding in the same sort of way.

The music really impressed me. It haunted my dreams last night. It is an extraordinary score. In the last couple of weeks I’ve heard quite a few smaller scale works by Saariaho but this was the first time I had heard what she could do with a full orchestra. Her tachnique here seems influenced bu European minimalists like Górecki but the end result is utterly individual. She create waves of sound, often with one section of te orchestra picking a phrase up from another. The effect is almost architectural as textures interplay to create a thing of real beauty. Often, despite the wealth of visuals i found myself wanting to close my eyes and just listen. The solo vocal writing is more straightforward than in some of her chamber works. Each character has a distinct musical signature. The Pilgrim for example has any number of the trills common to medieval vocal music (which I think of as moorish but that’s just my association). The choral writing combines elements of the orchestral and solo vocal styles. It’s all really quite compelling.

The performances were terrific. All three solo parts are long difficult sings and all three soloists were quite excellent. Russell Braun as Jaufré is on stage for four out of five acts. He was not as smoothly lyrical as he can be but his tougher, more muscular tone suited his line. Kristzina Szabó, as the Pilgrim, also has a lot to do. In many ways her acting must hold the piece together. This she said while sounding very idiomatic in the most ‘medieval’ sounding of the roles. Erin Wall almost stole the show at the end. Much of her part lies cruelly high and includes the sustained f and ff high notes that Saariaho likes to give sopranos. She coped admirably with those to close out the piece with a hauntingly beautiful rendering of the final, despairing prayer. The COC Orchestra and Chorus, were as ever, wonderful and conductor Johannes debus seemed to be right inside the music. Super stuff all round.

The production is very interesting. Gabriele Finzi pasca and his design team; Jean Rabasse – sets, Kevin Pollard – costumes and especially, Alexis Bowles – lighting and Roberto Vitalini – video, evoke the various settings of the piece extraordinarily vividly using cloth, light and video projections. The evocation of the sea in Act 4 is breathtaking and the ambiguous use of light shone into the auditorium at the beginning and end of the piece ask questions about the stage world and that f the audience. The story telling is embellished with shadow puppets, body doubles, acrobats and aerialists. It’s spectacular in the manner of a rather cerebral Cirque du Soleil performance. It might even be a little over the top to the point of distraction but there’s no denying the beauty of it.

I thought it was a terrific modern opera, beautifully performed and I’d go see this in preference to traditional warhorse productions any time but what I saw last night suggests I may still be a bit unusual in that regard. The house wasn’t full and seats which I’m pretty sure are subscription seats were empty. A significant number of people, young and old, left at the interval. This disturbs me on all sorts of levels. This is quite an accessible piece and it was presented in a production that emphasised that and despite that some people obviously didn’t get it. This worries me far more than people who get offended by blood or nudity in a new production of some over performed Puccini piece. There’s a catch 22 here. A new audience is put off by the idea of opera as a boring museum piece and a section of the traditional audience boycotts anything that isn’t stuffed and mounted. Anyway, if anyone at COC is listening my vote is for innovation, risk and life.

There are four more performances ending on February 22nd.  Go see it!

All photos © All rights reserved by Canadian Opera

Canadian Opera Company season announcement 2012/13

So this morning I was at the Four Seasons Centre for the press conference to announce the COC’s 2012/13 season.

Board President Philip Deck started off with a strong statement about continuing to improve the quality of the product on the Four Seasons Centre stage and striving for “uncompromising and inspiring” programming with a goal of becoming “one of the world’s great opera houses”. There are crucial words here. If General Director Alexander Neef is to meet these goals he will need a supportive Board. It looks like they are there with him at least for now and that’s very good to hear.

There was a very good “teaser video” with contributions from the many Canadians who will feature next season. I guess this will be available on line at some point. Then we got to the main business with Alexander presenting the line up. It’s pretty exciting so here it is in all its glory and with my commentary. 

Faust – 10/10 for trying

After all the negatives about McAnuff Faust my expectations for this afternoon’s HD broadcast were pretty low. I was pleasantly surprised. I don’t think the production is perfect but I don’t think it’s incoherent let alone dull. It also made me think a lot about the opera and the characters and that’s a good thing. Overall, it’s the sort of production I’d like to see more of. Far better a production that slightly over reaches than dull mediocrity.

