I can’t help noticing symmetry in 2019’s Toronto Summer Music and its Beyond Borders theme.

The Festival opened July 12th with a concert featuring a Mozart sonata including the famous rondo “alla Turca” and a 20th century song cycle in a reduction to a smaller –sized ensemble. Tonight in the last TSM concert at Koerner Hall a Mozart concerto bearing the epithet “Turkish” and another 20th century song cycle presented in a reduced form would seem to bookend the Festival for us.

And both concerts were extraordinary.

Tonight we heard a reduced version of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (aka The Song of the Earth) a work for two singers normally with a large orchestra. In this reduction begun by Arnold Schoenberg in the decade following Mahler’s death, and only finished by Rainer Riehn in 1983, we encounter a new set of parameters for the six songs of the cycle, not unlike what we heard in the reduced “Four Last Songs” premiered last month. I think it becomes a new composition with different requirements, a different kind of balance & dynamics, amenable to lighter voices.

Mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb

We heard soloists Rihab Chaieb and Mario Bahg, the ensemble led by conductor Gemma New. The Schoenberg-Riehn score is for about 14 players (2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, harmonium, piano, percussion(2), horn, flute/piccolo, oboe/English horn, clarinet(s), bassoon), most if not all called upon to function as virtuoso soloists. There are no easy parts, indeed some are extremely challenging. Add to that the brisk tempi New took—especially in the wildest parts of “Von der Schönheit (Of Beauty)”—and you’re seeing something rare. With the usual orchestration that fast middle part of the song can be a loud murky mess (sorry Gustav), with its overtones of sexual violence: but New and Chaieb were crisp & precise, giving it a hair-raising ride. Is it heresy to suggest that this version fixes a part of the cycle that needs to be fixed? Perhaps.  At this moment Mahler captures the battle between yin & yang, perfect order confronted with a big noise, reflection vs action: just like life itself.   If we are to understand that the reduced version aimed for clarity, it’s fair to say that that goal was achieved, as inner voices came through as never before.

(morning after thought… deconstruction/analysis take us inside a work leading us to understand it better. Students used to be asked to paraphrase & reduce works as part of their study. Playing a piano reduction for instance gives you a sense of the interplay of voices that’s invaluable…DITTO hearing a new version like this one)

It was a great pleasure watching New’s direction, her body language so articulate as to seem to paint the music in the air before her.  This was a fast & dynamic interpretation, one that deserves to be heard again.

Gemma New (Fred Stucker Photography)

Bahg too has a remarkable voice with a gorgeous colour and fabulous legato, that he mostly kept in check in matching the dynamics of the ensemble. From time to time he unfurled a big gorgeous note especially up top.  Both soloists easily filled the space with their sound, articulating words & expressing the text clearly. These songs were the best thing I heard in the 2019 Festival.  I’m dying to hear it again.

Jonathan Crow has been everywhere in TSM, both as the Artistic Director and often as the star, and tonight he had me wondering if this was a bridge too far given that he was in effect playing exposed solos all night. Yet except for a few moments in the opening movement of the Mozart, when he was perhaps just getting warmed up, Crow continued to impress with his agile sound & full tone. In the first half of the concert we heard 3 movements that got better and better. I think it’s fair to say that the third movement was the one that really excited Crow, both for its quirky inter-cultural overtones (in keeping with the Festival’s theme after all) and for the challenges it posed.

The Festival concludes this weekend.

This afternoon I saw the closing matinee of EARNEST, The Importance of Being, presented by Summer Opera Lyric Theatre and Research Centre (aka SOLT), at the Robert Gill Theatre. It’s an operetta based on Oscar Wilde’s play with music by Victor Davies and libretto from Eugene Benson, directed by SOLT General Director Guillermo Silva-Marin.

It’s my second look at the adaptation I previously reviewed in a presentation by Toronto Operetta Theatre back in 2015 (and premiered in 2008), when I think I misread the work in my first look at it. Today I had the chance to chat with the composer during intermission.

Davies & Benson faced an interesting set of options in taking up one of the greatest comedies in English. How are we to understand genre, or more to the point, what were their aims in their adaptation? I mistakenly called the piece a musical (the implications of that headline from back in 2015) , wishing I could see it in the hands of a cast such as the outstanding students at a school such as Ryerson. But in places the women’s parts, especially the vocal challenges of Cecily, are simply beyond what you’d usually expect from a player in the realm of musical.  Oh sure, graduates are now what we’d call “triple threats”, with capabilities as actors, singers & dancers. But when you drill down on that you discover that the vocal capabilities are for a pretty voice but not necessarily the extreme skillset required of Cecily, whose part ascends to the stratosphere many times. So in other words I was wrong.

This is an operetta: because Benson & Davies were mindful of the context for Wilde’s play. One can’t help thinking of Gilbert & Sullivan while listening to this score, and not just because  G & S are roughly contemporary with Wilde. It’s a tuneful adaptation but perhaps more important, it’s deliberate. There are several places where a small pretense in the text turns into an aria or an ensemble expanding upon that little gem. A 21st century musical would never be so deliberate, as the commercial imperative would push the piece to move quicker, and in so doing, to feel less authentic. Cecily & Gwendolyn are positively Victorian in their manners, adorably detailed creations. If Davies & Benson were not quite as successful in capturing that magical essence in the men, it’s only because they get blown off the stage by these remarkable women: not just the young ones but also Miss Prism & Lady Bracknell as well.

So in other words the four female cast members today were exemplary. You couldn’t take your eyes off of Karen Bojti’s Lady Bracknell whose every movement generated hilarity with a voice & a presence that was truly larger than life. Katelyn Bird (Cecily) seems aptly named for her brilliant coloratura & precise intonation, while Anika-France Forget (Gwendolyn) was an effective contrast, every bit as playful & vocally impressive.  Stephanie O’Leary has her moments too as Miss Prism, especially in her big scene near the end of the piece

Perhaps most important, the operetta is quite a funny piece of work that had me laughing out loud throughout. The adaptation doesn’t lose the wit of the original, and director Silva-Marin gave his cast lots of great business to illuminate the text.  Whatever the abilities of this cast — and they range from beginner to expert –Silva-Marin ensures that they all look good even when we can see that the performer is just learning how to act: so that the illusion is compelling & absorbing.  We get a great piece of theatre.

SOLT are a force training young singing talent for the world of opera. I put that headline on there, playing with the operetta’s title as I contemplate the future for Guillermo Silva-Marin. My mind is thinking of succession planning for at least a couple of reasons:

• Because it’s something we’re looking at within my own organization
• Because Alexander Neef is now known to be leaving the Canadian Opera Company, and speculation has begun as to his successor with the COC
• Because in the lobby there was a mysterious lobby display with balloons mentioning retirement. I was asked about it, and I don’t think it’s for Guillermo (as far as I know) but rather from the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, –the home department at University of Toronto in the Robert Gill Theatre– and who hosted a retirement reception for a professor back in May.
  That’s my best guess.

I was looking at his many accomplishments on Guillermo’s website, including

• founder of Toronto Operetta Theatre in 1985 (34 years ago)
• founder of Summer Opera Lyric Theatre in 1986 (33 year ago)
• And General Director of Opera in Concert since 1994 (25 years ago)

If he were to decide he’s had enough and walked away from his tripartite career who would take over at the helm of his many important activities? SOLT? Opera in Concert? Toronto Operetta Theatre? I don’t have any answer, and indeed I hope I don’t seem impertinent for mentioning this. But SOLT (like TOT & Opera in Concert) is an important organization. We need for all three to continue.

Guillermo Silva-Marin, General Director of SOLT

I am tempted to sing the blessing from Turandot that’s addressed to the Emperor.  God bless Guillermo.

The funeral for Father Owen Lee will take place on this Saturday, 10th August 2019 at 10 a.m. at St Basil’s Church, Bay Street at St Joseph. All lovers of music are encouraged to attend.

