This was the one I’ve been looking forward to for months, as James Ehnes played a full program of unaccompanied violin music in Koerner Hall.   I swear Ehnes played more notes than what he’d be required to play in three concerts with orchestra.  He was completely exposed, nowhere to hide.  Koerner’s acoustic gave us such intimacy that it was as though we could hear Ehnes’ thoughts.

The program consisted of four items:

• The Partita in B minor of JS Bach
• The “Ballade” from Sonata #3 of Eugène Ysaÿe
• Sonatina “In homage to JS Bach” by Barrie Cabena in its world premiere
• The Partita in D minor of JS Bach

Without question this was the best concert I heard so far in 2017.

Violinist James Ehnes (photo: Ben Ealovega)

I am reminded of something from long ago in my undergraduate days, studying philosophy.  I dimly recall a kind of hierarchy of the disciplines, with the understanding that mathematics is more pure than physics, which is more pure than chemistry and softer sciences are understood to be lower in the pecking order.  I can’t recall whether metaphysics –meaning religion—trumped science in the end, only that there’s something similar at work in the arts.  Walter Pater said “all the arts aspire to the condition of music.”  And what do the different types of music aspire to? I have to think that when we transcribe Bach for orchestra –as Stokowski did in the 20th century—that it waters down (some might say “bastardizes”) its purity.  I find the original piano version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky purer than the bombastic orchestrated version by Ravel.  The purest and more rarefied music? The solo violin music by JS Bach.  While I’ve played piano transcriptions of the Chaconne in D minor that concludes that Partita, both the massive one by Busoni and the subtler one-handed one by Brahms, each aspires after the rare air of the original.  And while I’ve heard this wonderful music in recordings, I realize now that it’s a totally different experience live, watching the violinist martial his/her resources, shaping phrases and building drama.  This is a most memorable performance, that bodes well for the festival.  The day after tomorrow –Wednesday night July 19th –Ehnes will be back, teamed with Jonathan Crow at the Church of the Redeemer in an all- Bach program.

For the B minor it’s eight movements, some delicate and lyrical, some brilliantly fast.  One wouldn’t believe how much variety there is in this music, but for the subtleties Ehnes brings, sometimes so soulful and distant, then urgent and passionate.

And then we came to Ysaÿe, and it was clear we’re not in Leipzig anymore, Toto.  Here Ehnes used a different body language, leaning from one foot to the other, playing a piece that was almost like an eight minute cadenza, big bold melodic lines, powerful double stops, delicate little figures, then heavy accents leading to an explosive ending.

Cabena’s new work might be understood as neo-classical if this were the early 20th century, or perhaps we can call it “post-modern” in this century, for its use of recognizable phrases that remind one of Bach.  It would have been better had they found space in the program to explain & discuss a bit, as a new work really benefits from explanation more than the pieces we’ve heard before, both to explain the inter-textual references, but also to give us some context within the composer’s other works.

And then we came to the item I was really waiting for, namely the D-minor Bach. In March I posted an earlier Ehnes performance of the Chaconne that I found on youtube, that pales beside what I heard tonight. In person I watched the drama unfold, an entire audience spellbound, mesmerized.  Wow.

It’s better in person of course.

Tonight’s Toronto Summer Music Concert featured violinist Jonathan Crow & pianist Philip Chiu.

The first guy is the draw.  Jonathan Crow is the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster, and in his first season as the artistic director of Toronto Summer Music Festival.  When he came out into the corridor afterwards you could be forgiven for mistaking him for a rock star, given the electric response among his fans.

Violinist Jonathan Crow, Artistic Director of Toronto Summer Music Festival & Toronto Symphony Concertmaster

The concert was promoted as “Jonathan Crow”.  And the other person playing? I didn’t give the pianist a second thought until I got to the hall, but he set us straight in due course.  Both Crow & Chiu took their turns being the witty host.  Again, I expected this from Crow, whereas Chiu’s wit was a pleasant surprise.  More importantly, Chiu held his own playing some difficult repertoire.

For the umpteenth time this year, I heard a Sesquicentennial rationale for a concert programme.  This one made a bit of sense, as we heard works for piano & violin from the two founding cultures:

1. Claude Debussy: violin sonata (1917)
2. Healey WIllan: violin sonata #1 (1916)
   (intermission)
3. Edward Elgar: selections for violin and piano (from the 1880s and after)
4. Maurice Ravel: Violin sonata #2 (1927)

The works strike an intriguing balance, given that we heard from two French composers, two English composers, AND a Canadian: Willan qualifying for inclusion in lists of Canadian composers even though he was born in England.

As we heard in one of the witty introductions it seems that Crow & Chiu used to work together at McGill University and so have developed a genuine rapport that was especially evident in the Ravel that closed the program.  While they made beautiful music together all night long, they took it to another level with the Ravel sonata.  The opening movement is poetry, closing with a reminiscence of earlier themes as though we’re hearing them in a dream or hallucination.  The second movement is blues, reminding me a bit of the foxtrot from L’enfants et les sortileges but without any singing dishes.  The closing movement’s perpetuum mobile is every bit as hair-raising as that name might suggest, the violin perpetually playing, the two of them building to a colossal climax.

Before that we heard a contrasting pair of sonatas and some sweet little tunes.  Crow & Chiu gave Debussy’s sonata a decidedly modern ride, without any schmaltz or excess.  From what I understand this is how the composer liked it, as they appeared to follow the score without deviation or rubato.

In contrast, Willan’s sonata seemed to take us back to the 19th century, a work that’s especially challenging for the pianist.  The first movement sounds like Rachmaninoff, the second more like Brahms, while the third has the exquisite gossamer textures of Mendelssohn’s faerie music, including some gorgeous melodies.  I wonder that this work isn’t played more often, except for a piano part that is ferociously difficult.  I daresay Chiu played it note-perfect throughout and with great sympathy for Crow’s soulful and expressive approach to the occasional broad melody.

The Elgar collection included three tunes I’ve never heard and two that are quite well known, namely the “Chanson du matin” and the “Salut d’amour”.  Chiu was very understated throughout the Elgar, and indeed Crow opted for a very delicate and self-effacing approach to the melodies.  This was a schmaltz-free reading.

We’re now in the last week of Crow’s first TSM Festival, which concludes August 5th.  

Summer festivals can be a challenge.  Bayreuth may be the ne plus ultra for Wagner but you sit on hard seats as your reward for having traveled around the world.  Tonight’s Toronto Summer Music Festival concert was a bit of an ordeal due to air conditioning that was on the fritz at the wrong time.  It led to some adventures for the string players trying to stay in tune.

The concert was ostensibly to honour Anton Kuerti although they didn’t explain the rationale for the progam or the players, other than to tell us that pianist Jane Coop –who played in every part of the program tonight—was a Kuerti student long ago. She told us that even now his teaching sometimes comes back to her when she’s playing.

In addition to the challenge posed by the heat & humidity most of the performers tonight seemed dressed for the usual air-conditioning, under layers of fabric. I spoke to a friend at the concert who –like me– had been almost chilly in the a-c at the last concert here, and so was dressed too warmly for the unexpected tropical heat.   I don’t envy anyone who took part, as this was service above & beyond.

There were four distinct sections to the program, each calling for a different kind of performance:

• Solo piano, as Coop played the seven Beethoven Bagatelles op 33
• Collaborative piano with violin, Coop and Barry Shiffman playing Mozart sonata K 304
• Vocal music (again calling for collaborative piano & viola this time) as Laura Pudwell sang two Brahms songs with Coop & former TSM artistic director Douglas McNabney
• Chamber music, as Coop, Shiffman & McNabney were joined by cellist Joseph Johnson for Schumann’s piano quartet op 47.

Coop showed us a different side of herself in each one.  In the Beethoven we saw a deadpan comedienne at work, serving up the oddball humour of Beethoven in these quirky little masterpieces, jewels that deserve to be better known.  Coop played up the sudden shifts of tone, the unexpected coups de théâtre emerging from passages of tranquility and elegance, that had us laughing out loud a few times.  I think Beethoven would have approved, and hope Kuerti liked it.

The Mozart violin sonata was especially poignant in the menuetto second movement.  Pudwelll’s plangent sound saturated the hall in the Brahms songs, with McNabney offering soulful sounds in the lower part of his instrument.

Mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell

After the interval I was reminded that Schumann used to be my favourite composer, someone that I believe isn’t played often enough.  The foursome of Coop, Johnson, McNabney & Shiffman each seized the stage for their solo moments, Johnson being particularly effective with his beautiful sound.

The Festival is coming to its close this weekend, concluding on Saturday (info).

One can’t write objectively about friends, especially when those old friends are beloved pieces of music.

I’m very fortunate to get all sorts of wonderful recordings through the mail.  One of the best things about the summertime, when there are fewer concerts, is that I have a chance to catch up a bit on my backlog.  I recently had the chance to explore music I first heard in my youth through one of those windfalls in the mail.

Tumblers from the Vault from Syrinx

Tumblers from the Vault tumbled into my life, a Syrinx retrospective of the years 1970 -1972.   Syrinx can be understood as a pop music band, comprised of three people

• Composer & synthesizer pioneer John Mill-Cockell (aka “JMC”)
• Saxophone player Doug Pringle
• Percussionist Alan Wells

But while they’re understood to be a band I think it’s a misnomer to think of their compositions simply as pop music.  Or maybe it’s just that I see depths I never noticed when I first encountered them.  Hindsight has a way of being 20-20, to fill in gaps of understanding. When I first heard this music I was moved, excited, but also stirred by the ambiguities of the music.  I recall getting lost in the sensations without understanding how they did it. At times I could tell that there was electronic music, but it was rarely foregrounded, instead blending into a mix.

My headline comes from my first encounter with Syrinx, namely “Tillicum” a piece used as the theme for a CTV series called “Here Come the Seventies.”  I had such a serious obsession with the opening theme, that sometimes I’d stop watching the show after I’d heard the theme.

The only thing I can compare this to is my first experience of Walter Carlos (later Wendy Carlos) via A Clockwork Orange. I had never heard or felt anything quite like that. I think it’s fair to say that Syrinx were ahead of their time, and even now have a remarkable freshness to their sound.

Composer, musician, innovator, teacher John Mills-Cockell

At times you’re hearing something resembling world music, with melodic turns and chord changes suggestive of other cultures and musics.  Some of their music resembles the pattern music of Philip Glass, which is especially interesting when one realizes that his first big recordings happen later.  I’m not interested in questions of who influenced whom, not when so many musicians seemed to get to the same sort of sound.  There are also melodies that remind me a bit of Frank Zappa, although not nearly as jagged or angular.   What Zappa and JMC have in common is a classical background.  Nobody talked about crossover in 1970, but that might be a relevant concept for composers making music that seemed to bridge cultures or disciplines.  I’m reminded also of Mark Mothersbaugh, whose work is boldly post-modern in his playful use of sounds and textures.  Mothersbaugh, Zappa & JMC made music that was considered legitimate as serious or classical music, yet also had credibility in the pop music realm.

Many millennials grew up listening to JMC’s music for The Stationary Ark, a regular series on TVO.

You may recall that a few years ago I interviewed JMC when workshopping his opera Savitri and Sam with a libretto by Ken Gass.  I’m hopeful that the opera will eventually get a full production. What’s clear when I think of S & S, in context with Syrinx is simply that JMC manages to be accessible.  While I love Zappa he is guilty of some of the most effete artsy writing, admittedly full of wit & unpredictability.  JMC seems more secure, less anxious about the need to seem brilliant, and so more confident as he gives us music that is at times pleasant and tranquil.

The same secure melodic gift is there in his Stationary Ark music, as it is in the Tumblers CDs. Of course I should be careful to credit all three of the members of Syrinx, a tuneful and rhythmic treasure.

I want to quote directly from their press release:

1) One modest task of Tumblers from the Vault is to reinstate Syrinx to their place in the wider canon of groundbreaking music so their story can be appreciated beyond the limits of Canadian notoriety
2) Unlike so many turn of the ‘60s experiments fusing rock and pop music language with new technology, Syrinx was never excessive in expressing their vision of what electronic music could offer. Instead, they blended these sounds in a holistic way, allowing the acoustic and electronic textures to create one organic voice. They opted to foreground the lyrical and poetic content of their compositions rather than their innovative techniques.

This is such a Canadian story, don’t you find? If they were Americans or Brits, they’d be much more famous. And their self-effacing approach to composition is quintessentially Canadian.

Tumblers from the Vault can be obtained here.

Nothing changes your perspective on a piece of music like repurposing it. The new context may strain the original to its breaking point. A happy tune works well at a party, perhaps not so well at a funeral. This is especially so when we think of instrumental music, abstract and with less specificity than songs with text.

I suppose I am really invoking that colossal topic, “meaning in music”. What if anything does a piece of music mean, what can it signify?

I’m thinking especially of one piece that I’ve been playing obsessively the past week or two. I didn’t know why, I didn’t understand what I was really experiencing, or why the short composition was haunting my thoughts. The title refers to a very specific sort of framework that I imposed. I think it’s helped me understand a new dimension in this piece and perhaps a few more besides.