I thought it opened quite strongly which is probably because Marguerite hardly appears in the first two acts. The idea of Faust as a disillusioned atomic scientist is a neat one though it might fit better with Goethe or Marlowe’s knowledge seeking Faust than Gounod’s rather shallow pleasure seeker. Still there’s a certain coherence in then moving back in time to the point where the events that lead to Hiroshima begin; in the first world war. It began to unravel a little bit as McAnuff tried to get to grips with Marguerite and I think it’s clear why. Marguerite simply isn’t a real human character which is massively problematic as the story becomes largely about her. She’s a projection of mid 19th century male neuroses about women; the “Angel in the House” personified. That’s not a character that can be sympathetically portrayed to a 21st century audience or easily placed in a 20th century setting. Add on to that the rather repellent religiosity of the final scene and we can that the problem here is not McAnuff but Gounod and his librettist. To McAnuff’s credit what he doesn’t do is fall back on slapstick humour to cover the bits that are essentially impossible to stage as written. He sticks with the core of the libretto story but it’s a stretch to find Valentin’s reaction to his sister’s seduction believable. Similarly the soldiers’ chorus in Act 3 rings hollow. The sentiments are not those of people who have come back from Verdun as anyone who has ever tried to talk to a WW1 veteran will know (my grandfather served on the Somme and at third Ypres). I liked McAnuff’s attempt to desentimentalise this scene but it didn’t go nearly far enough. The Walpurgis Night scene seemed like a missed opportunity too. The element of decadent glamour was completely absent which seems odd to me given the time periods chosen. I liked the ironic use of humour in Mephistopheles character. It was balanced and that’s important again because irony is not a mid Victorian strong suit as anybody who has ever read back issues of Punch will know. I’d watch it again quite happily and I’m sure I would see any number of things I missed first time through.

Musically it was top class all the way through. Nezet-Seguin has this score down pat. The singers were all terrific. Pape was athletic vocally and physically and played his role with real panache. Kaufmann was almost overpowering for the role (though that might be the usual overblown cinema sound) and Poplavskaya was utterly committed to her interpretation. I thought she sang as well as I have ever heard her. Top marks too to the ever reliable Russell Braun and, new to me, Michele Losier.

Technically this was better than many of the Met broadcasts. Mostly the camera direction respected the rather clear way in which the stage picture was set up. Sound got muddy at times but wasn’t too bad (though there were a few drop outs). I suspect I’ll buy the DVD when it becomes available. I want to take another look at the production and better than cinema quality sound will be a bonus.

Final thought; the interval interviews are starting to get utterly tedious. Someone think up some new questions please. Even Danni de Niesse bubbling over couldn’t wring any life out of them.

Dido as dance

I guess another way of dealing with the dance elements in baroque opera is to dance the whole thing. That’s what Mark Morris Dance Group do with this 1995 version of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The work is performed as a modern dance piece with the singers off stage. As it’s a film rather than a record of a live performance, the singers can be, and are, occasionally pulled into the visuals.

The piece is played out on an elegant blue and grey stage and backdrop with a (very) few white props as required and all the dancers are dressed very simply in black so the look is very spare but very elegant. The choreography (by Mark Morris) is of a school of modern dance that I don’t really understand. It’s almost like a parody of one’s idea of modern dance. At times overly literal, at others very jerky and inelegant. It certainly doesn’t have much in common with ballet, even of the more abstract modern variety. In this case it’s not helped by Morris himself dancing both Dido and the Sorceress. Some might find this bold and exciting. I think he just looks like a very unconvincing transvestite and I’ve see more than a few of those! So, no, this approach doesn’t work for me.

Musically it’s not bad. Jennifer Lane sings Dido and the Sorceress. She’s fine as Dido though not in the same class as Connolly or Ewing. She, along with the two witches, witch it up more than I care for in the witchy bits. Russell Braun is Aeneas and he’s more lyrical and less gruff than is often the case. The Belinda is Ann Monoyios and, to be honest, she doesn’t sound entirely secure in the role. Mercury is sung by a soprano (uncredited) which is a bit odd and jarring. Tafelmusik supply the orchestra and chorus and are as good as you might expect. I think Jeanne Lamon is conducting but it’s not entirely clear from the disc or the package.

The filming is very good with the singers and chorus being effectively, if infrequently, inserted into the picture. The video quality is standard DVD with hard coded English subtitles. Dolby 2.0 is the only sound option. Documentation is minimal.