Although not a member of the Faculty of Music (he was a Basilian priest, and a member of the Classics Faculty at St Michael’s College) he was perhaps the most well-known and widely read musicologist at the University of Toronto.

In the citation for one of his three honorary degrees it was said that he was “perhaps the most famous faculty member at this University” beloved by an estimated eight million listeners to the Metropolitan radio broadcasts over 23 seasons. He received the University’s “outstanding teacher award”.

Fr. Owen Lee, CSB received a Doctorate of Sacred Letters from the St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology at a convocation ceremony in 1999. Photo courtesy of the University of St. Michael’s College archive.

A scholarship was endowed in his name at the Faculty of Music, by Paul and Nancy Nickle and is awarded annually to a promising student in the Opera Division.

His four short books on Wagner have become essential reading for all Wagnerians. His “Wagner, the terrible man and his truthful art” is perhaps the most read introduction to the paradoxes of Wagner’s genius. His book on Wagner’s Ring Cycle “Turning the sky around” continues to be the best-selling introduction to that monumental work, according to Amazon.com and his other two Wagner books, on “Wagner and the Greeks – Athena sings” and on “Die Meistersinger – the wonder of art” are full of similarly succinct and masterly insights.

His thoughts on “Parsifal” were further elaborated in his book on the meaning of Quests (“The olive-tree bed”) which also provided an inspiring Jungian interpretation of the quests of Homer’s Odysseus, Goethe’s Faust, and Virgil’s Aeneas.

His insights into the wider operatic repertoire are contained in five other music books, two of which are particularly recommendable. Father Lee’s compendium of some of his radio scripts “First intermissions – twenty one great operas explained, explored and brought to life from the Met” and his follow-up compendium containing his program notes (for a further 23 operas for a variety of performing companies) “A season of opera – from Orpheus to Ariadne” have greatly expanded our knowledge of the art form.

*****

Announcement courtesy Iain Scott.

I’m very grateful for the serendipity that led to Robin Wallace’s book even if the fate governing its creation is cruel indeed.

A shy and short-sighted musicologist named Robin married a nurse named Barbara. She was losing her hearing.  I suppose it had to happen eventually: that a student of Beethoven’s music would have a close-up experience of the life of a person who was gradually losing their hearing. As Robin observed Barbara’s fight to retain her ability to hear, her eventual deafness and the various strategies & responses in her life, it gave him insight into the composer’s comparable struggles in the 19^th century, not just as a composer or pianist but as a man trying to cope.

Robin’s new book Hearing Beethoven is many things.

• a study of the life & music of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
• a memoir and love-letter to his wife Barbara
• an insightful multi-disciplinary study of the composer & his relationship to his music, both as a pianist & as a composer
• a wonderfully readable book (I devoured it in less than 24 hours,unable to put it down)

While I don’t believe this is a book for absolutely everyone (but then again what book is?), yet it creates a conversational space encompassing music & disability studies.  I did not expect to be sobbing while reading a book of musicology.  But it’s not just musicology, not when we’re also dealing with neuroscience, psychology, music perception & disability studies, just to mention the disciplines to which Wallace nods in the last paragraph of the book.

Professor Robin Wallace

I hate it when film critics are spoilers, giving away key plot points.  But I know I’m not giving anything away when I mention that Barbara passed away.  Robin told us about her passing early in the book.  Yet even so when we got to the climactic events of December 2011 ending her life Robin wrote an eloquent epilogue speaking of embracing wholeness, and I am now treading carefully, aware that I can’t possibly do it justice in just a few words.  Suffice it to say that the book is so much more than musicology.

I’ve long wondered about the impact of Beethoven’s deafness on his compositions.  Ever notice how playful some of them are?  The opening minutes to the last movement of the Eroica for instance –going back and forth between huge loud orchestral sounds and soft little sounds surrounded by big rests—is surely a wonderfully creation.  Now listen to it recalling that it comes from someone dealing with hearing loss. Notice how quiet it gets around sixteen seconds into the movement in this clip. And then it gets louder.  Softer. Louder.  Of course there’s more to it than just Beethoven’s hearing issues, but when seen through that lens, we see/hear it in a different light.

Is he playing with us? Maybe.

Hearing Beethoven is true to its title.  While I’m delighted to have a different perspective, a whole new way of understanding the composer, yet I think I will be different in my dealings with the people I know who are having challenges with their hearing. There are at least three in my immediate family.  This is a book to give you not just insight but genuine empathy.  I will never hear, never play, never experience music the same way again.

Wallace offers more than just the insights into the composer’s hearing issues.  For example, he makes a wonderful comparison to Mozart –another composer who was exploited by his father—before offering an insightful quotation from Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child.

Quite often we are faced here with gifted patients who have been praised and admired for their talent and their achievements… these people—the pride of their parents—should have had a strong and stable sense of self-assurance. But exactly the opposite is the case. In everything they undertake they do well and often excellently; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be—but all to no avail.  Behind all this lurks depression, the feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and the sense that their life has no meaning.   [Miller cited in Wallace p28]

Wallace connects this masterfully to Beethoven’s life.

In the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven was clearly struggling to construct a sense of self-worth based on his continued ability to compose, despite the humiliation caused by his failing hearing which he described in the 1801 letter to Wegeler.  If by 1812 he was once again doubting his ability, this would be more than sufficient to explain the depths of depression that he suffered during the ensuing years.  As Miller points out, such people often reach to their own children for validation, thus perpetuating the cycle.  Beethoven had no child of his own, so it is hardly surprising that he now devoted a great deal of his energy to seeking one, rather than to the increasingly challenging task of composing music.    [Wallace 29]

And then Wallace reminds us that Beethoven sought custody of his nephew Karl…

I think Wallace is correct to say that Beethoven did not fully lose his hearing, a matter that’s rather hard to prove one way or another, following up on an assertion in a 1994 article from George Thomas Ealy.  Wallace offers the de facto evidence via Beethoven’s many efforts to obtain devices to compensate, such as hearing trumpets & attachments to pianos to magnify the sound.  Although he is never as reductive as I am being in what I am about to say: one wouldn’t do that if one were completely deaf, right? Surely that means he had some hearing left, and indeed Wallace produces an enormous amount of indirect evidence suggesting that Beethoven’s hearing loss was partial & gradual rather than complete.

The book goes back and forth between chapters about Beethoven in the early 19^th century, and chapters about the Wallace family drama of hearing loss.  It’s so unlike what one usually finds in musicology and I must say it’s thereby so much better than what you usually get.  I am a believer in multi-disciplinary approaches, and indeed an agnostic about much of the musicology I read, because I find it too narrow.  I’m finally reading studies of opera that get that it’s not just music but a hybrid of text & music, a medium for spectacle & movement as well as music & words, all conditioned by complex factors of cultural contexts & market forces.  The humility of Wallace’s book is not just touching but apt.  Would that more musicologists would lose their egos and instead submit to the complexity of their study.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  I want my mom to read it, I want my wife to read it.

And you should read it too.

I’ve been listening to a song since childhood even though I still don’t really know what it means.

Imagine if the most impressive song you had ever heard was in a foreign language. So please picture the most impressive song you’ve ever heard, in your head.

Got it?

That could be a popular song or a classical aria or song. Imagine? Okay Computer? It’s now or never?  Oh patria mia? They’re all relatively easy to find.  Everyone is usually able to find their touchstone, and usually able to understand it.  Indeed, understanding is a part of the magic normally (although come to think of it, some songs –even in English– are pretty hard to understand. Radiohead?)

Because in my case, the music was well-nigh impossible to find it continued to be largely an unknown. And I feel like a cheat now that Google has made it possible to solve some of that mystery.