The second movement of Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto is one of the most original little pieces. In five minutes we’re experiencing a kind of debate or dialogue. We are in the presence of something fundamental about music and its power. One can’t help thinking about the composer, whose hearing had started to fade in the late 18th century. I read that he was 60% deaf by 1801, completely deaf by 1816. This piece was created in his decade of transformation, premiered in a public concert in 1808, after a private performance in 1807.

The strings of the orchestra come in with a loud unison statement. The solo piano seems to answer, as soft & gentle as the orchestra was rough and implacable. I find this piece a bit of a challenge to hear clearly, because of the contrast, the adjustment it requires of us. What are we hearing exactly? A loud orchestra and a soft piano? Or is this an encounter between Beethoven (the piano) and the unyielding world that he was having trouble hearing?

The allegorical explanation I first heard for this music was of an encounter between Orpheus (the piano) and the furies of hell (the orchestra). It might make sense, if we notice the way the anger of the orchestra seems to soften in the presence of the gentle sweetness from the piano. The voice or persona on each side is distinct, but as the piece goes on, the piano gets stronger, while the orchestra seems to back down.

Today I played this piece –that is, in a reduction for piano—at the conclusion of the church service (I was the organist). I couldn’t help noticing a new possible reading for this five minute composition, influenced by what I’ve been seeing on CNN, an ideal re-write of the headlines from Charlottesville, Boston or so many other places and confrontations. Yes the orchestra and piano in dialogue could be the world vs Beethoven, or the Furies vs Orpheus. Or maybe what we have here is a dignified response to angry extremists, with nobody killed or injured. Of course it’s a fantasy, a five minute drama entirely in music.

I call it a sermon because it seems to enact the appropriate response, showing us how to behave. The piano doesn’t rail against the stronger louder forces arrayed against it. Soft gentle sound works to soften the opposition, and the result is harmony.

This is not a triumphal ending to a church service. While I didn’t frame the piece for anyone –not offering my own allegorical reading– the stillness at the end was exactly what I’d hoped for.

Composer Richard Strauss often dropped subtle references to other works into his scores. We’re accustomed to this in poetry, drama or film, where a quote can add depths to our experience, but it’s especially powerful when we recall how abstract music is, adding meanings that would otherwise not be available in a musical score. “Intertextual” is a word Julia Kristeva employed to call attention to the powerful relationships between texts.

By now we’re familiar with this effect in film-music.  Here’s a classic example from Gone With the Wind, as Max Steiner creates a medley of several songs whose associations amplify the effect of this scene.

I recently mentioned a Wagnerian allusion in the first act of Arabella.

In one of his last compositions, Metamorphosen (1945) Strauss quotes from the mournful slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, as though to write the epitaph for Germany in the darkest years late in the Second World War. It’s in the last minute of the work (if the link works you’ll start there). Strauss inscribed the words “In memoriam” at the pertinent passage of the score.

It sounds very much like what Max Steiner did in that excerpt above.  And it’s a bit surprising to recognize that Strauss wrote his work years after Steiner.

But Strauss is especially likely to quote his own music.  In his 1899 autobiographical symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben –or “A Hero’s life”—the composer is the hero, his exploits illustrated in quotes from several of his own compositions—Don Quixote, Death & Transfiguration and Also Sprach Zarathustra, to name three– while doing battle with the enemy: the critics.    Or in the last decade of his life, he wrote a series of songs assembled into the “Four Last Songs”.  The one usually sung last, “Im abendrot”—or “at sunset”—which was the first of the four composed, includes not just the passage from “Death & Transfiguration” that is usually discussed in program notes, but also a passage from Don Quixote.  Heldenleben was a marvelous opportunity to make self-reflexive music, bringing back the various characters—in a series of musical themes—as though he were on a psychiatrist’s couch introspecting about different aspects of himself. Strauss seemed to valorize the humble Don Quixote’s version of heroism above all others, returning to the Quixotic ideal in “Im abendrot” even if he gives us the big show of humility in the midst of a colossal display of ego.

He’s hardly the first one to do this kind of inter-textual reference.  In Die Meistersinger, Richard Wagner quotes his previous opera Tristan und Isolde, a poignant quote pointing to the impossibility of a relationship between Hans Sachs and Eva, who are as far apart in age as Isolde and Tristan’s uncle King Marke (Isolde’s intended husband).  OR in Don Giovanni Mozart gets comic mileage in the last scene of the opera when he quotes an aria from The Marriage of Figaro.

So when I was listening to Arabella, especially recalling it as an opera that was the last collaboration with Hofmannsthal, I expected to find other music.  This game of looking for quotes is an old-style musicology that is out of fashion, with roots in the dry leit-motiv lists for Wagner operas, searches for meaning in esoteric little quotes.  I would insist that any such commentary must be supported in the story.  For example Arabella’s longing for the mysterious stranger while being besieged by suitors for whom she has little or no interest, parallels Elsa’s dream in Lohengrin (which incidentally is the very first time we encounter that tune in the Wagner opera). While Lohengrin is no comedy, it might be the single opera most associated with romantic love & marriage, especially when we recall another theme, surely the most famous tune Wagner wrote.

I thought I heard something from Der Rosenkavalier the first time through Arabella.  Let me do this in reverse.  Before I went back for a look at the actual text, I couldn’t help noticing remarkable parallels in the stories.  Of the six operas Strauss did with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, it’s Rosenkavalier surely that we might think of, not the other four:

1. Elektra
2. Ariadne auf Naxos
3. Die Frau ohne Schatten
4. Die ägyptische Helena

The first and last adapt characters from classical myth (Elektra and Helena) while the other two are even further removed from reality via a magical story (Frau ohne Schatten) and a topsy-turvy juxtaposition of two different dramatic presentations presented simultaneously at a wedding (Ariadne).  Rosenkavalier and Arabella, though, are much more similar.

When I started to tally up the parallels between Rosenkavalier and Arabella I was drawn to look for something more in the music.

• both explore romantic love
• both call for an ambiguous portrayal:
  • Octavian is a young man portrayed by a woman, while Zdenka is a young woman who masquerades as a young man in the diegetic story itself
  • both Octavian and Zdenka attempt to bring two lovers together
  • both Octavian and Zdenka present a rose on behalf of the one for whom they’re advocating
  • both Octavian and Zdenka end up with the one they were touting to someone else

And no wonder, then that Strauss decided to gently underline some of those parallels in the score of Arabella.  The theme of the roses that are such a magical bit of colour in the opening of Act II of Rosenkavalier and echoed at the end of the opera for the starry-eyed young couple is what I thought I heard in Act I of Arabella.  And there it is right in the libretto. When Arabella is asking about roses, a moment before she utters the question the music reminds us of that rose presentation music.  The stage directions say “sie sieht die Rosen” or “she sees the roses”, and at that precise moment a version of the theme is heard in the orchestra.

Here’s the original, where Octavian meets Sophie while carrying his ceremonial silver rose.

Let me be clear. It’s not vitally important.  One can watch the opera without ever noticing this. But I think it’s worth observing that Strauss made the connection, perhaps encouraging us to think about the parallels and divergences.

Can we find any more? I wondered about something else, not in the score but in the libretti and this time it might be an allusion to Ariadne.  You’ll recall that the arrival on Ariadne’s island by Bacchus –the god of wine & intoxication—is announced by his offstage voice singing of Circe, who gave a drink to Ulysses’ men, turning them into swine.   The god is not transformed.  Similarly Arabella brings a glass of water to Mandryka, as a ritual show of love and readiness to marry; when she’s asked if she will remain the same she asks to be accepted as she is because she can’t be anything else.  But is this something Kristeva might call an inter-textual reference?  The formality of the moment suggests it might have been self-conscious but even so I tend to doubt it.  And in Act II we watch Mandryka get steamed up, drinking aggressively and somewhat transformed as a result.  Is it in any way an allusion to Bacchus or Ariadne?  No I don’t think so.  Yes it’s fun to peer into the score. But while this can be a nerdy way to get deeper into the music, if it doesn’t lead us to the theatre and something we can discern in performance, I question the value of that kind of close study.

I’m looking forward to watching the Canadian Opera Company production at least a couple of times, at which point I’ll be very susceptible to echoes from the other operas, especially Ariadne, which was one of the first operas I ever saw, a U of T student production of the opera at the Edward Johnson Building when I was 12 years old.  Come to think of it I think this was the first time I had seen an opera that really moved me, that really worked.  Strauss is a curious composer, largely under-rated or even dismissed as a creator of kitsch, a composer who self-consciously turned his back on avant-garde music with popular operas such as Rosenkavalier.  Yet just a couple of days ago TCM broadcast 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) featuring the two most famous minutes Strauss ever composed, and premiered the same year of that student Ariadne.

No matter what the critics say, everyone knows a little bit of Richard Strauss.  We will talk about him in the opera course that begins in September and also in the film music course early next year.

I’ve heard Jeremy Dutcher before in collaboration with other artists:

• As part of the first Electric Messiah in 2015
• As part of Toronto Consort’s Kanatha/Canada: First Encounters, a little over a year ago

This time we heard him alone. Having just released his first solo CD a few days ago, Dutcher brought his unique sound to the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre for another of the Canadian Opera Company noon-hour concerts, in a space that felt more like a magical sanctuary than ever.

If you’ve never been to this space, it’s a curious combination of informality (everyone sitting on the steps upstairs inside the Four Seasons Centre) and glamor (everyone floating in the sky above University Avenue).  It’s a block away from city hall, down the street from the provincial parliament and hanging above one of the city’s main streets.  As Dutcher sang and played we saw and heard three different emergency vehicles, sometimes seguing nicely into his music, and always reminding us that music is part of rather than an escape from life.

Dorian Cox, program manager of the Free Concert Series, quoted Louis Riel’s words in his introduction to the concert:

My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.   

And then Dutcher seemed to enact them.

At several points in the concert Dutcher consciously and ostentatiously invoked spirit. To begin he took a drum and walked through the space as though addressing those unseen in the space around us.  And he reminded us shortly thereafter, that while there may seem to be empty seats, they are filled by spirits.

We heard him sing along with an old recording of an indigenous song, that he elaborated into something simultaneously honoring the tradition yet something new and liberated, in its use of modern sounds.  Dutcher is working to keep his culture & language alive.

Dutcher’s is a fascinating voice, classically trained but not at all like the usual opera singer, given his flexibility, a tone that can mix raw power and soft delicacy.

At another point in the concert he depressed the pedal, and sang into the piano, as the strings picked up his sound and vibrated sympathetically.  I’m sure everyone has tried this. But it was magical in a new way, poignantly fading in the air like a suggestion of a spiritual presence in the air with us.

And of course he was accompanying himself the whole time.  Dutcher has an interesting approach at the piano. At times his playing reminded me of Keith Jarrett although it’s not fair to call it jazz.  While there’s an improvisational quality to his playing he always seems to know exactly what he’s doing, where he’s going.  This was the first time I’ve seen the RBA piano swung around to face directly into the audience. While I would have liked to see his hands working the keys, we also got a wonderfully direct performance of remarkable intensity.

In the hour of his solo concert we heard a broad range of music, sometimes gentle, sometimes more powerful and celebratory.

For more about Dutcher and his new album, go to jdutchermusic.com 

I’m going through a series of retrospective experiences.

Yesterday was Jeremy Dutcher’s concert exploring and re-visiting music from his culture.  Today I heard a Holocaust memorial performance (review still to come).

And the whole time as a kind of background there’s the CD in my car that I’ve been playing incessantly.

Unlike the two aforementioned experiences, this bit of remembering is a joyful project from University of Toronto Schools.

I’ve spoken of this institution a few times in passing, particularly when interviewing or reviewing an artist alumnus, such as

• John Allemang,
• Derek Bate,
• David Fallis
• Zoe Barcza
  or
• Conrad Chow.

University of Toronto Schools = UTS.  It was projected in the plural when founded in 1910, but is still a single institution.  And it’s singular, one of a kind.

The headline means at least two things.  There is a CD titled “I remember” that has been produced by UTS.  But when I say “I remember: UTS” I’m unavoidably thinking back on a place that has been indelibly etched into me, because of course I’m an alumnus.  When I think for example of the phrase uttered by that unforgettable teacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” (a film that appeared when I was in grade 8 at UTS by the way), saying loosely paraphrased, “give me a girr-rull at an impressionable age, and she will be MINE for LIFE”..?

Of course I can’t find it on youtube.

Even so it has a great deal of truth to it.  I remember looking about me at the time, taking in the godlike masters (as they called the teachers in those days), and thinking I would have no ability to resist their imprint.

When I was at UTS it was boys rather than girls (and they called us “old boys” not “alumni”), although the school has been co-ed since the year after I left.

As far as the CD is concerned, it’s unique, a remarkable recording unlike any I’ve ever encountered.