 

I think this one is strictly for the Mark Morris fans.

Burnt Toast

So this has to be the weirdest opera related thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s a 2005 CBC production of eight very short comic operas (the whole thing only lasts an hour) going through the stages of a relationship from Attraction to Starting Over via Marriage and Murder. The characters are mostly played by actors lip-synching while someone else sings. The music is by Alexina Louie and the libretto by Canadian comic, Dan Redican. Each piece is introduced by Redican as a mad toast scientist and the cast includes some of the best known names in Canadian theatre and opera including Colm Fiore, Isabel Bayrakdarian and Russell Braun. It sounds like a great idea but unfortunately it’s pretty ordinary. The music is mostly dull but it livens up a bit when it’s more obviously pastiche. The humour is a bit lame though the piece about a woman slicing her husband’s head off then disembowelling and liquidizing him for leaving the toilet seat up has its moments; especially her acquittal by an all female jury. Also you get to hear Isabel Bayrakdarian sing about kitty litter and Russell Braun do a version of Der Hölle Rache.

All in all, it’s as Canadian as moose jokes and about as funny.

Beautiful simplicity

I don’t think I’ve ever been to an opera with higher expectations than last night. The show was a piece I love; Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. My favourite director, Robert Carsen, was directing. The cast; Susan Graham (Iphigénie), Russell Braun (Oreste), Joseph Kaiser (Pylade), Mark Doss (Thoas) with solid young singers in the minor roles, was as starry as I have seen at the Four Seasons Centre. How could it live up to my expectations? All I can say is that it did.

The stage design for Carsen’s production is about as minimalist as it gets. The raked stage is enclosed by three plain grey walls in the form of a regular trapezoid. Occasionally a rectangular slab (altar) appears centre stage. The chorus chalk the words AGAMEMNON, IPHIGENIE, KLYTEMNESTRE on the walls and later Iphigénie erases them. The rest is done with lighting (Peter van Praet). Even the lighting plot is spare. The palette is predominantly blue-grey with orange/red appearing to symbolise the Furies and the violence of the history of the house of Atreus. Only at the very end does the gloom and claustrophobia lift. Within the gloom though van Praet creates ominous giant shadows of the characters which enormously enhance key scenes.

To play out the drama in this gloomy space Carsen uses dancers and places the chorus in the orchestra pit. Occasionally this leads to minor balance issues between the soloists and chorus but it is a small price to pay for the action on stage. In one particularly effective scene, the Furies carry Oreste and force him to walk sideways across the text of KLYTEMNESTRE. In another they turn into writhing serpents who back Oreste into a corner. In the final scene the “dea ex machina” element is handled about as well as I have ever seen it done. Diana (Lauren Segal) sings, unlit, from what sounded like Ring 4 stage left. The characters on stage are frozen. She resolves the drama and the stage walls rise about six feet to flood the stage with very white light. Unfussy and effective. All in all one feels that Gluck’s ideal of a “beautiful simplicity” is achieved. The one place where the minimalism is a bit of an issue is that all the characters pretty much look the same to the point where it isn’t always obvious who is singing. A good pair of opera glasses, a decent seat and knowing what the main singers look like helps here. I think the approach works in part because the drama moves ahead at a breathless pace. Wagner would need about fifteen hours to get through a story that Gluck manages in less than two hours.

Musically the evening was about as good as it gets. Pablo Heras-Casado pushed things along at a pretty fair pace but didn’t lose the drama. He was helped by some gorgeous woodwinds. The soloists were all quite excellent. Susan Graham owns this part, her rather bright mezzo suits the role and she sounded utterly in command. Joseph Kaiser and Russell Braun worked really well together in a reading that wasn’t as obviously homoerotic as some I’ve seen. Kaiser has a lovely Mozartian tenor and Braun has power and beauty of tone to spare. Mark Doss was appropriately violent as Thoas and I’d really like to see what he could do with something more lyrical. The minor roles were all more than adequately covered by local singers who will be familiar to anyone who frequents the Four Seasons Centre.

So, my unrealistic expectations were met and I thoroughly enjoyed one of the best evenings I’ve spent in an opera house. I’m late to the party though. If you want to catch this show Susuan Graham is singing just one more time on October 12th and there is a final performance with Katherine Whyte in the title role on October 15th.