Not long ago my brother (who like me also loved the song) got the music as a gift from a student.  Finally we’re going to try it out. I’ve been playing the piano part in anticipation of him coming over to sing it. Bit by bit the mystery is receding.

The headline mentioned the word “macho” which tells you a lot about how I see the song. The title “Till havs” is Swedish for “At sea”.

But this is not like John Masefield’s poem “I must go down to the sea again”. That poem is nostalgic and distant, more in the head than out on the water. Of course the fact that I know what Masefield’s verse means changes it substantially. Till havs appeals to my subconscious because it’s more symbolic, a mostly musical experience, a song suggesting bravery, and the elemental power of the oceans.

And yes part of the magic comes from not knowing precisely what it means. In my youth –before the Canadian Opera Company invented surtitles, before titles became ubiquitous—we watched operas while knowing the synopsis and –if we were really keen—looking up the meaning of the text.

If you couldn’t find the score (and remember we couldn’t find this one until recently), you were out of luck. There was no google in the 1960s, ..or 70s… or 80s.

Although I was able to use google just now to translate the first part of the text, I feel like a cheater. So let me share the first part of the song (text by Jonatan Reuter 1859 – 1947):

Till havs                                                      At sea
Nu blåser havets friska vind                Now the fresh wind of the sea is blowing
ifrån sydväst                                            from the southwest
Och smeker ljuvligt sjömans                And sweetly caresses the sailor’s cheek
kind av alla vindar bäst!                       of all winds, the best…

Then we get to the refrain…

But instead of deconstructing / translating the song I prefer to keep it in the mysterious form it has held for me, unknown in another language.

The song calls forth a very masculine sound from the singer.  Most arias and songs encourage a more reflective side to the singer, indeed that’s probably why opera relies so heavily upon divas: because gentle reflection can exploit the best qualities of a female voice.  Short of heavy metal, what can a loud male voice do? There are some moments I can think of such as Hagen’s call to the vassals in Gotterdammerung: which may be loud but isn’t at all pretty.

And then there’s “Till havs”.  The music is by Gustaf Nordqvist (1886−1949).

I have been hearing this song since childhood. Today for the first time I saw a couple of videos that allowed me to see the song sung, which changes it slightly. There’s less mystery when you can watch the singer, even if I still don’t know what the text means.

To begin, there’s the singer with whom I associate the song, Swedish tenor Jussi Björling, who died when I was just 5 years old, the same year as my father.

I associate the two in my head. I have almost zero memories of my father, who took the family first to Sweden (long before I was born), before  eventually bringing the family to Canada (where I was born).

So the association isn’t completely random. Far from it.

This is the first time I’ve found a version of Björling singing with video, so that I get some idea of what he looks like as he sings the song, which is nice I suppose.   The recording is from 1953.

But it was more magical on the old vinyl record.

Here’s a more recent version sung by baritone Carry Persson in a lower key.  The sound is clearer in the recent version. But I think I like it better in the tenor’s key. And the poor audio somehow seems more apt for a life that is less about technological prowess and more about grappling with the natural world.

And here is another look at Björling singing, this time with piano in 1958, about two years before his death.

Forgive me if I keep listening to the song without knowing precisely what every word means. Before too long I suppose I’ll find out.

But for now I like being in the dark.

Did they know when they programmed the Toronto Symphony Concert for September 2018 featuring Berlioz works conducted by Sir Andrew Davis that it was going to make a good recording?

Here I am now thrilled to be able to listen to a new Chandos recording of one of those splendid concerts, just released a few weeks ago.

I attended one of the concerts, a fun program featuring the Fantaisie sur la Tempête de Shakespeare, a piece that works nicely as a curtain-raiser at a little over 14 minutes in length for the Symphonie fantastique that follows. Berlioz re-purposed the Fantaisie to close Lélio, Berlioz’s dramatic sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, and indeed when you’re playing the CD one may begin with this charming little work, or if one keeps listening after the SF, one gets to hear the music Berlioz understood as the finale to the piece subtitled “the return to life”. They complement one another so remarkably well, you’d think they were meant to go together.

Which of course they were…

You wouldn’t mistake Berlioz’s work for an accurate treatment of Shakespeare, but that’s par for the course with this composer. His Roméo et Juliette is largely the story told from the young Romeo’s point of view, a bold paraphrase rather than an accurate telling of the story with a poet’s passionate flourishes. Similarly with the Fantaisie, Berlioz is offering a commentary upon the Tempest rather than telling the story. We hear the airy sounds of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, a chorus singing rapturously to Miranda, and warning her of Caliban & Ariel. Two pianos magically tinkle away, the simple direct melodies of the choral writing reminding me of the Apotheosis of Marguerite in the composer’s Damnation de Faust.

In other words it’s very beautiful. Please understand that I don’t say this because I want Berlioz to faithfully set the Shakespeare. Indeed I’m not sure anyone has ever done that, and besides, this is way more fun.

And to follow we get a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique. It’s a full meal, this CD at almost 70 minutes when you add the 14:25 Fantaisie to the 55:33 SF.

The Toronto Symphony and the SF are a good match. It’s a wild boisterous piece that can furnish a great test for your car’s new sound system. The TSO have been steadily adding new young talents, so that the skill level has arguably never been higher. With Davis they have a steady hand to lead them into the realm of fantasy & hallucination, to the brink of madness and back. I enjoyed writing about the piece last fall a few weeks before Canada legalized pot.

If you’ve never thought a classical piece could be stoner music, I have news for you. Symphonie Fantastique is arguably the first such composition, long before the Beatles said “let me take you down”. The combination of clear sound on the recording with an accomplished performance makes this hard to resist. I’ve surrendered to it over and over.

In the opening movement Davis coaxes a gentle aching vulnerability from the soft introduction, genuine “rêveries”. In due course Davis brings it to vivid life, the pace to suggest you are elated as though something is pulsing in your veins, your heart rate surging out of control, then subdued, then wildly excited again. The ball of the second movement is led masterfully by Davis, so elegant and precise you can almost see dancers in period costume. In the scene in the country that is our transition to the druggy realm Davis lets it sing sweetly, building inexorably to the perplexing ending (the sounds of distant thunder, portending the bad trip that is about to erupt) and the real fireworks that follow.

Thank goodness Davis is a purist, a guy who takes the repeats as written. It’s especially powerful in those last two movements, one a nightmare march to the scaffold (the timbres so bizarre especially in the use of the bassoons, building to an execution at the end), the other a quirky send-up of everything that has come before, the lovely melody now parodied in the ghostly finale. These last two movements are big and loud like heavy metal: except the metal is the brass section & percussion, not guitars. While it’s done without use of amplifiers, that doesn’t mean it’s quiet. There are places to make you jump as though you were watching The Shining. Davis keeps the TSO in check, patiently building to fabulous climaxes in each of the last two movements.

And the bonus is that you can then go on to listen to the Fantasie after the SF. It follows rather nicely, because it was from the sequel after all. I’ve had it in the car, playing it endlessly, letting one follow the other, on and on. They’re literally made for each other.

And by the way Berlioz died a little over 150 years ago.

I’ve been reading a bit about Robert Wilson in anticipation of the new Canadian Opera Company Turandot that is to launch the 2019-2020 season at the Four Seasons Centre, a co-production with Teatro Real & Lithuanian National Opera. Online pictures (for example this link) from the previous incarnations in Madrid and Vilnius give us a good idea of what to expect, especially considering how much has been written about Wilson’s style.

Wilson is called “a towering figure in the world of experimental theater” on the COC page announcing & promoting the production. He’s been a famous director for such a long time that he likely was already famous before most in the current opera’s cast were even born.

His work has been seen here before.

• In 2012 Einstein on the Beach, a work premiered in 1976 (43 years ago), came to Toronto as part of a world tour. At the time I wrote about its influence, a seminal piece talked about far out of proportion to the actual number of people who had seen it. I posted a picture while saying
  “I can’t help noticing an echo of Wilson in Robert Lepage’s designs (the compartments of the space-ship scene replicated in Lepage‘s Damnation de Faust, even as Wilson himself paid homage in that scene to Lang’s Metropolis).”