If you come to the recording without any connection to UTS you might simply enjoy the diverse assortment of performances:

• Scriabin: Valse in A flat major, Annie Zhou (‘16) piano
• Brahms: Scherzo, Amir Safavi (’10) violin & Aaron Dou (’18) piano
• Dukas: Villanelle, James Sommerville (‘80) horn & Annie Zhou (’16) piano
• Dvorak: Romance, Aaron Schwebel (‘06)  violin & Derek Bate (‘71) piano
• Chopin: Trois Écossaises, Annie Zhou (‘16) piano
• Vieuxtemps: Souvenir d’Amérique, Emma Meinrenken (‘17) violin & Su Jeon Higuera piano
• * Rapoport: Waldberauscht, James Sommerville (‘80) horn & Annie Zhou (’16) piano
• * Royer: Danzon, Conrad Chow (‘99) violin, Aaron Schwebel (‘06), violin, Ronald Royer cello, & Aaron Dou(’18) piano
• * Shugarman: Carousel, Conrad Chow (‘99) violin, Aaron Schwebel (‘06), violin, Emma Meinrenken (‘17) violin, Donna Oh (‘18) cello,  Ronald Royer cello, Mark Laidman bass
• *Eddington(‘98): Bubblegum Delicious based on poetry of Dennis Lee (‘57), Cynthia Smithers (‘06) soprano, Rebecca Moranis (’16) flute,  Conrad Chow (‘99) violin, Donna Oh (‘18) cello,  Aaron Dou (’18) piano, David Fallis (’73) narrator, Alex Eddington (‘98) conductor
• * Bao (‘14): Dance, Billy Bao (’14) violin & Ronald Royer cello
• Mendelssohn: Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Alastair Thorburn-Vitols (‘22) boy soprano & Derek Bate (‘71) piano

* Signifies premiere recording

Notice that plethora of asterisks, meaning that roughly half of the recordings are premieres, original compositions getting their first hearing. That’s new music.

But alongside the new, are the memories that I remember.  I remember that when I was there, the music program was not as it is now.  The school produced an amazing assortment of talented grads, and –no offense, UTS! –it was not due to the excellent music program.  I was a cellist when I arrived at UTS at the end of grade 6, going into grade 7, but: they didn’t have a string music program.  Nope. Of course that was in another century.  The music program in those days was co-ordinated with the cadet corps, and so we played wind instruments.  And so the cello was set aside (my family couldn’t afford private lessons, at least, not for that plus the piano I was already studying). I started playing the euphonium and later took up the tuba, marching around as the smallest guy in the UTS band, with the biggest instrument.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fun.  My single most enjoyable moment in my whole time at UTS is a memory of being in the band at an assembly playing “La Cumparsita”, alongside George Stock on trombone.

But my point is, Derek Bate, David Fallis, James McLean et al (the ones who went in that pre-co-education era, 1910-1973) don’t come from a brilliant music program.  It was a school full of nerds, which meant we showed up already primed and ready, usually taking private lessons.  And the current generation of nerd? They get the additional push of a really good school music program, to kick it up a notch.  That’s why you have a generation of wonderful musicians coming out of the school.

The recording is an anthology of recordings to celebrate the school by anthologizing that  talent.  Some, like Bate & Fallis, who are from that Precambrian era before there was much of a music program, got their education via private study (Derek Bate) or great church mentors (David Fallis).  But the majority on this CD  come from that later era when the school took the gifted kids and saw to it that their nerdy sensibilities had good music instruction to kick it up a notch.  And some on the CD are from that eager team of teachers.  Everyone on the CD is affiliated to UTS in some way either as graduates or instructors.  Ronald Royer was the driving force behind this labour of love although you’ll notice a number of participants who don’t have their graduating year bracketed after their name, indicating that they did not actually go to UTS.  It’s a fascinating CD, and as I listen, I really do remember.

And it’s a nice feeling.

I Remember was released through the Cambria Music label and is distributed through NAXOS Direct. The recording is available on more than 65 streaming services worldwide and through vendors such as Amazon, iTunes and University of Toronto Schools. OR go to this page

It’s interesting that on consecutive days, the Canadian Opera Company gave their noon-hour concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre over to a performance resembling an act of remembrance.

Yesterday was Jeremy Dutcher’s concert, in which he seemed to address the unseen spirits around us. Today it was soprano Sara Schabas’s turn, in a vocal concert including Laura D’Angelo violin and Geoffrey Conquer piano.

Soprano ​Sara Schabas (photo: Kirsten Miccoli:)

Where Dutcher sang in a language that was mostly unknown to the listeners (and curiously apt in an opera house, when I remember that for much of my life I was watching and hearing operas in languages I did not understand, and without benefit of the surtitles we’ve been blessed with since the 1980s), Schabas sang mostly in English, or in German with the benefit of a translation in the program. I hope it’s not controversial to be comparing the two concerts. Where we’re accustomed to speaking of the Shoah, a Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews in the Second World War, the Indigenous experience in Canada was at the very least a cultural holocaust –as children were stripped of their heritage, force-fed Christianity and English, over-writing their language & religion—to say nothing of the actual deaths of so many that we cannot count their numbers.

It’s a sad day of commemoration in Israel, one that began at their sundown, which occurred almost exactly at the conclusion of the noon-hour concert. I can’t help but be impressed by the timing of today’s concert, that spoke directly to the audience assembled today. Where yesterday’s listeners seemed younger & hipper on the whole, whooping and cheering for Dutcher, today’s solemn group were there to remember and be reminded, a serious and painful path.

Born Jewish with the name Sonia Landau​, she became Krystyna Zywulska.

The main work on the program was from Jake Heggie’s opera Another Sunrise, with text by Gene Scheer, concerning Krystyna Zywulska, a survivor of Auschwitz, one of two operas given their Canadian premiere recently.

Composer Jake Heggie

Schabas gives us a monodrama accompanied by Conquer at the piano. The title figures in the last moments of the work, as she tells us that she is alive to see another sunrise. The opera is like an act of remembrance, taking us to a very curious place, a conflicted and guilty perspective, considering that Zywulska was able to survive by getting a position at Auschwitz. Needless to say hers is a dark perspective of anguish and pain, but surprisingly celebratory and life-affirming all the same. I think for anyone of Jewish heritage it is not just a matter of empathy but of the necessary celebration and honouring of those who went to the camps. It’s a national ritual in Israel where there are still survivors, let alone their descendants.

Schabas eased us into the concert with lighter fare to begin. We started with songs from composers who lived awhile in the bogus camp of Theresienstadt, which was a kind of model camp set up for PR purposes misrepresenting for the outside world what was really happening. The two composers would be executed in Auschwitz.

First came Carlo Taube’s “Ein Jüdisches Kind”¸ a poignant little song with a violin line that was almost another character in the song, at times muttering something very similar to prayers. I couldn’t help but be moved. Then came a trio of Viktor Ullmann songs, displaying his wonderful approach to tonality, songs that were for the most part sad, overshadowed by the facts of the composer’s life. I was especially struck by his “Abendphantasie” (or “evening fantasy”), where we hear of his impossible dream of a peaceful and serene old age after youth has burnt itself out. I couldn’t help remembering the poignant treatment Derek Jarman gave ”depuis le jour” in Aria featuring Tilda Swinton.  What could be more poignant than dreaming of a life-long romantic affair or even a long life, when one already has a death sentence in one’s youth? (Ullmann in the camps, Jarman with an AIDS diagnosis).

Conquer was quite magnificent in support. At times he’s barely there, like a soap bubble in his soft presence, but in the Heggie at times he enacted military precision, the relentless machinery of the trains and camps, seen grimly by Schabas as Zywulska, while the piano painted the picture. At other times, especially in the songs, we heard softer tonalities, sensuous playing to match the dreamworlds in these flights of fancy.

Geoffrey Conquer, Sara Schabas, plus violinist Laura D’Angelo in the background at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre

In the recent Canadian Opera Company Cosi fan tutte from just over 4 years ago, Tracy Dahl’s sparkling portrayal of Despina was the breath of fresh air that we desperately needed in Atom Egoyan’s dark intense interpretation.

Here’s what I wrote in my review:

I hadn’t laughed once before Tracy Dahl arrived as Despina, but whenever she appeared, the mood lightened.  Not only did she manage the usual comic bits, but she brought extra, especially in her scenes with the two young women.  (full review)

Every time she came on stage she made us smile.   I expect she’ll have the same impact when she returns for the COC revival of the production next season.

And so it was as Zerbinetta in Lotfi Mansouri’s 1988 COC production of Ariadne auf Naxos alongside Judith Forst as the Composer.

Left to right: Guillermo Silva-Marin, Theodore Baerg, Tracy Dahl, Christopher Cameron & Dennis Giesbrecht in the Canadian Opera Company’s 1988 Ariadne auf Naxos (photo: Robert C Ragsdale, FRPS)

Next week Forst and Dahl reunite for Bernstein’s Candide with the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall.  But I’m remembering Dahl in 1988.  Here’s what George Heymont wrote.

The major hit of the evening was soprano Tracy Dahl’s first Zerbinetta — a phenomenal artistic triumph for this tiny young singer who, last season, stole the San Francisco Opera’s production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann right out from under Placido Domingo’s feet. Dahl’s Zerbinetta was a naughty baby doll whose spicy cascades of coloratura never got in the way of a brilliant theatrical characterization; one of those landmark performances that will not only be treasured for years to come but could easily make a major talent like Kathleen Battle look like a tired old has-been.
(full post here)

I can direct you to a biography either for Tracy Dahl the singer (with Dispeker Artists) or the teacher (at the Desautels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba), but neither captures the magic that you encounter in person.  I am not going to lie to you. Our interview is no substitute for the live experience of Tracy Dahl.  I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing her next week with the TSO, and next season with the COC.

In the meantime I had the privilege to ask her some questions.

Are you more like your father or your mother?

That is probably a question for my siblings to answer for me.  My sister Jane is definitely like my father.  I cannot boast as many likenesses as she can.  My husband says I remind him of my father. My father and mother were both amazing human beings and to be like either of them would be, to say the very least, an honour.  My father wanted to be very fair. He gave money to each political party so everyone would have an opportunity equally to let us know what they could do for the community. He always wanted to give to each child “equally” and if ever there was an imbalance he would try and explain why. He was a peace-maker.  I wish I had more of that quality.  He was an excellent listener and I think I can do that well when I am one on one.  My father loved a good joke: Ice cubes down the back, hiding desserts when you stepped away from the dinner table — so much of it revolved around the dining room table.  And of course who made that possible, but my mom.  She would be the last one at the table and often so am I at our house.  I taught our budgie how to talk while I sat and waiting for our youngest to finish his meal. My father was a good conversationalist and enjoyed being with people and I am a people person, too.  If I am tired often I seek a good conversation with someone to get re-energized, rather than taking a nap.  I guess that’s the extrovert in me.  My father and mother were both very supportive of my singing before it was ever a career choice.  I know they worried a great deal about financial security and stability heading into it all, but they were always there.  My dad would sit down and send me a note after a performance or competition and tell me what he really loved about it.  He was a multi-tasker.  I am definitely that, and probably, like him, get over-stressed about the number of hats I am wearing at any given time. My dad acknowledged how much others did around him, and he valued everyone’s contributions, whether it was at work or church or the curling club.  I think both my Mum and Dad gave me the sense of every person is to be valued.

Soprano Tracy Dahl (Dispeker Artists)

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

The worst thing about my work is leaving my family.  It has never gotten easier.  In fact I think it got harder as our children got older, because although we have so many more ways to connect to one another technologically, it came at an age when my children were beginning to establish their own lives. Depending on where the job is when you are doing opera, it can be a very lonely time. In cities where all the artists are staying in the same place, they often are closer than when we are working in the big opera houses where everyone heads their own way at the end of the day.Trying to remain in good health is another un-fun part of my job.  We all try, but a singer’s job — and pay cheque! — is in jeopardy if they become ill. It can be tiresome trying to avoid getting sick – though worse still is having to cancel an engagement when you are sick.My other professional ‘hat’, teaching voice, is most difficult when the “marriage” of teacher and student doesn’t mesh.  It can happen for many reasons.  I think I feel like I let my student singers down when I can’t help problem-solve, but at the same time I know it is a two-way street and they have to commit as well to the creative process and the work of internalizing their craft.  It is hard work. The student has to do the work.  When they don’t invest in the work it is frustrating. I love the work. I fell in love with the journey — the techniques, the learning — when I began studying with Mary Morrison (a national treasure, and not just by my reckoning!). I love the creative process almost as much as I love being in front of people and performing.

Flipsides;  I have been to some amazing places — in Europe, in Australia, and around this continent—  with my family that I, or they, would never have seen together or maybe even traveled to, had it not been for the chance to perform.I have made friends in this business that I will have for life.  There is a connection in the process of theatre that makes fast friends. We may not see each other often, but I have found that it is like no time has passed when we get together.There isn’t really a flip side to good health – one just needs it.  I have been through a serious health crisis — I am a Stage 3 breast cancer survivor — and know that a cold is just not a big deal, even if it means a missed fee.  It will pass. But I think having cancer and surviving that year was enough to give me some valuable perspective on health.With regard to my teaching career, I would say that I love having to “improvise”. I like looking for new ways to describe a technical journey. I use a lot of metaphors and my students and I often laugh in our lessons – at the metaphor or at ourselves.  When the student is willing to explore their creative ideas, the possibilities are endless.  I love that, every hour, I can learn something new about how to sing or express a phrase, because every hour a new person comes in the door. The art of music brings to mind a line in Richard Strauss’ opera Ariadne that I love: “eine Heilige Kunst” — the ‘holy art’.  It is uplifting.  This came to mind last month, when I was on the stage in the middle of a symphony orchestra playing Mahler …can it get any more transformative?  I am very blessed to do what I do.

Who do you like to listen to or watch?  

I listen to folk music.  My chosen go-to discs often have a Celtic feel to them.  I love acoustic guitar.  My son Jaden has learned this year to play guitar and it is so relaxing.  If I am not listening to our shared ITunes account, which has mostly my teenage children’s music on it – then I might have on violin music.  I leave the radio on one of the two classical stations we have in Winnipeg, and I have recently taken to listening to good talk radio (long live the CBC!) or podcasts (This American Life, Because News)  that are recommended to me.  As for TV, our family watches a lot of comedy at our home on Netflix. I don’t watch network TV often, except when I am on the road and I have too much time on my hands.  I think people would be surprised to know I watch curling and figure skating whenever it is on. I have always loved figure skating.  The best figure skaters – Kurt Browning is the best, in my opinion! – move on ice the way I envision my sound would be, if it were movement.  With figure skating, I can see what my sound feels like.  And an opera singer who loves curling? Don’t ask!  Maybe it has to be because I am like my father!  I like the thoughtfulness and strategy of the game.  I can’t really explain it, but I know it was a comfort to me during my chemotherapy. I was always at my worst after treatments on the weekend – it was during the winter — so there was lots of curling to be seen during that time, and now I am hooked.

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

I wish I could ice-skate.  I was once in a production of The Tales of Hoffmann where I had to perform my aria as Olympia on roller-skates!  But I have had two nasty falls on ice-skates in recent years that have got me spooked, even though I adore the beauty of figure skating, and would love to be able to do a spread eagle. It is such an open and generous action. It looks like it opens the soul.

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

I love walking our dog; I don’t consider that work.  I enjoy working in our yard — also not work.  I don’t feel the same way about cleaning the house — that is still work!  BUT I love decorating the house for Valentine’s Day and Easter and, obviously for Christmas.I love being outside with my family, cycling, hiking, swimming or canoeing.I love being in the car with my family on a road trip.  We get some really good talks in the car.  I hear their music and listen to them sing.  It’s great.

*******

More questions about Candide and Despina in Cosi fan tutte

Please talk about Cunegonde, your role in Candide 

Cunegonde is a role I have sung since I began my career.  Now to be truthful I wasn’t in a staged version of it until, well, recently – avoiding putting an age to it
It is often done as a semi-staged concert since the sets and costumes for such a crazy opera are hugely expensive.  I have done concert versions all over the world and Cunegonde’s big aria (“Glitter and be Gay”) is almost a party piece.  In fact it was an unexpected ‘command performance’ at my 50th birthday party where without any prep at all I had to sight-read new lyrics and sing the aria in front of our family and friends — the opening line re-written to say “FIFTY is okay… so my sisters say …” , etc.  There were some classic lines in that version, thanks to my nephew Graham and his clever lyrics. In fact it is the best I probably ever sang the aria, as it was so spontaneous.

When I learned the aria in Banff in the Musical Theatre Program, I had just discovered from voice instructor Dodi Protero that I had those notes above the staff.  I learned it singing with her.  She sang all of it with me. All I had to do was listen and follow her and because both our voices were meant to do that coloratura, it seemed easy. I think that was a real blessing. I didn’t have to imagine what it ought to sound like or listen to 20 Youtube videos – the sound was present and in front of me.  I just had to feel the sound she was making and “imitate it”.   I have since learned that Cunegonde’s role is difficult. I didn’t learn it the way I would necessarily teach it. BUT I practise it now the way I teach it; in slower sections of detail work in arpeggios and scales, legato and staccato.  Honestly it was such a good thing that I didn’t understand how hard it was when I learned it!

If your voice is meant to sing it, then there are parts that are a breeze but I will say the first time I sang the famous syncopated section with an orchestra I had no clue where I was.  I don’t know that there is any way to prepare for that moment when you move from piano to orchestra except to give you a heads up – it is a different ball game with the orchestra a beat ahead of your part. If anyone wonders why women who sing Cunegonde dance a bit during that aria – that may be the reason; dancing to the beat of our own drum. In some ways, because I sang it in my early musical theatre days, it was never associated with operatic aspirations.  It was fun.  It is fun. Well, it ought to be fun! The extreme highs and lows of the piece are meant to be melodramatic. She is a character of extremes.  In her first duet with Candide, we learn how she aspires to an entirely different world than the one of Candide’s dreams. So the piece is really about living her dream … only as all the characters find out, the dreams come at a cost. The version we are doing in TO is all the more challenging, because it really includes all the musical theatre elements that are required of Cunegonde, as well. You can’t sing the role like Lucia di Lammermoor –  it wouldn’t sound right. So, not unlike Despina, in Cosi fan tutte, you look for other colours or, when in musical theatre, do like the musical theatre singers do, and put character in your voice.

As I have aged with the piece I have learned more about how to sing it, pace it and play with it. One needs to be in fine health to sing it and have all your tools at your command – and always be mindful of what you are doing to keep it lined up.I hope people will find it funny.  It is pretty hard not to tap your toe once the coloratura section starts and that toe-tapping temptation includes me and the orchestra! They get two goes at it, since it is in the overture as well.

Bernstein is a curious composer, who wrote classical music and musicals and jazzy pieces.  Please reflect for a moment on the challenges a singer faces reconciling those aspects in Candide, a piece that sits right on the boundary.    

He is an American composer.  He wants everything from us as performers.  I think he respected the classical traditions.  I think we should sing it with the same respect and accuracy that we do in classical music and in the intricacies of 21st century music for rhythm and pitch.  I feel the same way about Sondheim.  Yes, he bridges the world of musical theatre and classical, but it seems clear to me in this piece where the line is drawn and most of it needs to be classically delivered.  It is fun to throw in a line or two of character-voice and to sing it back in my old musical theatre version of me.  It needs it.  It can’t be sung as Lucia – it is Cunegonde.  If you get a chance watch the video of him working on the recording of West Side story – he wanted it as he wrote it.  One should not try to be more clever and  more of a genius than Bernstein; simply respect him and the libretto, and it will be clear.

Fortunately, because I began in musical theatre and my voice is not a full lyric soprano, I can still pull off the crossover parts of this work.  The parts of the role that demand bel canto singing are never abandoned.  Singing in one’s own language changes things somewhat, but my aim is still to communicate and that is the same whether it is Strauss or Bernstein.

You sang Despina in Atom Egoyan’s Cosi fan tutte when the COC last presented it, and will be one of the anchors in its revival next season.  The opera is sub-titled “The school for lovers”, an aspect Egoyan exploits in his concept.  If it were “The school for singers” you might be the principal, and so I wonder: what lessons would you teach us?

Funny question!  I think I would rather not be the principal.   I would like to be with the teachers in the rooms doing the creative work, not the discipline, paper trails or policy work.  That being said, I think I get your question.  I don’t know that I can answer that in a complete way because there would always be a subsequent question or explanation wanted.   Here is some of the advice I have given over the years: When you do an audition or a recital set out a list of goals (none of which can be memory with text or pitches) that you will evaluate yourself at the end of the day.  I suggest five goals.  The results of auditions are out of our hands but how we feel at the end of that audition is in our control.  If the only goal is to get the job you will end up disappointed too often.  Take ownership and make your own goals. In my set of five goals I want three I will do and rarely miss – and two that are a challenge to myself to improve in places where I do not always succeed.  We all want to strive for perfection but getting there is an impossible task so don’t ask for a perfect audition.  I will steal something I read on line recently; the job is auditioning.  The perk is the job. Be yourself, not some version of an admired artist or described professional.  Sincerity will win out.

Please, oh please, don’t let the business or school rob you of your love of music.  That being said if you want a career in this profession you will need to love the journey as much as the performing. One spends so much time preparing alone before we ever get to the first rehearsal when we start to collaborate and then again before we finally get to perform in front of an audience. Be prepared. You never know when that opportunity to step up and show what you can do will happen.

Don’t take everything that comes your way – or take a dream role simply because it is offered.  Sometimes the timing is wrong. I have, at times, advised singers to say NO. You will have mentors who can advise you. Trust their knowledge of the business and your instrument to know if it is a good opportunity at the right time or not. If you take on something before you are ready and it goes poorly it will be harder to put it behind you both in your confidence and in the eyes of the professionals who heard it.  Career building is an art form.

I think you have a gift for comedy.  Is all acting & theatre the same regardless of genre, or is there something you do differently in comedy? 

Thank you for that compliment.  It is very hard to address our strengths as artists but I do trust this element of my performing. All acting needs to be sincere and come from within the story and character, and that includes comedy.  I am not sure how to describe this in a way that will not leave your readers asking more questions.  Comedy is about listening, about beats and about clean ideas.  It usually is crisp in execution.  Watch Carol Burnett if you want to know where I think most of my ideas were formed!  We watched that as a family every week when I was growing up.  I still to this day will say – “Thank you, Carol Burnett!” You need to be willing to take risks in rehearsals to find those moments.  When I was working with Sir Thomas Allen, we had a blast.  It was always consistent and true to the character but there were nuances that would change. Opera can’t be improvisation because there are too many elements that rely on being consistent.  HOWEVER the process of staging is a place to play and that is where the comedian in me gets to explore and improvise.

Tracy Dahl and Sir Thomas Allen in the COC’s Così fan tutte, 2014 (photo: Michael Cooper)

If you could reprise any of your favourite roles, here or anywhere else, what would you sing?

I have been blessed to sing a variety of roles in my life as a performer.  I never tire of singing Adele in Die Fledermaus.  She was the perfect bridge from musical theatre to opera.  She is trying to pass herself off as a lady of society – and in some ways that is how I felt coming into opera.  Truly, she is the best example of your question above and, because there is so much dialogue, often there was room or even need to improvise while troubleshooting props and such.I really loved singing Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream but I only sang it once.  The same is true of Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. I would love to sing that again. Baby Doe … I learned and performed in ten days for Calgary stepping in.  I would love to sing that role again. Marie in La Fille du Régiment, is probably the role I feel really let me live out all my strengths as a singer.  It is a very physical role, one of the ones I would often get asked to do a cartwheel in. (Those years of gymnastics were good for something!)  It has dialogue – which I love doing; ties me back to my straight theatre days.  It is comical and heart-breaking. My favourite moment in that opera is saying good-bye to the soldiers and Sulpice at the end of Act 1. I always felt really connected to the male chorus in that opera.I would be happy to sing Lucia (di Lammermoor) or Gilda (in Rigoletto) again … I love to sing. I know it is a blessing to still be singing and being given opportunities to share the gifts God gave me. I have no expectations moving forward, but to be prepared and ready if and when I am asked to step on stage.

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

There are four teachers I would like to thank.  Marie Enns, my elementary music teacher who saw something special in me and first put me on the stage as “Piggy number 1” in the Three Little Pigs in grade 3, and then on a dinner theatre stage in Winnipeg.  I learned a lot about performing from her and responsibility and being accountable as a performer.  She still is making music in seniors residences and care homes in Winnipeg.  Her love of music has never diminished.

My second vote of thanks: Herbert Belyea and his wife Audrey who were my private music teachers when I started in Winnipeg, voice and piano.  I made some wonderful friends in that home.  I learned in a safe and supportive environment about singing – I still remember the day Mr. Belyea said, “Did you hear that? That was your vibrato”.

Dodi Protero was the first teacher to identify that I was a coloratura soprano and taught me Glitter and Be Gay by singing it with me.  My teachers in Banff were are all special people but Dodi was the one that could look me in the eye – she was also petite – and sang with me.  I don’t think I would have discovered that voice without her.

Mary Morrison

The biggest influence in my musical life has been Mary Morrison.  I met her at Banff as well, and it was the beginning, as Bogart said, of a beautiful life-long friendship and mentorship.  I have no stronger musical champion than Mary.  I have learned SO much about singing from Mary.  I was a very natural singer when I met Mary but she very gently began a process of teaching me. I remember going to Mary and asking where my larynx was, because everyone was saying it had to be low.  LOL.  She showed me and told me to forget about it, mine was “just fine”, she said. It was with Mary that I got a thirst for understanding how my voice worked.  I wanted to do scales.  Honestly I think we spent more than half our lessons then just singing exercises. Her passion for a scale and a vowel never tires. All of it is based in wanting to serve the texts and the music of the poet or librettist and composers. I can hear her voice in my head now as I write, laughing at how many different ways I could sing an “Ah” vowel!  I call her often and ask her advice now on singers I am working with and on ways to troubleshoot their issues or simply to bend her ear and have a teacher moment of “Can you believe!”.  Every conversation includes a pep talk encouraging me in my own singing.  She is truly an inspiration.  I am so grateful for the way she somehow made the journey in technique so much fun and so informative. I am grateful to her for her never letting go of the desire for my sound to be better.  I never left discouraged.  I always left wondering how I could make those sounds again, which I could because Mary made that part of the process.  She empowered her students.  Mary always made time for me in her busy schedule. I was a fly-in student – of which she had many.  I didn’t do the university route.  So I was coming in for lessons when I could.  She opened her home to me and to many other singers as they would fly through and run in for the 10,000 mile check-up.