  Wilson echoes Lang. (Photo: Charles Erickson 1992)

  • In 2008 another tour brought us The Black Rider (The Casting of the Magic Bullets).
  • In the 1990s Wilson gave a talk in a lecture theatre packed with drama students at the University of Toronto.

The phrase from that talk that still sticks in my head from his lecture, in his bland lecturer voice was “the stage picture”. There were slides showing us how Wilson treated the proscenium arch theatre as a kind of viewer window that he divided quite decisively in his sketchbook, such that we would see certain things to the left or right, as though the actors and the lighting were all nothing more than parts of a flat picture, parts of a strategy to create a particular kind of image. I am reminded of the painter Maurice Denis (whose operatic connection btw is that he painted the cover of the program for the 1893 premiere performance of Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande) who famously said
“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors”
I can’t help thinking of that when looking at a dramatist showing us pictures of a stage picture, that might be 3-D but is presented to us as a flat picture. Is Wilson’s work the logical mirror image to Denis (the symbolist seeking something transcendental in his work, at least in the 1880s & 90s)?

And Wilson showed little or no concern for what anyone was saying or thinking onstage, no Stanislavskian worries about motivation let alone transcendence. They might move but it was a physical correlative to the mechanical actions we find in Sam Shepard’s play Action or the redundant repetitive texts in the Songs from Liquid Days, words that go so well with the noodling but un-motivated eighth note ostinato in a Philip Glass composition (such as the aforementioned Songs). I was reminded of Edward Gordon Craig & his fascination with puppets and the über-marionette”. Where Craig saw the puppet as a means to a representative end, the ideal vehicle in the presentation of a Wagner opera, what if you strip away all that heavy fraught symbolist baggage and simply let the puppets move or be still? If you can have dance qua dance, movement for the joy of movement without the weight of meaning & storytelling: why not puppets or über-marionettes for the pure exploration & joy of the puppet & its movement of stillness..?

And yet as I look at the pictures from the Madrid & Vilnius productions of Wilson’s take on Puccini’s opera, I want to come at this from a different direction. Let’s back up for a moment and look at Turandot, recalling for a moment two previous productions brought to Toronto by Alexander Neef.

Alexander Neef (Photo: Gaetz Photography)

I’ve been thinking about Wajdi Mouawad’s Abduction from the Seraglio (who interrogates the Mozart Singspiel as a site of what the director might call “caricature or casual racism” ) and Peter Hinton’s Louis Riel (an opera originally conceived as a site for a kind of struggle between French and English, while the Indigenous part of Canada –arguably the key to Riel—was disrespected, both in the appropriation of a song used without permission, and its politics) a pair of redemption projects arguably rescuing operas from their own problematic politics.

Is there any need to save Turandot from itself? (which shouldn’t be confused with Calaf’s project to save the princess from herself and her murderous project of revenge upon males).

You may laugh at the thought that there’s anything especially problematic in Turandot. It’s funny to me recalling my favorite DVD version, in which Eva Marton gives a wonderfully sympathetic account of the princess’s grudge against the male gender, especially the one long ago who raped one of her ancestors, as we watch Placido Domingo of all people portray the prince Calaf, a prince claiming to be different. Do you want to #standbydomingo ?

Not me.

But there is a big gaping problem in the construction of Turandot, an opera Puccini was not able to finish before his death in 1924

In its first performance in 1926 the ending was left open, unfinished. Like the opera itself, which has been completed by at least two composers, there are multiple versions of what happened. It is agreed that the opera stopped partway through the 3rd act, that Toscanini turned to the audience to speak, after which the curtain descended.
1. One reporter present at the occasion quoted Toscanini saying
“Qui finisce l’opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto”
(“Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died”).
2. Another reporter quoted the conductor saying
“Qui finisce l’opera, rimasta incompiuta per la morte del povero Puccini”
(“Here the opera ends, left incomplete by the death of poor Puccini.”)
3. The version I heard has Toscanini say “Here the Maestro laid down his pen”, which is certainly romantic even if it maybe be nothing more than a loose paraphrase from the two eye-witnesses.

Yes Puccini left pages of sketches with Toscanini, begging him not to let his Turandot die. But it’s not that simple. At the point where Puccini left off composition the slave-girl Liu had died, sacrificing herself to save Calaf’s life. Meanwhile with no Liu left onstage I find I rarely believe in the ending:

• Because Turandot is heartless, largely responsible for Liu’s death
• Because the scene where Calaf is left alone with Turandot—using Puccini’s sketches but finished by someone else—feels inauthentic and weak compared to what has come before
• …as I wonder: are we meant to like or admire Turandot? to like or admire Calaf?
  Do we care about this royal couple?

Why couldn’t Puccini finish it? Of course his health was part of it. But it’s intriguing to notice parallels between life & art. Puccini’s wife accused her husband of having an affair with a servant girl: and the servant committed suicide. Is this not a curious parallel to what we see in the plot of the opera? And how interesting that Puccini was trapped, becalmed in the waters of Liu’s suicide, unable to bring the good ship Turandot into port. Death meant that other composers faced the task of persuading us that Calaf & Turandot belong together at the end.  Did Puccini even believe in the ending of the story or was he stuck? I wonder about his motivation in setting this opera, which may have been a kind of mirror, even a veiled confession.

It’s a funny thing that when I was young Turandot was my favorite opera. I knew it through the RCA recording conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, with Birgit Nilsson, Jussi Björling, Renata Tebaldi, Giorgio Tozzi & Mario Sereni. I knew nothing of problems in the dramaturgy, because for me at this time opera was all about singers hitting high notes, music rather than theatre. I knew opera as a series of arias and set-pieces.

I had not yet discovered Wagner & Gesamtkunstwerk, the ideal you and I embrace in our modern world without properly appreciating its origin. The unified behaviour of your phone is employing the same dramaturgy seen for the first time in the middle of the 19th century. Dramaturgy on a phone? But it’s what all devices do now when they’re sending you a message. Your car may tell a little story, depending on whether you’re being warned of danger or reminded to fill your gas tank. Machines don’t communicate with irony or humor, but with a total unity between the machine and the functions and/or sites we visit. When it works the music is happy to tell me of success, beeping when it’s done or playing a happy little tune. When something is dangerous or prohibited the machine tells me so. That’s something invented in the 1850s for the first time when Donner the god of thunder called up a storm in the last half hour of Das Rheingold: by wielding his hammer. The moment when he strikes, there is a magical event, both in the story and the history of theatre. For the first time there was an instruction in the score where all elements of the mise-en-scène and the text (both the words & the music)  function in complete precise synchronization. We hear the lightning & the ensuing thunder-clap, AND we see the flash as requested in the score. Gesamtkunstwerk is often translated as “total art work”, with the expectation that all of the components work together towards a unified goal.

And so by the time we get to Puccini, he’s doing it too. He’s mickey-mousing

• to tell us when Rodolfo is sprinkling water on Mimi’s face (to make one smile or even giggle),
  or
• to show us Angelotti desperately searching for the basket in the first moments of Tosca (to make one feel his indecision & terror, and finally relief when he finds it)
  or
• giving us the sounds of the cannon fire in Nagasaki harbour in Butterfly’s imagination, during “un bel di” (to make one teary-eyed):
  …right in his orchestral score. It’s Wagnerian, that idea of unity, with the orchestra functioning like a wordless Greek chorus whispering non-verbal messages to inform us of important information that isn’t conveyed in words.