*******

Next season Tracy Dahl reprises her portrayal of Despina in Atom Egoyan’s production of Cosi fan tutte with the Canadian Opera Company. But first there’s her portrayal of Cunegonde in Candide with the Toronto Symphony conducted by Bramwell Tovey, Thursday April 26 and Saturday April 28 at Roy Thomson Hall.

I’m writing about Against the Grain Theatre right now as I think about their imminent co-production of Gluck’s opera, that they are calling Orphée⁺ (the original press release said “an international co-production between AtG, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Opera Columbus“, although AtG now also mention “NYC’s Company XIV” on their website).

The production’s arrival in Toronto is imminent, a show that premiered last night south of the border with Opera Columbus, who are already known hereabouts as the employer of Opera Atelier regular & star Peggy Kriha Dye, the General and Artistic Director of Opera Columbus.

Against the Grain music director Topher Mokrzewski

Let me make an analogy.  Let’s say Against the Grain are the Beatles and it’s still the 1960s.  All four were still alive back then in the 1960s when they could do no wrong and if you were like me, you hung on their every word, guitar strum and batted eyelash.  The thought they might ever break up(??!) was as unthinkable as growing old and dying to those of us who were young at the time (who knew!?).

I’m a fan who wondered at times if AtG could break up, as we watched Topher take a job for awhile in Calgary, as we watched Joel take all sorts of directing jobs all over the world.  Would they continue creating edgy projects here in Toronto? Or had they outgrown AtG? I am sure I’m not the only one who figured that after their Da Ponte trilogy of transladaptions, each more impressive than the last, after presenting and reviving Boheme and Messiah, that maybe they would lose interest, perhaps not be bothered.  Would they be distracted by better offers elsewhere?  Was AtG merely their youthful proving ground where they found their first fame, before going on to bigger and better things?

The Canadian myth for success especially in theatre, opera and music has essentially been the story of artists who get their legitimacy by being discovered abroad:

• Robert Carsen
• Joni Mitchell
• Donald Sutherland
• …and I’m sure you could list another 100 very quickly

Against the Grain Artistic Director Joel Ivany

Or is that template now out of date?  Topher split his energies east and west for a time.  Joel & his wife Miriam have a child and probably have more than enough miles just going out to Banff where they workshop their shows before bringing them to Toronto, without adding a host of foreign destinations.   I hope I’m right in sensing that Against the Grain have renewed their covenant with themselves & the company in this new project pulling them together (admittedly in a co-production with others outside Toronto), everyone seeming committed and making an important contribution.  But a co-production is a great way to be able to do something exciting in Toronto.

I’m going by the promotional materials I’ve received plus the press I’ve read concerning Orphée⁺, in considering three elements, namely burlesque, aerials and the musical side.

Burlesque has been re-invented in the last decade, a site for women to reclaim their bodies in all shapes and sizes.  It is no longer the voyeuristic spectacle of objectification & pornography from the last century, indeed the aim to titillate has been replaced by a kind of fun celebration, as burlesque has come to signify inclusiveness & empowerment.

We’ve seen burlesque begin to enter the visual lexicon, part of the movement vocabulary for theatre practitioners.

• Opera 5 gave us their spectacular Die Fledermaus in June 2016 including aerials & burlesque
• Pulse Theatre’s sexy production of Flea in her ear in the 2017 Fringe used burlesque & dance to inject sexiness into every moment of Feydeau’s farce

The challenge for any show is to make the new and glamorous element an organic part of the whole.

Aerials are now solidly established as part of the visual theatre vocabulary, an addition to the toolkit that a director can’t ignore.

• We know aerials have roots in the realm we sometimes call “circus”, from companies such as Cirque du Soleil
• Theatre artists have been importing aerials for a long time, for instance Robert Lepage, who brought aerials into Erwartung (1993), Damnation de Faust (2008), his Ring cycle (2010 – 12) and Needles & Opium (2013)
• An essay I wrote about it a couple of years ago .
• Inspiring imports such as The Return ,Triptyque
  and
• Inspired local creations such as Balancing on the Edge  and Bruce Barton’s experimental YouTopia
• …and we can’t forget inspiring productions at the Canadian Opera Company (in addition to (Erwartung) such as Love from Afar, and Semele

So it would seem like a natural to remake Amour, aka The Goddess of Love as an aerial goddess of glamour as in the pictures I’ve seen (such as the one at the top of this blog).

As for the music I’m on shakier ground in my projection/ speculation. The Berlioz take on Gluck was used recently by Opera Atelier in their production. But perhaps more importantly there’s also the use of electronics & sound design. Is this too part of a new vocabulary?  One can look at electronic incursions into classical performance, for example:

• Haus Musik (where Tafelmusik regularly marry their authentic sound with new electronic improvisation + staging to match)
• The annual Electric Messiah

Electronic and Electro-acoustic music have been there for awhile, and regularly  incorporated into operas, either in the score or in adaptations of older rep.  I could list lots of productions, but I have no idea what AtG’s adaptation will be like, so they’re not terribly relevant, except as a reminder that electronic music and electronic/digital processing of sound & music are normal ingredients in theatre.  We will see & hear soon enough. I sense that AtG want to ensure that their adaptation is an update both in the visual and sonic realms, but I’m just guessing. This weekend they’re in Columbus.

On the AtG website it says
“Against the Grain Theatre, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Opera Columbus, and NYC’s Company XIV collaborate to present the Gluck/Berlioz masterpiece, the opera Orphée et Eurydice. We all know the original Greek myth: the musician Orpheus is grieving the death of his lover Eurydice—and gets one chance to retrieve her from the Underworld. In 2018, we think this would become an electronic, baroque-burlesque descent into hell. While staying true to the original score — which features the world’s most exquisite melodies of love, loss, and desperation — and honouring the traditions of Baroque opera, this new production pushes the boundaries of operatic presentation through an orchestra that mixes acoustic and electric instruments, features captivating choreography from burlesque dancers, aerial artistry, and a global virtual chorus.”

I’m looking forward to seeing Orphée⁺ next weekend, one of the three Toronto performances.  When I went online to buy a second pair of tickets to go with my comps (because four of us will be going; I said I was a fan, remember?) there were still some available.

Find out more & book tickets by going to AtG’s website.

Opera Atelier’s Revival of Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses (1640) starts slowly but builds to a strong finish.  By intermission I had enjoyed a few moments (Kresimir Spicer in the title role and Mireille Lebel as Penelope, and Meghan Lindsay in a pair of goddess incarnations) as well as the usual sterling work of the orchestra led by David Fallis, but otherwise wondered if things might improve in the second half.  I think director Marshall Pynkoski devoted most of his attention & energy to the complexities in the latter scenes, where most of the dramatic interest is found.

And wow did the story ever come to life.

There are at least three plot-lines, in this opera based on Homer’s epic.  After a Prologue showing us the vulnerability of man in the hands of the gods, we watch things developing at home around Penelope including among the servants in the palace, around Telemaco, and around Ulysses.  Gradually the action coalesces as Telemaco reunites with his father –in the most affecting moments before the intermission—and we see the pathway Ulysses will take homewards, as Minerva assists him and his son in handling the suitors who are pressuring Penelope to re-marry.

For the most part we’re listening to gentle vocalism, singers able to sail comfortably over the orchestra because of its delicate sound.  Spicer reminded me a bit of Charles Daniels in the Bach Mass in B Minor, for his lovely unforced vocalism, agility without any forcing, perfect intonation and a wonderful sensitivity to the moment.  Like Daniels with the Bach,  we were witnessing a performer who might know his music better than anyone in the world, having done this role many times over the past 20 years on both sides of the Atlantic.  Whenever he was on stage there was something lovely to listen to and usually something interesting to watch.  His first scene with Minerva was especially interesting as he and Meghan Lindsay, who had teamed up a few years ago in Der Freischütz in a very different fach were once again making big powerful sounds for a few moments. Lindsay made a totally different kind of impression as Cupid, although both of her goddesses were larger than life.

Krešimir Špicer as Ulysses and Mireille Lebel as Penelope (Photo: Bruce Zinger)

There was something I saw on social media in the past week or so from Mireille Lebel, an artist whose singing I already admire very much. She said something about intensity, that she would be singing the role of Penelope differently because of something she experienced in the past year.  I read this and I set the thought aside, until I came to the last scene of the opera tonight. The way Lebel approaches this last scene is quite unique and validates Monteverdi’s opera for me. I’ve long thought of this last scene as an odd superfluity, when the scene where Ulysses shoots the suitors should take us quickly to the end, rather than leaving us still facing a whole other drama.  I don’t know what her subtext is, but the scene makes tremendous sense, right up to the moment when Lebel is persuaded, and you feel the Earth move, as everyone feels the adjustment and change in her attitude, as she finally believes that Ulysses has come home.  I realized that for the entire scene I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, the flashing eyes and the unbearable agony.  It’s one of the finest performances I’ve seen in a very long time, and as I said, for me helps to make sense out of Monteverdi’s score for the first time.

I’d like to also mention the powerful presence of Douglas Williams, who was a totally different artist tonight as one of the suitors chasing –and harassing—Penelope, from the man we saw as Figaro a few months ago.  Instead of affability & charm we saw swagger and intimidation, a rugged machismo unlike anything I’ve ever seen from Opera Atelier.  And I realize now how much restraint he used singing the Mozart, after hearing the sound he produced tonight.

There were other great performances.  Laura Pudwell again made me giggle, while sounding fabulous as usual, in the relatively thankless part of Ericlea the nurse,  that she elevated into something magnificent.  And I realized how much I’ve missed Carla Huhtanen, who was the most musical performer of the night in the fascinating little role of Melanto.  Huhtanen has a gift for comedy that had us all laughing, yet it was her musicianship, making beautiful music that impressed me the most.    Christopher Enns was a believable son to Ulysses, and the Opera Atelier ballet were as beautiful as ever.

Opera Atelier’s stunning Return of Ulysses continues at the Elgin Theatre until April 28^th.

Tonight was the first of two concert performances of Candide presented by the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall in the worldwide celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s centennial year.

Earlier this week Joseph So was rapturous in his description of a concert performance of a Wagner opera in Cleveland with their orchestra.  One of the ironies of high definition broadcasts, particularly with bizarre director’s approaches to the staging, is to make some of us rebel at the notion of realism, pushing us back to the music, and indeed embracing concert performances as an ideal.  It’s especially valid for those works requiring the imagination, that are near impossible to stage in a realistic fashion.

If one were to ask for a list of such works, Wagner’s operas might be the first one would think of: yet Candide is every bit as impossible.  People die and come back to life. The action takes us back and forth across the Atlantic, and the whole time we’re really in the presence of a story that is told to us as if for instruction rather than for the purpose of creating a dramatic illusion.

One might argue that too much illusion is counter-productive.When I think of the music-theatre nerds I know:

• I remember Leigha Lee Browne, the founder of the theatre program at Scarborough College, who gave her name to the theatre they built at UTSC, telling me that this was the finest musical ever written
• And yes I could name three others who told me that Candide is their favorite musical

Of course they were speaking from their acquaintance via recordings, aka virtual theatre.  When you listen to it you can create the illusion in your head, and won’t trouble yourself about the inanity of the plot.     And so this is a nerd’s dream.

They’re playing with us in this presentation from the TSO, as we watch members of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir put on a bit of costume, which is to say, they’re still in a concert tux with a funny hat.  So this is hugely theatrical, demanding that we use our imaginations, like good nerds.  It doesn’t matter if Cunegonde is older than Candide, not when we’re in this virtual theatre of music, words & our flights of fancy.

Judith Forst & Bramwell Tovey dancing (baton betwixt his lips) as Tracy Dahl, Mendelssohn Choir &  TSO look on (photo Jag Gundu)

This felt like a very authentic performance to me, Bramwell Tovey kicking the TSO, chorus & soloists along at a wonderful pace.  Tovey even got into the act, singing & dancing himself, but he was having a great time.

I call it authentic because of a video I saw of Tovey, speaking of his history with Bernstein.  You watch, and judge for yourself.  All I know is that this Candide made a ton of sense, the best Candide I’ve ever seen.

There are other reasons why it was remarkable.  Tracy Dahl showed us a very different way of doing “Glitter and be gay”. Oh sure, she sang it perfectly. But in the middle she acted, she played the role of Cunegonde, giggling and crying like a true comedienne. This wasn’t just an aria but a whole scene, a complex portrayal, hysterically funny in places, poignant in others.  It brings me back to a current obsession of mine, that we need to pry the fingers of the musicologists off the throat of opera,  a form that they are strangling by missing the point.  Because of course opera isn’t just music, but theatre. And ditto for operetta and musicals.  We wouldn’t mistake a musical for a pure piece of music would we? Even in concert performance we understand that we’re dealing with a hybrid, part music / part theatre, and greater than the sum of its parts.  Dahl makes theatre out of her big aria, and indeed is making theatre –and wonderful comedy—every moment she’s onstage.  Oh sure, the voice is fabulous: but it’s not a virtuoso display, never about the music at the expense of the character or the situation. She was always alive as a character, in the moment and fascinating to watch.

Tracy Dahl and Nicholas Phan sing, Bramwell Tovey conducts as Richard Suart and Judith Forst et al watch the romance unfold (photo: Jag Gundu)

Judith Forst is also a theatrical animal, although in the Old Lady role, she’s given tons of great material, in numbers that people sometimes remember best of all in Candide.  I love this rich elegant voice, especially singing these wonderful melodies.

Nicholas Phan has a classic music-theatre sound, even though his bio suggests he’s at home with oratorio & classical singing.  The high notes floated, sometimes in a delightful falsetto: and they were pure magic.  While it’s a team-effort, I can’t help noticing that he is the most likeable Candide, managing to be totally sympathetic in a work that at times is all big ideas & philosophy.

And speaking of philosophy, one of the keys to Candide is the role of the narrator & Pangloss, presented tonight by Richard Suart.  If the virtual presentation floated along on any wings, they were largely his, the man spinning the tale.

If there’s any possible way you can get to see the second presentation on Saturday –admittedly on what feels like one of the busiest weekends of the year—I strongly recommend that you get yourself down to Roy Thomson Hall.  You’ll see and hear what I’m talking about.

L-R in the foreground, Judith Forst, Tracy Dahl, Nicholas Phan, Bramwell Tovey (extending his hand), and in the white tux, Richard Suart.

Orphée+?

That plus sign might signify an opera updated, enlarged, perhaps even reformed(?). The “+” means some remarkable additions and changes from Gluck’s original, Orphée et Eurydice (or the Italian version aka Orfeo ed Euridice). Gluck created more than one version, but the + is a 21st century incarnation whose pluses include adventurous mise en scene, electronic guitar, and a virtual chorus, who aptly mirror the isolation of so many in the modern world addicted to our phones. There are some marvelous ideas vying for our lonely broken hearts. It’s a colossal team effort, involving singers, dancers, musicians, designers, directed by Joel Ivany,  choreographed by Austin McCorrmick, a co-production between Toronto’s Against the Grain Theatre, Columbus’s Opera Columbus, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and New York’s Company XIV. This is the biggest collaborative effort we’ve seen yet from AtG and expensive considering how beautiful it is in so many ways, appealing to all of our senses.

For anyone who knows Gluck’s opera this is familiar turf. The story gets told with some intriguing wrinkles and embellishments. Love (aka “Amour”) is the most flamboyant character in the story and in the production, sung, acted and… okay I have to stop and pose a question.

What is the verb for what an aerialist does? I googled and found a wonderful plethora of words and images describing the moves, a reflection of a burgeoning culture that’s far from the operatic world. Because aerials have rarely been integrated into another medium such as opera, the vocabulary is unfamiliar outside that realm. There are moves and positions that have names within the community, the same way that figure skating or dance has given names to the positions or the leaps. Just as we learned what a death spiral or an arabesque looks like, so too eventually for a single knee hang, shoulder balance or so many more. But when I start dropping the names I’ve become the sort of snob I hate (I loathe jargon on principle): so I’ll stop.

Of course part of the problem may be that it’s hard to talk when your mouth is hanging open, silenced but for a few gasps. I guess I need to get out more.

Marcy Richardson is Amour (Darryl Block photography)

Marcy Richardson is the best reason to go see Orphée+, as though the plus-sign were the twinkle in her eye. Marcy is an aerialist, dressed as Love with wings and sequins and looking like a slim petite version of Mae West (please note, I speak as a huge fan of Mae West, the under-rated and empowered sex goddess from another century). Did I mention that Marcy also sings? And that she does it while suspended upside down ten feet above the stage? So in other words we’re talking about a remarkable feat verging on a circus stunt, something that might even be called dangerous or death-defying.

All in a day’s work if you’re an immortal goddess.

You will never see or hear anything like this in your lifetime, at least not until singers routinely incorporate aerials into their training. But I wouldn’t hold your breath for that possibility. It’s not impossible I suppose. I remember being taken aback by Barbara Hannigan doing the role of Lulu on her toes, so perhaps there will be another rare multi-talented performer like Marcy Richardson.

We’re in a very interesting time for displays of beauty. One of the things I love about burlesque, invoked in the costuming and in the movement style of Company XIV, is the aura of empowerment that totally deconstructs the old-fashioned objectification of women we used to see in the 1950s and before, when a performance like the one I saw tonight could elicit wolf-whistles: but in places far removed from the operatic stage. This is a relatively new notion of beauty, an inclusive image that isn’t sizist or sexist, although it remains to be seen whether age or disability can also be transcended as well. As the bodies on this stage from Company XIV conform to the thin athletic ideal, I can’t say Orphee+ is a fully inclusive display of that sort even when the 21st century burlesque aesthetic suggests something more broadly accepting; and we did venture into ambiguous territory when dancers paired off & moved in ways to signify intimacy, at least avoiding the hetero-normative displays one sometimes sees in ballet & theatre.

What Marcy and her Company XIV entourage pulled off is stunning and apt for this opera, where she is the redeeming goddess who rescues the other two protagonists. They say love conquers all, and on this occasion it was so.

I’ll continue to harp on a theme I keep bringing up, that opera is theatre above all. We are immersed in a powerful spectacle, not just in the form of Marcy’s magnificent movement, but in the stage picture incorporating wonderful CGI on a stunning set, all designed by S. Katy Tucker. Long before we see Mireille Asselin perform Eurydice, we’re seeing her face projected in different ways, haunting poor Orphée, played by Siman Chung. All three are wonderfully musical, emerging out of the soundscape conducted by Topher Mokrzewski, an orchestral texture including keys and guitar. John Gzowski’s contribution is lurking throughout, a sound design that gives the piece an edge. When I say it sounds like hell I mean it in a good way, in an opera showing us the afterlife. The addition of electronics plus a virtual chorus may represent departures from Gluck’s original, but the goal is theatre & magic.

It’s the morning after (I set aside my review late last night) and I woke up thinking about Opera Atelier, suddenly appreciative of what they achieve and thinking of how hard it is integrating dance into the story-telling, making the dance inevitable and cathartic. They do it by relentlessly forcing everyone—dancers, singers and maybe even the stage-hands—to conform to the same consistent movement vocabulary. In places the Orphée+ dance –beautiful and skilful as it was–seemed extraneous rather than organically linked to the story-telling. Perhaps I’m caught up in the visual aesthetic & its fashionable appearance, but these dances felt more like accessories, scarves and fascinators, adornments rather than an organic living part of the whole. When I went to bed I was trying to find the right way to express what I felt was missing. But I think the key is that Gluck is known as a reformer, his Orphée sometimes austere and dry (thinking for instance of the minimalist version we saw from Robert Carsen at the COC), a reform of the excesses that preceded him in removing divertissements and extraneous decoration. The + in Orphée+ seems to be the attempt to put a lot of the stuff back in that Gluck sought to remove, a counter-revolution against the reformer. I wouldn’t object if I felt it hung together better, but my sense of the + as excess came to me after the interval. Where the first half cohered beautifully (and isn’t it always the way with daring adaptations?), the longer we went on, the more I felt that the different parts –and collaborating companies—almost seemed to be in competition rather than accord.

So in other words I think Orphée+ is AtG’s bridge too far, biting off more than they can chew, in the collaboration between one company too many, a brave attempt that still hasn’t quite gelled. So many of their productions are near-perfect especially in their ability to pull it all together around a few key ideas. On this occasion, while there is so much that’s brilliant, yet the performance felt very uneven to me, spectacularly breath-taking when Amour is onstage but far less exciting when she’s not there. We had tantalizing guitar work, some loud electronics in the scenes with the furies, and tantalizing dancers. Go big or go home I wanted to say, because I felt the negotiation underway between the existing text and the desire to make it bolder and newer. Hell could be so much more seductive, so much louder and nastier. I felt that what we got was so respectful of Gluck, in the way that a project requiring so many players –onstage and in the pit—with so many pages of musical score, must negotiate between daring adventure and more cautious steps in the service of organization & intelligibility. I wanted more adventure, more daring wild spirit. We came to pages of recitative that honour Gluck, but plunked on a guitar (or was it a keyboard? I couldn’t see for sure) rather than the usual way: a collision between the desire to innovate vs the published score by Gluck. I wondered about their creative process, commissioning John Gzowski as a sound designer, whose work was very self-effacing, peering through the pages of the score from time to time, when I wished he had been turned loose to do more re-imagining. It felt too respectful to me. And at the very end the lovely tableau was so tantalizing as we all silently stared, gradually realizing that alas the show had ended and had segued into the curtain call.

Against the Grain music director Topher Mokrzewski

Yes it’s very cool that they used burlesque in an opera. In fairness it’s from a time when opera was normally in parts & chunks, when eye candy was the reason you went to the opera in the first place. Gluck’s reform aimed to strip away the excess complexity to get back to the essence. I wasn’t sure who was winning in this battle for opera’s soul even as the collaboration seemed intent on turning back the clock on Gluck’s reforms. The musical side was impeccable, Siman Chung with a big beautiful tone, very accurately wielded. Mireille Asselin brought her usual beautiful musicianship, a sensitive and passionate delivery of every moment, and as mentioned Marcy Richardson was spectacular in every way. The virtual chorus plus the few actual chorus singers were beautifully integrated into the live performance, another impeccable outing for Topher Mokzewski.

And just as Gluck came back to his opera, aiming to improve it each time, I’m sure AtG aren’t finished with this either, especially given that they brought back Boheme and Messiah. But you still have a chance to see this version: Saturday night at 8 pm at the Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront.

Some actions are startlingly ambiguous.  Right now for example I’m not shaving my upper lip. Am I growing a moustache –which would be an action—or am I simply not shaving my upper lip?

I had that thought, thinking about a topic that reared its head a few days ago, in passing, at the beginning of an opera review, where I spoke of crying.

I’d mentioned crying in response to opera.

And the next day a friend spoke to me about her husband, who had seen the review and was delighted because he also cries at the opera. And like me, he is of a generation reared to conceal such feelings.  Two other gentlemen also spoke to me about crying.

So I thought I’d talk about it a little bit.  When I started I thought I wouldn’t have more than a couple of paragraphs. Surprise surprise, the floodgates were open, and I am working hard to stop this from turning into War & Peace.

And so as it turns out, we’re speaking of another thing like my shaving example, hm, and here I am thinking of that proverbial stiff upper lip.  I suddenly have a new perspective on the metaphor.

I have to ask, is it that we sometimes cry, or that we sometimes don’t stop ourselves from crying?

The analogy goes further.

There’s a kind of choice between a natural process and an intervention, refusing nature’s pathway.

The hair growth is the process that happens naturally, even, gulp, after we die (or so I have read). Shaving is a revolt against nature, an attempt to civilize the caveman, trimming and mowing the chaos of a facial garden.

Similarly, the emotional response –whether we mean the tears or something more extreme like sobs—is a natural eruption like a rainstorm.

But I am far less lucid about the alternatives, the choices for this one. I remember being teased for my tears as a child.

Boys don’t cry, I was told.

Men don’t cry, I heard.

And it gets messier because of course I transgressed. While I may have been told I wasn’t supposed to cry: I did anyway.  I was perhaps one of the lucky ones, because I was exposed to things that would make me cry involuntarily.

Now imagine that you’re older and you discover via books or in conversation reasons to doubt what you learned before. Maybe you start to wonder if your previous conditioning was wrong.  Can you allow yourself to cry, to surrender to those impulses, however taboo or forbidden they may feel?

Or maybe you think about it: but aren’t able to do so.

It’s a deep-seated set of messages that aren’t overturned easily. I’m reminded of the stutter we saw in The King’s Speech, a kind of visceral battle of wills, between one older set of instructions at a gut level, and new injunctions at a more superficial level of conscious thought.

I can’t help thinking that opera and classical music are really good for me: because they help overturn those old faulty messages.

Wagner’s operas, especially Parsifal, were among the first works to help subvert all that bad conditioning: softening me up.

In time I have found more and more. Beethoven leads me back to my true self.  Poulenc strips away the BS and reminds me of who I really am.  Debussy too. And John Lennon.

I’m lucky that so many different media & styles move me so much. I cry for baseball movies like Field of Dreams, or the politics of The Post or JFK. It was helpful to watch Dumbo as a dad with my daughter: which stripped another layer off of me.   

One can read about the physiological processes of music.  This is your brain on music, we would discover.  There is something called a “Mozart effect”, someone claims.

So I would add my own little footnote at this point.  Perhaps there is something redemptive about music, indeed, about the arts, in restoring ourselves to ourselves and subverting the false conditioning that may have been imposed upon us.

A stoic warrior is one who denies his or her feelings in service of their higher cause: because something important was needed, that precludes the luxury of feelings & tears. At times civilization demands such sacrifice, or maybe one thinks it’s necessary in the trenches of our 9-5 lives.  And it is one’s humanity itself that is sacrificed.