In Puccini one sometimes encounters the dilemma the composer must have faced, between those two impulses:

• numbers or through-composed
• arias with climaxes vs something continuous
• opportunities for singers to show off (aka arias) vs the showcase for composer & librettist

Who do you go to see/hear when you go to the opera, or indeed any play or film? Is it the story or the star? Is it a singer or a song? In Puccini that conversation is especially intriguing, the famous tunes embedded in scenes without the full-stop one usually gets in opera. “Nessun dorma” may get applause but the music is written to go on at the end: unless the conductor holds the orchestra back in expectation of an explosion of appreciation from the audience.

My favourite scene of the opera as a child was one that’s often shortened, phrases cut mercilessly: namely the scene between Ping, Pang & Pong that opens Act II.

Oddly it seems apt for 2019, the powerless observers dreaming of something better while feeling powerless. It reminds me of a Globe & Mail editorial I saw a few days ago. Is there so much difference between what Ping Pang & Pong observe in China (dealing with Turandot’s daddy the Emperor) in the opera, or what the Globe would observe about Brexit & Boris Johnson?

In the opera there are at least three different textures musically, corresponding to something in the story, interconnected like solid plates or quilts sewn into one fabric

• The heartless chorus and the implacable Mandarin in whole-tone harmonies
• The romantic leads in melodies that are often pentatonic (recalling how pentatonic Puccini can get even in other operas with no connection to the far east such as Tosca)
• Ping, Pang & Pong in the discursive space between the two extremes. When we’re in whole-tone mode things are dark if not nihilistic & brutal, while the melodic space is a sentimental and diatonic place where happy endings at least dreamt of, even if they are impossible. This includes some choral moments such as the boys who sing Turandot’s leit-motiv: which articulates the dream of reconciliation between male & female.

RAGAZZI
Là, sui monti dell’est,
la cicogna cantò.
Ma l’april non rifiorì,
ma la neve non sgelò.
Dal deserto al mar
non odi tu mille voci
sospirar: “Principessa,
scendi a me!
Tutto fiorirà,
tutto splenderà! Ah!…”

BOYS
There, on the Eastern mountains,
the stork sang.
But April blossomed no more,
and the snow didn’t thaw.
From the desert to the sea,
can’t you hear a thousand voices
sighing: “Princess,
come down to me!
All will blossom again,
all will be resplendent! Ah!…”

Zeffirelli cast the boys in Buddhist attire in his production, but this is not a Buddhist idea, this attachment to desire. It’s funny how this tune
made me cry (Tutto fiorirà)
before I even understood what it meant (tutto splenderà!),
before I understood desire (Ah!…”).

Do we make a mistake with Turandot in expecting it to work the way other Puccini operas have worked? Where Boheme , Tosca and Butterfly all build up to a catharsis summation on the last page, where there is a combination of the powerful melodramatic action typical of verismo, complete with the orchestra taking over for that final summation–in a Wagnerian approach to story-telling– Turandot perhaps needs to be thought of in other terms. Where those three operas have closure & catharsis on the last page, maybe we should think of Turandot as closed at the moment when “the maestro put down his pen”. While Liu has made her sacrifice and that once savage chorus are now contrite, fearful in asking her spirit for forgiveness, Calaf & Turandot are still glaring at one another across a physical & discursive gulf. While Puccini may have given us his last word at the moment he stopped, that the servant gave her life for love, even so: the story is not concluded and therefore must be thought of as open.

Enter Robert Wilson, who could be on the cover of Umberto Eco’s The Open Work, because of his tendencies coming at theatre & signification.

I see in a review by Polina Lyapustina of the Lithuanian production from earlier this year, she says that
“It seems that the director was not convinced by the dramatic denouement of the work and he seemingly made no attempt to create it.”

Could that be another way of saying that Wilson chose to show us the characters as they’re written, reflecting the open ending Puccini has written? Maybe Wilson dares to offer us an older kind of opera, where we get spectacle, music, singing but without insisting on the total work, and instead offering ambiguity & ambivalence. Instead of the total artwork we get an open work. I can’t help placing this in context with Alexander Neef’s previous redemption projects: Wajdi Mouawad aiming to redeem Abduction from the Seraglio, or Peter Hinton re-thinking Louis Riel. Instead of the usual struggle to make the ending of the unfinished opera work, perhaps Neef saw the match between Wilson, who leaves works open, and Turandot a work that is arguably unfinished even with the endings created by other composers such as Alfano (whose ending is to be used in this production).   Its conclusion is in some respects an oxymoron, a happy ending in spite of everything Turandot tells us she stands for, in spite of Puccini’s attempt to persuade us that Liu should have Calaf. Should Turandot and Calaf end up together or should the ultra-feminist resist Calaf’s attempted seduction? I’m dying to see how it looks and whether it works.  Of course it was likely Wilson’s idea to take on the opera, but at least Neef had the good sense to bring it to Toronto.

Does it work? Or does my younger self still win out, in my former desire for the happy ending? We shall see.  I hope that it does work.

Of course this is my speculation without yet having seen the show. Robert Wilson’s Turandot opens at the Four Seasons Centre on September 28th, presented by the Canadian Opera Company.

Irene Theorin as Turandot in Turandot (Teatro Real Madrid, 2018), photo: Javier del Real

I wish I could somehow reclaim my innocence.  Sometimes sophistication & experience get in the way.

No you can’t believe everything you read, especially when you overthink (….guilty). When will I learn?

I came to Rocketman this past weekend more or less accepting what I had heard & read about it.  I heard that “ho-hum another biographical film with music about a rock-star” and tried to get beyond that, to recognize the film on its own terms.  Yes we’d already had Bohemian Rhapsody. Hollywood does lots of imitation, so of course when you get two that seem similar a kind of cynicism about the business takes away much of the lustre. At such times be especially on guard against BS in the press because of course a film is much more than just someone appearing to imitate someone else. Usually one big project has little to do with another big project except in the sense that someone noticed that this subject is marketable, helping to get them a green light. Where the first one of a type might be understood as risky, the second one is suddenly a genre.  I recall that when there was a second film adapting Les Liaisons Dangereuses I heard that Valmont couldn’t be as good as Dangerous Liaisons.

And when I saw it the opposite was true.  And they’re ultimately two very different films. The first one into the theatre isn’t necessarily the better one. And sometimes some film critic takes a short-cut in observing a similarity, that becomes the story.

I wish I had gone to see Rocketman in a theatre during its first run.

A film by an aging rockstar seeking to tell his own story? Nevermind Rocketman, TIFF led off this year with a doc about The Band focusing on Robbie Robertson, so of course this is an idea with lots of interest.  While we’ve seen lots of films about films & actors, the study of the music business hasn’t gone nearly so far, not when we recall that Inside the Actors Studio for example, began 25 years ago. If this is to be a new genre? Welcome! I can’t wait.

I loved Bohemian Rhapsody, a film that won its star Rami Malek a best actor Oscar. I came to Rocketman expecting something similar because, between the trailer and my own expectations, I couldn’t really unsee what I’d seen, which framed the two as in a sense of the same genre. Argh, but they’re not really the same.

During lunchtime today I watched the title track again.

It’s not what I expected. Yes Taron Egerton is the actor portraying Elton John, and that means not just acting but singing too, but he doesn’t begin the song, as you may have noticed watching this video (just now? Or perhaps you already saw it). There are at least two other actors portraying the character, whose name is “Reggie”, namely Matthew Illesley as the younger Reggie and Kit Connor as an older version.  Reggie is the young man who then changes his  name to “Elton”.

From time to time I find insights into human psychology while watching a play or an opera or a movie. The conceit at the heart of this film is pure gold.  Who would have expected that the carefully constructed version of Elton John’s life might offer something of depth?

During his apprenticeship playing keyboards in rock-bands in bars, Reggie (as he was then calling himself) hears something powerful that he took to heart.

Reggie (his real name & persona) had to be killed. He had to die: so that there could be an Elton (the stage name, a new larger than life creation).  Elton gives himself not just a new name but a whole new way of living & behaving, erasing Reggie.

And no wonder then that Elton meets Reggie at the bottom of the pool in the middle of trying to kill himself. At this point has Elton forgotten about Reggie? Estranged from his true self, at war with his inner child (to invoke another idea that has become cliché)?

Doesn’t he look a bit surprised to find himself while losing himself?

I was blind-sided by this image that I have never encountered before, that seems useful at least as a model for what some people do, possibly a cautionary tale: what never to do.  There’s a lot more to this film than I expected. The songs are used less in the style of Bohemian Rhapsody, where the tunes are shown more or less in their historical context, and more in the manner of ABBA’s songs in Mamma Mia or the Beatles songs in Across the Universe, where a plot-point becomes the occasion for a famous song, and never mind whether or not it’s at the right time in the artist’s chronology. “Your Song” may or may not have been written as shown in this film, as a kind of love-song from the gay Elton to Bernie his straight but nonetheless loving lyricist. For that relationship alone –a loving relationship with ups and downs between a straight man and a gay man—I am indebted to the film-makers, something we’ve not seen often enough in film.

There are moments to put alongside the best in Amadeus (thinking of the moments near the end when Mozart sketches the confutatis) to show us inspiration at work. Is this actually a musical that we will someday see done live in theatres? I would love that, even if it is, after all, rated R, which might not work quite as well in a live theatre setting. First and foremost there are a ton of songs in this film, if we include the little snippets and the wonderful allusions in the soundtrack. I saw 22 songs listed when I searched online. No I don’t pretend that I know them all, even if I’m enough of a nerd that I was a fan when many of them appeared in the 1970s. They didn’t use such huge hits as the song “Daniel” or “Candle in the Wind”: but I am pretty sure I heard brief allusions to them in the soundtrack. So when we are watching Bernie & Elton discussing a reconciliation, to resume working together again after a break, we hear some of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” the song that was sung during their big fight earlier in the film.

Perhaps the real star(s) of the film are the songs, arguably the greatest recent body of work from a pop star since the Beatles, and largely under the radar until now.

Of course this is the same Elton John who wrote songs in Lion King, so it’s not as though he’s been invisible. I wonder if that means he will be competing against himself at Oscar time, if say the song “Rocketman” is up against the new song for the recent film (and that doesn’t even include “The Circle of Life”).

Rocketman is surprisingly good.  I was suggesting it to a friend as we talked about varieties of bad parenting.  Chances are you will see yourself or someone you know in this film.  There’s a lot to it, illustrations of every variety of human behaviour.  I’ve only sat through it three times this week via pay TV, which makes me want to see it a few more times.

I guess I’ll have to buy it.

Janina Fialkowska has made a delightful new recording of French piano music titled “Les sons et les parfums…”

You might know that phrase from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, in a wonderfully evocative poem “Harmonie du soir”, where music is as fundamental to the evening as a sunset or the air we breathe.  Recalling Walter Pater’s famous saying that “all art aspires to the condition of music”, this poem is practically a sermon, both an invitation & an exhortation.  Of course it’s an uncommon title for an album, perhaps an indication that this is a change of direction for Fialkowska, who I know mostly as an interpreter of Chopin, Liszt, and eastern Europeans with some ventures into German rep.

But I couldn’t help noticing how the opening cut sounded like something Chopin would have written, an easy-going Impromptu by Tailleferre that put me in mind of Chopin’s A-flat Impromptu, with its flowing lyricism. Did Fialkowska mean to open as though making a segue from Chopin into the French rep? Or maybe it’s all in my mind. But of course Chopin himself is a perfect bridge, an exile from Poland who was after all half French. Tailleferre’s easy & melodic textures open the doorway in the gentlest way for what’s to come.

But the liner notes suggest that this is if anything a sentimental journey for the pianist, familiar rep from the past that she has played many times in the past. Perhaps it’s who she has always been even if the French pieces can’t be found in her discography.

Better late than never..!

It’s a fascinating and well-conceived survey that brings us into the 20th century from the final decades of the 19th.

• Impromptu by Germaine Tailleferre
• Nocturne #4 by Gabriel Fauré
• Intermezzo by Francis Poulenc
• Habanera by Emmanuel Chabrier
• Poissons d’or by Claude Debussy
• Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir by Claude Debussy
• Reflets dans l’eau by Claude Debussy
• Clair de lune by Claude Debussy
• Jeux d’eau by Maurice Ravel
• Sonatine by Maurice Ravel

If these works are not well-known to you, the album will persuade you of their importance, very easy to listen to.  There’s variety even though they hang together like a well-curated exhibit of art by several painters.

Fialkowska’s sound is very clear, mostly sparing in the use of the pedal, without any noticeable blur even when many notes are being sounded, as transparent & sparkling as a clean aquarium full of koi.   For the most part this sounds very relaxed, without the kind of drama one associates with virtuoso display. We’re hearing a pianist who is so self-assured that she gets inside the music. The water pieces by Ravel & Debussy have lots of atmospheric effects, decisively coloured and yet ultimately very calm & tranquil. This is pianism of the highest order without struggle or conflict.

I will resist the temptation to use the “I” word that is so often used when speaking of Ravel & Debussy, a descriptor imported from the realm of painting. I don’t use the word because I believe it’s misapplied when speaking of Debussy, and likely as well with Ravel. These evocative compositions conjure visual images of water & fish & moonlight in Fialkowska’s interpretations. If you find it helpful to think of the painterly qualities of music in this period, especially if it reminds you of the colours & effects found in paintings by Renoir or Monet, then by all means, seize the association. However you choose to understand the music, you’ll hear confident and accurate playing inviting you to an encounter of warmth and tenderness.

The Toronto Symphony’s opening concert welcomed the “dynamic duo”, soprano Barbara Hannigan and violinist John Storgårds. Each did some conducting, and each took a turn as a soloist. While it was not a long evening it felt like a lot to digest perhaps because so many food groups were represented.

Did you ever dream of singing with Barbara Hannigan? Mission accomplished. Hannigan led us in “Oh Canada”, beginning unaccompanied then asking us to join her with the orchestra completing the ensemble partway through. If you come to the concert Saturday night you can have the same thrill, and that’s just the first couple of minutes.

Soprano Barbara Hannigan, singing & conducting the Toronto Symphony a few months ago. (photo: Jag Gundu)

For me the highlights were after intermission although there was lots of music before.

• Beethoven Egmont Overture
• Dutilleux Sur le même accord: Nocturne for Violin and Orchestra
• Haydn Symphony No. 96 in D Major “Miracle”
  Intermission
• Brett Dean And once I played Ophelia for String Orchestra and Soprano (Canadian Première)
• Sibelius Symphony No. 3

Matthew Jocelyn

Sometimes I prepare for a concert by reading the program notes over, other times I come in unprepared to see how it all hits me. I chose the latter approach for better or worse.
This is especially relevant to Hannigan performing Brett Dean’s piece, a kind of gloss on Hamlet with libretto by Matthew Jocelyn. You may remember Dean for his work curating the TSO’s 2016 New Creations Festival.

You may remember Jocelyn as director of the opera Julie presented in 2015 by Canadian Stage where as Artistic Director he imprinted a multi-disciplinarity into their programming that I’ve found irresistible and that appears to have become their brand, even with his successor.

One can listen with one’s head buried in the program to follow the libretto: and as a result be unable to see the singer or the orchestra. I chose to attempt to follow without the program, watching and listening as well as I could. I’ve said it before and I am saying it again. Come on TSO / Roy Thomson Hall, isn’t it about time you had surtitles projected, the way even Bill Shookhoff manages in his tiny company Opera by Request? Don’t force me to choose between intelligibility and watching a talented actor like Hannigan. Can’t I have both? I saw Alexander Neef of the COC in the audience, where they’ve had surtitles since the 1980s.