Sometimes humanity needs tough heroes, and sometimes the gentler person that feels and cries, that is vulnerable and malleable.  I think nasty impulses sometimes begin in the fear of exposure, fear of being shamed. If we are given space to be ourselves in whatever failed versions, we can find a happier reconciliation of our impulses.  I recognize that what I am talking about in my personal restoration project is to redress the balance, to be less a pure warrior, less likely to sacrifice myself for a cause (and one where the enlisting was imaginary; nobody really asked me to enlist), and more likely to take care of myself.  When push comes to shove, the warrior is still there, but he is no longer perpetually at attention, guarding the citadel of visceral emotion against anything soft & tender.

In case you’re wondering, the headline isn’t like the song in the musical, and Argentina doesn’t come into it.  I am explaining what I do. I cry for me the way I run for me or lift weights for me or eat kale & krill oil for me.  I do it because it feels good, and to block the impulse is harder and harder, finally.

One of the things I do on this blog is suggest films, CDs, operas, plays, books, that you might enjoy.  Chances are you already know this phenomenon But if you’re like me, someone who was led astray when you were younger, crying might be something you’d really enjoy.

Tonight’s programme from Tafelmusik was the first of their season-ending concerts at Koerner Hall. We heard Beethoven’s violin concerto & the Pastorale symphony.

Thinking about moustaches & tears earlier this week, it felt serendipitous to be studying the same sort of phenomenon tonight.  Both the guy sitting next to me and I were fascinated to watch a child so moved by the Beethoven that they danced around in their seat, at times resembling a ping-pong ball boing boing boing-ing, first left, then right, then left, and so on, from one parent to the other and back and forth with the energy only a child high on Beethoven can muster.

Tafelmusik always strikes me as a kind of phenomenological laboratory, wherein we explore the creation of the music they are presenting.  To hear Beethoven played on their more natural instruments isn’t quite as perfect as what you’d hear from the modern instruments of –say—the Toronto Symphony or the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra—because of the riskier sounds produced in those old-style instruments.  And so I feel we’re brought into the presence of Beethoven as he was, the new & dangerous composer, that radical of the early 19th century. Sure, it sounds a bit ludicrous to say, when these compositions are over 200 years old, but we become blasé hearing perfect performances on the modern instruments with valves and metal strings, not recognizing how daring these works were when they burst upon the world.  To hear this orchestra risk so much in performance? That brings Beethoven to life like nothing else I’ve ever encountered.

Okay, so that’s the usual laboratory for me, hearing Beethoven or Mozart as if from first principles. But in addition we were presented with a miniature psychological experiment that echoed some of what I wrote about a few days ago. This time it wasn’t a question of weeping (although I was momentarily blind-sided by tears watching the child bouncing around), but joyous phenomena:

• dancing
• singing
• laughter
• applause

Think about it.  These are all the things we suppress in a classical concert, as though we were checking our humanity at the door, hung up with our coats & scarves. And so of course, the parental units were not entirely amused, although I was mightily impressed with how they handled their little firecracker, who looked to be 6 or 7 years old.  I wanted to surrender myself, wanting to applaud after the first movement –the way any normal person would have applauded in 1805—and indeed after the wonderful cadenza, again as any normal person would have done, back in the day.  We’ve had our spontaneity curtailed by the conventions we now agree to in 2018, although had this been a rock concert? I think the woo hoos would have erupted spontaneously.

I’m going to see this program again on the weekend.

First we watched Elisa Citterio play the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

Violinist Elisa Citterio, Tafelmusik’s new Music Director

Is this the best of all the violin concerti? Maybe not. But it is my favourite because it has such drama, appearing out of the slow plodding figure in the timpani, a sweet slow melody with great passion, energies held in check but explosive under the surface.  The cadenza that Citterio created was every bit as profound as the movement from which it emerged, including a wonderful statement of the main theme in a contrapuntal creation back and forth between two adjacent strings.  As I said, I wanted to applaud the cadenza, and again at the end of the movement. Only in the third movement –when the child started to dance—did the passion find legs.  Conductor Bruno Weil gave us a wonderful series of tempi, always keeping things moving, with spirit yet always eloquent. My one discouraging word would be that Citterio’s matching cadenza for the third movement was probably too long & fraught.  My opinion? Perhaps, but the child stopped dancing, stopped cold by all this ambivalence & chromaticism in a movement that is mostly diatonic. Indeed I’d say that’s the concerto’s real dramaturgy: that it tortures us with chromaticism for the first movement, gradually emerging into the clear air of the diatonic particularly in the last movement. To insert all that angst in the last movement? Out of context, I feel. Movement One is perhaps like Chekhov or Pinter, but movement three?  Not so dark or complex.   Even so the concerto is magnificent, the performance a watershed for Tafelmusik working with their new Music Director. The smiles! those erupted from faces all through the orchestra.

Conductor Bruno Weil

After the interval came the 6th Symphony, another beautiful performance from Tafelmusik.   I went looking for what I wrote about their complete symphony recording that I reviewed a few months ago, conducted by Bruno Weil.

Weil does not suppress one part to help bring out another. What’s daring and new for me in these recordings is that I can hear every little part.  I can’t help thinking that this is what Beethoven must have sounded like in his first appearance: that is, in the performances before conductors started regularly “interpreting” symphonies in particular ways (aka distorting and changing the music). (review)

So too tonight, especially in the third movement, when Weil allowed all the various voices to have their turn without picking one to be the “melody”.  It’s fabulous. I can’t help thinking it might be closer to what Beethoven created in his own time, before conductors started “interpreting”, aka distorting the music.

And at the end I was shaken thinking about this hymn to nature and ecology, wondering if the shepherd who celebrates the Earth’s renewal in the last movement could have imagined climate change & whales choking on plastic.  Is there a possibility for the planet’s renewal or are we in a death spiral?  Listening to this lovingly presented antique, namely the careful performance from Tafelmusik & Weil, it’s especially poignant.

I recommend you go hear this concert if you can.  I’m going again on the weekend.

When I interviewed David Fallis five and a half years ago concerning a period production of Der Freischütz my first sentence said that he “is surely one of the most important musical minds in Canada,” an assertion that has only gathered weight with every passing year.

Have no fear, he’ll still be prominent in Toronto’s musical life. While David’s tenure as the Artistic Director of Toronto Consort ends this season, he’ll continue to work with them, as well as in his roles as Musical Director for Opera Atelier and Choir 21.

David closes his final Toronto Consort season as Artistic Director with three performances of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Jeanne Lamon Hall at Trinity St Paul’s Centre beginning May 25th.  I had to ask him a few more questions.

David Fallis (Photo credit: Paul Orenstein, digital work by Ross Duffin, background by Gerrit Dou 17th century, Dutch).

1. What has the Toronto Consort meant to you?

The Toronto Consort has been an exciting place to explore so many repertoires of music which are too little heard today. I say repertoires, in the plural: since we perform music from roughly 1150-1650, there are many styles and developments to come to understand (sometimes lumped together as “early music”), and it has been great to have a vehicle for constantly discovering new and beautiful music. This is thanks to our strong base in Toronto, where an appreciative audience comes back year after year, but they naturally want to hear new music each season.

The ensemble has been blessed with great, committed performers over the years, and it has been a privilege to work with them, and get to know them so well.

Since early music is often unknown, we’ve always felt that it is important to give the audience a context, and this has led to great collaborations with actors, dancers, visual artists, world musicians, etc., and to the chance to create scripts and stories which can add so much to the concert experience.

2. As you look back at your years with Toronto Consort, do any concerts stand out, perhaps for the piece being presented, perhaps for the guests or the performance?

This is a hard one! A few possible candidates:

• our most recent version of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, which sounded even more magnificent than before in the newly-renovated hall at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, with Charles Daniels leading a team of fabulous singers, and Bruce Dickey leading a group of fabulous players
• the feeling of having the audience join in on “In dulci jubilo” at the end of the Praetorius Christmas Vespers has always been magical, achieving the sense of community participation which we strive for in that concert
• it was a dream to perform “The Play of Daniel” with a youth choir, and to hear them all sing the Te Deum at the end, with the bells ringing around the church, is something I will never forget

  From The Play of Daniel in 2017: Belshazzar – Olivier Laquerre (l) Noble – Bud Roach (r) (photo: Glenn Davidson) . Olivier Laquerre and Bud Roach appear courtesy of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association.

• the serenity and beauty of “A Medieval Christmas”, curated by Katherine Hill, with images projected in the darkness
• countless opportunities to sing great one-on-a-part vocal music with such a great vocal consort – it’s like working in a string quartet: challenging but one of the most rewarding things for a singer

3. Recalling all the different roles with the Toronto Consort, as performer & curator, and impresario, and knowing that you don’t have to do all that for much longer, please reflect, which parts did you find most rewarding, and are you breathing a sigh of relief as far as any part of the job is concerned?

Choosing a program of early music has many challenges. You have to find a theme, find the sheet music itself, decide if it is good music, decide if it can fit the Toronto Consort, make lots of decisions about scoring/arrangements, etc. I have always felt that the beauty and quality of the music must be of first importance, so it’s not always easy to find the perfect piece for a certain moment in every program, but when it works it is wonderfully rewarding. I will miss the “thrill of the chase” in that sense – finding something which is worth hearing that not many other people have noticed.

But I know that there are lots of great ideas and musical programmers in the Consort, so I know that tradition of “searching for gold” will continue.

4. Help us to understand what’s involved in being a curator/ impresario for music that existed so long ago.

As I mentioned above, the quality of the music is #1. Then, like a curator, you have to set the piece in the right place, with the right light on it. This means spending a lot of time organizing the order of the pieces to create a sense of wholeness to the evening’s program, with enough contrast, enough common ground, between pieces.

Of course, there is a lot we do not know about musical performance so many years ago, but I like to be inspired by what we do know, and then commit to whatever equivocal decisions we have to make. Especially in the Middle Ages, I think music was often heard and understood differently than today, but that “strangeness” can be very mind-opening if you are willing to explore it.

5. Out of the complex planning and development cycle, what’s your favourite moment when you mount a concert or an opera?

You hope to reach a moment when you feel that the order of the program is settled, and that it has a rhyme and reason. For opera, it is always thrilling when, after weeks of staging rehearsals, we add the orchestra and suddenly the colours in the composer’s ear are revealed.

6. What do you love about the repertoire you’re playing & discovering?

It depends on the particular rep, but in renaissance music, I love the directness of the rhetorical quality. I love the fact that what’s on the page is only the beginning of a piece of music. Almost like jazz musicians today, we are expected to add and create new things, guided by the original piece of music. I love it when what was, only a while ago, some scribbles in an obscure source have become a living piece of music.

7. Do you have a favourite moment in Orfeo?

Another tough one. Again, some possibles:

• the messagiera scene, where Eurydice’s death is told by an eye witness
• Orpheus’ response to hearing this news: “Tu sei morta” and his resolve to go to the underworld to get her back
• Persephone’s pleading with Pluto to let Orpheus into the underworld (“Signor, quel infelice”)
• “Possente spirto” with its singing, the echoing solo instruments, the harp solo, the slow harmonic pace, the magic of the music as it creates this eerie underworld scene
• the brass sinfonias, and male choruses which end Acts 3 & 4, so solemn and so different from the lively choruses earlier

8. Please talk about the cast in Orfeo and what we’ll be hearing.

Charles Daniels is divine in this repertoire, and it’s really his piece.

Mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell

And we have a great cast around him, with Laura Pudwell as Messagiera, Katherine Hill as Musica, Michele DeBoer as Persephone, Kevin Skelton, Cory Knight and Bud Roach as shepherds.

The instrumental colours are also magical in Orfeo. The theorbos, harp, harpsichords, organs, strings, recorders, cornetti, sackbuts are all used in wonderful ways, and the sounds of the orchestra is constantly shifting.

9. Is there a reason why Orfeo seems like a fitting conclusion for this chapter of your life? [or am I reading too much into this..?]

Well it depends what you are reading into it

[When I was young Orfeo was known as the first opera, a notion that has since been overturned, so it seemed fitting / symbolic. Oh well…]

I’m glad to be ending with Monteverdi, one of the greatest of early music composers, and glad to be ending with such a great team of musicians.

10. How do you relate to Medieval and Baroque music & opera as a 21st century man?

There is a wonderful balancing act you do as a 21st-century musician dealing with repertoire that is so old. On the one hand, you want it to be comprehensible and moving for a modern audience; on the other you also are intrigued and curious about the “otherness” of early music. You are always struck by similarities with the modern condition, and by differences.

With lots of medieval and renaissance music, you know you are often presenting music that much of the audience is hearing for the first time, sometimes because it may indeed be the first time it’s ever been heard in Canada! So you enjoy the spirit of discovery and newness.

Which leads to:

11. You’ve divided your time between older works –both with Toronto Consort & Opera Atelier—and newer ones, as the Music director of Choir 21 (a choir specializing in 21st century compositions). Going forward, will we see you with those three ensembles?