The program (where the text is printed) says “Please turn page quietly.”  Surtitles would be even quieter.

The first frenetic minutes of this piece are a compelling beginning, as our Ophelia sings words that were directed at her rather than her own lines, the “get thee to a nunnery” lines sung and then fragmented into bits, sounding genuinely mad. Hannigan physically & vocally gave me something of Ophelia that I’ve never seen before, a kind of disabled and wrecked personage. From there we retreated into something so much softer, I wondered how Dean scored it; how many p’s did he dictate for this amazingly soft texture? We went from a frenzied sound to something suggesting a recollection, as though from afar or from the other side of the barrier between madness & sanity.  Perhaps we’re inside her head (where it seems sane)? The super soft harmonic texture of the strings allowed Hannigan to sing easily, where the first part was much harder to understand. This is a beautiful piece of music to interest anyone intrigued by the Shakespeare or by the possibilities of the human voice.

John Storgårds conducted the works after intermission, both the Dean sung by Hannigan followed by the Sibelius 3rd Symphony. I wonder sometimes what conditions a conductor’s style, what leads them to their particular approach. Storgårds is a violinist whose approach seems very different from Hannigan, persuading the TSO to play very softly with wonderful solos emerging throughout. The TSO responded to him in both works. The Sibelius was built from the inside out, transparent in texture, energetic and committed, as every player seemed to bring their “A game”.

Before intermission we heard Hannigan leading older classical repertoire surrounding Storgårds as soloist in the Dutilleux, a wonderfully angular piece, deconstructing and analysing a pattern of notes over and over. I will have to listen to it again. Before it we heard the Egmont overture of Beethoven in a reading playing up rhetorical phrases & dramatic effects, from the dreamy and thoughtful to the bombastic and revolutionary. And after we then heard a wonderfully idiomatic reading of Hadyn’s Symphony #96. Maybe I read too much into Hannigan’s presence (that champion of new musics), but at times the Haydn felt very new, almost inevitable in its organic unfolding.

The concert will be repeated Saturday September 21st.

Finally!

After waiting for decades Tafelmusik’s concert program tonight with works by Tchaikovsky & Mendelssohn plus a brand new composition felt like a political statement. Already last year led by their new Music Director Elisa Citterio, we were experiencing a higher standard both in the programming and the playing.

And tonight’s amazing concert set the bar even higher.

Tafelmusik Meets Tchaikovsky (photo: Seanna Kennedy)

I can’t be alone in this perception. Since the 1980s we’ve been hearing historically informed performances of works from the 19th century. But Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra have mostly stayed true to their name, rarely venturing past the year 1800.  The thing is, an ensemble can just play a piece without care, or it can investigate what that style requires.  It would be an experiment, but then again: all performances from any ensemble represent a kind of experiment. Citterio is balancing the need for studious care in preparation with a boldness to  confidently take on any music.

Tonight felt like a coming out, as Citterio and the orchestra seemed to lay claim to this music, which sounded so exquisite tonight. I hope they’ll record the works we heard tonight, all for strings:

• Mendelssohn Sinfoniesatz
• Mendelssohn Symphony for strings #7
• Scherzo from A Midsummernight’s Dream arranged for strings
  Intermission
• Balfour Pyotr’s Dream (world premiere)
• Tchaikovky Serenade for strings

For Tafelmusik this was a daring venture, and one that I hope they will repeat. It’s funny, while last night I watched a Canadian premiere from the Toronto Symphony, tonight’s concert of works from the 19th century (plus a short world premiere) set more of a precedent, represented a bigger paradigm shift. In a real sense it was new, as they ventured closer to the present day than ever before.

Yes the first half of the concert was wonderful, a series of pieces by Mendelssohn. It struck me as funny as I listened that so much of the Mendelssohn seemed typical for Tafelmusik, given his propensity for counterpoint, a funny cross between Mozart & Bach that shouldn’t bother a Tafelmusik subscriber. The d-minor string symphony #7 is a four movement work that builds in intensity as it goes along. The third movement Menuetto & Trio was especially powerful, at times employing a kind of call & response across the stage between the violins & violas, the phrases so energetic that the stage seemed to come alive with the exchanges of vivid bowings back and forth. This movement was repeated as an encore at the end of the concert in response to our enthusiastic cheers. The fourth movement too was a wild ride, with at times a fragment of melody from section to section.

To conclude the first half Citterio turned to her brother for an original transcription for string orchestra of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummernight’s Dream. It’s especially apt when we recall the propensity of composers of the romantic era to transcribe and paraphrase, whether we recall Rachmaninoff’s piano version or Korngold’s more Wagnerian take on the piece in Max Reinhardt’s film from 1935. Elisa Citterio chose a quick tempo that brought the faeries vividly to life.

After intermission we heard a commission that set up the Tchaikovsky nicely. Andrew Balfour’s intriguing Pyotr’s Dream didn’t sound out of place sharing the bill with Mendelssohn & Tchaikovsky, a soulful work at times reminding me of the Barber Adagio in its elegiac weight. It managed to be melodic even while employing second-intervals to create momentary dissonances, an intriguing combination that lent the work true gravitas.

And then the piece we were all waiting for, that gave the evening its title after all, surpassed expectations. Citterio led a reading bursting with confidence, the players often bursting into smiles. You think you know a piece, the melodies running through your head: yet you experience surprise & novelty. The delicate sound of this orchestra’s players lent a new colour to Tchaikovsky that is after all nothing more than the way he must have sounded in his time when the work first appeared. There’s a great excitement in exploring that, to feel you’re in the presence of something new. After the stately processional figure that opens the work, for the most part the tempi were quicker than usual, yet with no loss of accuracy in the playing. I’m filled with confidence for this ensemble.  I feel they can play anything, and hope they’ll give us more of the 19th century.

If they’re reading this, I’m happy to make suggestions.

• How about the whole suite from A Midsummernight’s Dream?
• More Schubert, for instance his 9th symphony
• Anything by Berlioz, for example Harold in Italy (a favorite of mine)
• Anything by Schumann

I could go on. The point is, I think Citterio has the right idea. Tafelmusik are laying claim to music that sounds extra-special on their instruments with the benefit of their special scholarly insights. And tonight the audience was younger than usual. Is that a coincidence?  I think this is the way to go for the future, broadening their appeal.

This wonderful concert would make a great recording. But for now if you want to hear this remarkable program, you still have a couple of chances to hear Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky & Balfour Saturday & Sunday at Koerner Hall.

I have huge admiration for the two artists behind Amplified Opera (aka AO), namely Aria Umezawa and Teiya Kasahara, a new opera company.

Aria directed L’hiver attend beaucoup de moi in March.

Teiya was larger than life singing in Pomegranate in June.

Teiya Kasahara in Pomegranate (photo: Dahlia Katz)

AO will mean opportunities to see & hear more of them.

Here’s how they describe themselves on their website.

IT MAY BE CONSIDERED A DIRTY WORD IN OPERA, BUT WE BELIEVE GREAT ART SHOULDN’T BE AFRAID TO

GET LOUD

Raise your voice and be Amplified!

As far as I can tell AO are all about Inclusion. Diversity. Empowerment.

Amplified Opera’s first concert series “AMPLIFY” launches the company October 10, 11 and 12, 7:30 pm at the Ernest Balmer Studio.

I asked Teiya & Aria a series of questions to find out more.

Barczablog: Describe the pathway that brought you two –Aria & Teiya—together and led you to this collaboration.

TEIYA: In 2017 Aria and I met for coffee and ice cream to catch up. And I was telling her about my frustrations with auditioning. I wasn’t booking gigs at the time, and on top of that, I was uncomfortable because I was wearing dresses to auditions and trying to present myself in a way that is expected of a soprano.