Maybe it’s the same spirit of discovery which has attracted me to both early music and contemporary music.

And, yes, I’m not retiring, only stepping down as AD of the Toronto Consort, so besides my continuing on the team of Artistic Associates at the Consort (next year I will be leading the Praetorius Christmas Vespers for the Consort in December, and doing a program of modern music written for the Consort in February), I will still be working with Opera Atelier and Choir 21.

12. Your music direction & performance of Ulysses (with Opera Atelier), a more mature opera by Monteverdi, likely stayed in your head while you were rehearsing Orfeo. You are acquainted with Monteverdi on so many levels, as teacher & practitioner. Please reflect on our understanding of Monteverdi, the difference between the two operas (reflecting his growth & development but also the growth of opera itself) and how that informs your process.

Orfeo was written for a courtly/academic milieu where the rich orchestration and the beautiful sensitivity to the elegant poetry was central. By the time of Ulysses, opera was being performed in a public theatre trying to turn a profit, so the focus had changed somewhat. The orchestra was reduced, the storyline features more “action scenes” etc. Orfeo has almost the quality of a religious rite, where Ulysses is very much a human, even domestic, drama. But Monteverdi’s sureness in creating drama and bringing the text to vibrant life with his music never falters.

*******

David Fallis conducts Toronto Consort’s concert presentation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo May 25 & 26 at 8 pm and May 27th at 3:30 pm at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre.

And next season David will be back:

• a double-bill of two short operas in the fall, namely Charpentier’s Acteon & Rameau’s  Pygmalion  October 25 – November 3, 2018,
  and Mozart’s Idomeneo in April 2019 with Opera Atelier
•  Praetorius Christmas Vespers in December 2018 with Toronto Consort

I love ambition.

Tonight I was plunged into a world completely unlike anything I’ve encountered in opera, and it will be replayed tomorrow.  Okay, performed again I should say, even if it does feel like a hockey game at the Jane Mallett Theatre.

There are red and blue lines, boards, and lots of passion (as you can almost glimpse in this picture).

You can see a bit of the stage, although the main reason for this picture was the charming sweater of the gentleman directly in front of me.

Start with this premise:

• that we recall the rivalry between Toronto & Montreal in hockey from the era of black and white television
• that we make a kind of film noir story out of that rivalry by injecting some romance
• and it’s an opera

So did you get all that? They’re presenting a 1950s film noir about the hockey rivalry between Toronto & Montreal.  That’s what I mean by ambition.  You don’t get much more Canadian than that, especially when it’s in both official languages with splashes of Joual.
And it’s a collaboration between Continuum, Ensemble contemporain de Montreal (ECM+) and the Toronto Comic Arts Festival giving it great flair visually and aurally.  It was not so much a film noir as a graphic novel, sepia images reminding me of old black and white TV hockey broadcasts. Still images or animated ones were projected onto the screen behind the live performers.

ECM+ filled Jane Mallet Theatre, a string quartet, keyboards and percussion, conducted by Veronique Lacroix.   The opera is an 80 minute collaboration between librettist Cecil Castelucci (who has several graphic novels under her belt) and composer André Ristic, who has several previous commissions with ECM+, in four acts.

And like any good film noir it’s narrated from the point of view of a detective, this time Detective Loiseau.   I was immersed in something unlike any opera I’ve ever seen.

I love its ambitions even though the hockey fan in me quibbles with its anachronistic errors.  For instance, “slot” and “slapshot” were words that were never heard before 1960, coined much later; and the image onscreen of a goal-crease is round… I just looked up a goal by Guy Lafleur from 1979 on youtube and even then the crease was still rectangular.

Forgive me! I am a stickler. NB the teams in the opera can’t be Leafs or Habs likely due to copyright concerns (as you can see in the picture above)

Even so this was a magical opera presentation.  We were re-enacting Richard Wagner’s point, from Opera and Drama, that opera was not a form employing music for dramatic ends, so much as a form using drama for a musical end.  We were immersed in passionate singing about love and relationships and yes, sometimes about the game.  Much of what we heard was marvelous, especially coupled with the sophisticated visuals. We were in no danger of mistaking this for real life because it was so stylized, surrounded by the magnificent projections.

I could be wrong but I think Quebec society & culture are more laid back, less likely to give too sh**ts over what some hack writer like moi should have to say about anachronism and opera.  They took their concept and ran with it, which is what we need to see more of here in Toronto.  The adaptors were as bold as Mafia hitmen (yes that was in the story too), making no apologies for their eclectic mix of styles.  The audience—who must be the youngest audience I’ve ever seen at an opera that wasn’t geared for children—totally ate it up, likely because they were nerdy young graphic novel fans, entirely in their element.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, and I think that’s a good thing.  Continuum / ECM+ are back Friday night at 8 pm for another performance at the Jane Mallett Theatre.

Today’s noon-hour recital at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre aka the foyer of the Four Seasons Centre was unlike any we’ve seen before.

Readers of this blog may recall that I’ve expressed my admiration for Keri Alkema in my reviews of her Tosca last year, her Vitellia from a few years back and again in Anna Bolena a few weeks ago.  There was no way I would miss the chance to hear and see her up close.

Kamen Chanev as Cavaradossi and Keri Alkema as Tosca in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Tosca, 2017, photo: Michael Cooper

I came expecting to hear Keri Alkema’s beautiful singing, but that was just part of it.  The program on the page was unlike any other:

• “All’afflito è dolce il pianto (Roberto Devereux) – Gaetano Donizetti
• “Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata” (Don Giovanni)—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” (Un ballo in maschera)—Giuseppe Verdi
• “Salce, salce…” (Otello)—Verdi
• “Che tua madre dovrà” (Madama Butterfly)—Giacomo Puccini

I was tempted to call this “Keri Alkema, this is your life”, as we were taken along on a musical journey, ably supported by Rachel Andrist at the piano.  Not only did we hear the arias but we heard a great deal of personal commentary in this most informal and relaxed concert.  The transformation? From mezzo-soprano into soprano.  The Donizetti aria with which we began is a mezzo-soprano aria, one from earlier in Alkema’s career.  Her role as Giovanna Seymour in Anna Bolena¸ the opera she’s currently singing with the COC, is also a mezzo-role.

In addition to the arias, the recital included anecdotes – for instance the time her Otello accidentally smacked her so hard in the face onstage as she sang Desdemona that she literally saw stars, and wondered if she’d be able to even open her mouth to sing —and a series of questions & answers from the audience.

I was astonished by something else Alkema brought to the stage, namely a complete commitment in each of the arias.  She joked about the vulnerability she felt in this venue & in this program, her first such recital in awhile.  That was another aspect of the concert that was unique.  We could see her sweat, and at one point in the final aria, she thought that we saw her sing a note slightly less than perfectly.  Frankly, I think the note was fine, but what was extraordinary was to observe her portrayals in an exposed & genuine method-acting approach and up close.  Alkema was wonderfully at ease, unprotected by a costume or an affected attitude. Many of my favourite singers choose to take on a kind of stylized facial expression that owes at least something to the ancient Greek masks, that can be as blank as pure abstraction, and therefore freed of anything too personalized.  One can disappear into such a mask, but one can also hide behind it, especially if one might have a moment when one wonders about the voice.

Not so Alkema.  In each instance, Alkema gave us another sort of transformation, namely that of her portrayal, vanishing into the character instantly.   Donna Elvira had a heroic ferocity, her Emilia, a desperate regret, her Desdemona, a wonderful panorama of emotions, as she told the story of Barbara and her willow song, jumping fearfully at the sounds at the window, and closing prayerfully.  And then her Butterfly illustrated one of the great challenges with Puccini’s opera, of keeping the mask in place, of portraying without reacting to the music & the emotions one is signifying.

We heard a great deal about mentors such as Marilyn Horne & even Sondra Radvanovsky who currently portrays Anna in the same production at the COC.  I was struck by Alkema’s genuine humility as she spoke of colleagues and influences, as this is a singer who has a great deal to offer the younger ones coming up.  That next transition is still to come, the natural culmination of development when one begins to give back to the next generation.

Today’s concert was like a workshop on the mezzo-soprano voice, an intriguing combination of vocal demonstrations and discussion.  I was hooked, not just because I love her voice, but also because I find the mezzo voice to be one of the most intriguing of all operatic phenomena.  I grew up accompanying a baritone, and attempting to sing, first as a baritone then as a tenor, so I am always curious about the parallels in the mechanics of the female voice-types.  Alkema sings as a soprano, but began the recital with a mezzo aria. I wondered if that might change the way she sang in subsequent numbers.

Was I imagining it, when I heard the lower parts of “Mi tradi” seemingly emphasized (so rich & full), while the higher notes were sung with at least thoughtful care rather than wild abandon?  I found myself identifying what it must have been like the first few times venturing up above the treble clef to those high notes.

Alkema was so vulnerable in telling us about the adventure, particularly in Ballo, which is one of the toughest roles of all.  What’s it like to discover doubt and fear in the middle of a role, and how does one surmount that?  It was quite a story.

I hope the COC will bring Alkema back so that we can see the next phases of her development.  But first? Keri Alkema & Sondra Radvanovsky have two performances of Anna Bolena left this week.

Rachel Andrist (piano) and Keri Alkema perform in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, 2018 (photo: Kevin Lloyd)

An Evening With the Ensemble Studio is a special opportunity. It’s interesting to get a closer look at the members of the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio. For most of the year they’re confined to small roles in the mainstage productions, but on a night such as this they take on bigger roles, a taste of prime-time. And for us, it’s the chance to see so much more of what they can do, their potential realized. We see that they’re ready.

In past years this meant a performance cast with Ensemble members, but beginning in 2017 they’re doing a showcase in formal attire instead, a new concept that I think they are still figuring out: as in, sometimes it works and sometimes, not so much.

There were two parts to tonight’s show. After intermission we saw one of the glories of the operatic stage, namely Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas in a well-conceived production that didn’t require costumes but did entail some clever use of the Anna Bolena set (designed by Benoit Dugardyn), a production that stands with some of the best work I’ve seen from the COC. I loved it so much possibly because it was so much better than what we’d seen before the intermission.

We began with a series of scenes from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte that pale in comparison to the tight organic performance of Dido. It was the same group of singers before & after intermission, sounding marvelous on the whole and accompanied by the COC Orchestra led by Johannes Debus. If you ask me (and nobody did), if opting to present only part of an opera, the choice of scenes needs to be more carefully thought out than on this occasion, as the Cosi scenes were to my eye rather awkward. We began in media res, handing things to a character who is always liked –Despina—while expecting the four lovers to grab us without any exposition, no chance to create a through line either with us or for them with their character. I think this choice was simply too difficult for the singers, and of dubious value in the creation of a micro-characterization.

But let me get back to Purcell, the wonderful and indeed indestructible Dido. Every moment was gold, the orchestra sounding delicate & committed. In fact part of my problem with the Mozart might be that I felt it was a bit brusque, barely intelligible, whereas I caught every syllable of every word in the Purcell: something that owes as much to Debus’s sensitive ear as to the enunciation of the singers. Was Debus preoccupied, perhaps mindful of a farewell he would be making to some of the members of the orchestra?  Of course there is value in the experience, as singers tell horror stories of unsympathetic conductors (part of the job, right?). They mostly kept it together. All I know is that everything was a thousand times better after the interval, although the fact we were dealing with a complete work in a well-conceived production, surely had a lot to do with it.  In the program one sees “Dramatic Consultant –Anna Theodosakis”, leading me to wonder how this was done. No actual director credit? Were the Ensemble Members only getting advice without actual direction? Ah well. ‘Tis a mystery.

And hindsight is 20-20 of course.

Soprano Danika Lorèn and soprano Lauren Eberwein in the Canadian Opera Company’s An Evening with the Ensemble Studio, 2018, with the COC Orchestra conducted by COC Music Director Johannes Debus. (Photo: Gaetz Photography)

There were some wonderfully original touches such as the meta-theatrical choice to have Dido onstage watching the witches, as though they were haunting her dreams. And while this wasn’t a period approach, when Lauren Eberwein said “remember me” staring directly into Danika Lorèn’s face, I totally lost it. The two of them had genuine star power throughout the evening, Loren effortlessly switching from the wackiness of Despina to the darker shades of Belinda.  I was mindful too of the question of vocal type, after having heard Keri Alkema’s thoughts just a few days ago about changing from a mezzo-soprano to a soprano.  Eberwein herself has made such a switch (notice that she’s called “soprano” in the COC photo credit) even though Dido is usually understood to be a mezzo role: but embellished by some higher notes.

Everyone had their moments though. Bruno Roy was strong as both Don Alfonso & Aeneas, Megan Quick dominating the stage as the Sorceress, Samantha Pickett & Simone McIntosh delightful in their witchy machinations (and which seemed so much more fun than what they were given to do as Fiordiligi & Dorabella), aided and abetted by Samuel Chan who then slipped into the sailor’s role (although everyone was in formal attire).

Maybe I ask too much, but I think less is more. If I had only seen Dido tonight I would have been more impressed by the COC’s Ensemble Studio than what I saw. Yet it’s a work in progress. It will be interesting to see what they’ll do next year.