ARIA: I remember asking Teiya how much energy they were spending thinking about their singing, and how much energy they were spending on how uncomfortable they were in the outfits they were wearing.

TEIYA: And I was like, “Most of my energy is on how I’m dressed.”

ARIA: And I was like, “Teiya. Newsflash. You’re not getting hired now, so what do you have to lose? Why not try expressing yourself in a way that feels honest?”

TEIYA: And that really shifted my thinking. I think in that moment, I think we both saw in each other that there was a spark, and that we wanted something more with our professional paths. There had been moments in each of our lives where had been talking about how to rethink the artform, and it was like, “Wow! There’s something here.” So we began talking about a new type of performance art company where we would start by thinking about what we as artists want, and then expand that to give space for others to tell their stories on their own terms.

ARIA: Could we find a more authentic way to resonate with audiences if empowered artists brought their authentic selves to the process?

Barczablog: Please amplify for us the connotations of the word “Amplify” that underlie the name of your organization “Amplified Opera (AO),” and of your first series of concerts, titled “AMPLIFY!”

ARIA:  My good friend, Sean Waugh at SFO, suggested the name Amplified Opera for a couple of reasons. First, because opera takes great pride in being UN-amplified, so for a company that is trying to shake things up and disrupt the current landscape, it is a deliberately provocative name. Second, because the entire artform is built on showcasing the beauty and power of the human voice, yet we seldom let our artists truly speak their minds.

TEIYA: We want for ourselves, as leaders of this initiative, to really give energy and power into these stories that have been systematically oppressed and pushed to the margins. They’re just blips on our radar. There are so many other stories that aren’t cis, or white, or hetero, or able-bodied that are valuable in knowing and sharing, and we want to tell them loudly, and to give them more life and longevity.

ARIA: While the point of the name is not meant to be taken literally, we’re not particularly hung up on acoustic amplification or non-amplification. We just want to focus on telling stories loudly, and authentically – whatever that means to the artists we work with.

Aria Umezawa (Hayley Andoff Photography)

Barczablog: How do the politics of race & the tensions in the world serve as subtext for your shows, the context for AO? What do you presuppose in your Toronto audience and our anxieties about the world?

TEIYA: I don’t think we want racial tension as a subtext… I think it’s our foretext. We want to put those tensions front and center, and we want to lean into these uncomfortable conversations and highlight them. These conversations will become less difficult the more we have them.

ARIA: One of our artists, Michael Mohammed (who is directing “What’s Known to Me Is Endless”) sent me an article on the idea of Brave Spaces in the world of social justice. The very basic idea being that we need to draw a distinction between harm (which is destructive), and discomfort (which is instructive). We want to hold space for people to have uncomfortable conversations, so they can have opportunities to expand their understanding and gain empathy. What we assume about Toronto audiences is that they are ready and interested in fostering this kind of dialogue.

Barczablog: Let’s talk about the problem with representation in opera… Sexism, imperialism, focus on the 1^st world: Are you aiming more for new work as opposed to inclusive productions of existing work..?

TEIYA: Both really. The Canon is wrought in sexism, imperialism, elitism, racism, ableism, the list goes on. In no way is our society of today reflected in these iconic works, yet we continue to put them on. The rise in “Regie-Theater” over the last few decades has shown us that we need a more diverse representation not only in producers and directors and of reimagining these old operas in new ways, but to also create more conversation surrounding why we are putting on these shows, what value a new concept of an old work can give us. Simply doing it because a director or company wants to isn’t a valid enough reason anymore.

New works also need to be better nurtured and given more time, resources, promotion and care going forward. Having a premiere and then being forgotten months later isn’t doing this industry nor for our decreasing audiences.

Representation really needs to start with the artists embracing their inherent agency. They are the face of opera, they are what everyone sees, so if they start to realize that they have a say, that they can use their voices in more ways than one, then we will also start to see change. We need to see this at the top, too, people who are making the big decisions, where money is allocated, who is being hired and what is being put on the stages. It all effects each other.

Teiya Kasahara

Barczablog: Are there political subjects missing from the operatic stage (for instance, an opera about climate change or being a refugee)..?

ARIA: We’re starting to see contemporary issues explored on operatic stages, (companies like Heartbeat Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, and the Prix 3 Femmes are doing that really well), but there could always be more. Opera is an artform about the power and abilities of the human voice. So we have these big, powerful voices but what are we doing with them? What are we saying? How are we enriching our communities by existing? How can we use the power of our voices to elevate those issues that are critical to humanity’s/society’s survival? I think in the broadest possible sense, opera is failing to communicate a genuine value to society because we have not landed on a good reason for existing. What can the world learn from opera that would help us to frame some of these crucial, political conversations?

Barczablog: Do you see yourselves representing or offering a pathway to those who are in some sense less able?

TEIYA: I think both being able-bodied people, we don’t begin to know what to offer those differently or less abled, but want to invite conversation to create opportunities for collaboration down the road. We started with people that we know already navigating the opera industry despite their perceived challenges, so with AMPLIFY this is where we are starting and we are excited to create more relationships with those folk within (that we don’t know of yet) and beyond the opera community to create bridges and share experiences, for example the Deaf community.

ARIA: The position we take at AO is not diversity for diversity’s sake. It’s diversity because people who have unique experiences tell unique stories, and those stories are valuable and worthy of sharing with the public. We want to know of all our artists: what leaps out at you about this artform that I miss because I don’t have the same lived experiences as you, and how can we use those insights to build a better society?

Barczablog: And how do you reconcile opera to virtuosity, which is often a showcase for showing an audience what the performer can do that the audience can’t.

TEIYA: I think it’s about broadening the definition of virtuosity, or excellence, or even genius. We need to recognize that these concepts are derived from a Eurocentric mindset that is steeped in a history of colonization and imperialism which only exists to the detriment of others.

ARIA: I agree with Teiya.  In many ways, I feel we’ve weaponized virtuosity as a means of keeping certain groups of people off the stage, away from the podium, and out of the director’s chair. Virtuosity often refers to a technical precision that requires a great investment of resources: education, mentorship, and legitimization from the establishment. Certain communities have much greater difficulty accessing those resources – particularly those crucial mentorship opportunities, and the legitimization that comes from appearing on the world’s greatest stages. In many of these cases diverse talent already exists, but it’s seldom given a platform.  So opera prioritizes so-called virtuosity, and in doing so, limits the types of people who have access to opera as a means of expression, and downplays the role that visibility will play in ensuring a contemporary value for our artform.

I think AO is trying to take two positions: First of all that virtuosity and inclusivity are not mutually exclusive terms. They can co-exist in the same artist, performance, or production. And second that art’s value to society is that it holds space for spectators to engage with profoundly emotional topics in both the beautiful and devastating sense. We will prioritize resonating with audiences, regardless of their background in opera, and will encourage our artists to push themselves to achieve new ways of connecting with people – whatever shape that takes.

Aria Umezawa

Barczablog: Are you open to going beyond opera, for instance to musicals, spoken word, and dance?

ARIA: AO is about breaking things apart. About challenging the existing structures, and proposing new ways of moving forward. I think everything is up for debate. What is opera? What does that mean exactly? I think if we seek to answer those questions, we will naturally open ourselves up to many different mediums through our exploration.

TEIYA: Yes, we want to start with what we know, but we’ve both personally experienced the benefits of diversifying our practices and bringing together disciplines. Opera is supposed to be a culmination of all the artistic practices, but it still operates as a siloed discipline. There is rarely any allowance made for this holistic concept of singer and actor in one person for instance. Singers are known for “park-and-bark”, or for being wooden, etc. Yes, the vocal line must express the emotion, the sub-text, but there is also room for more.

Barczablog: Please talk about your performers: will you be inclusive or are you aiming to redress the balance, showcase persons of colour, and other groups who are under-represented.

ARIA: We will strive to walk-the-walk of inclusivity at AO, and we understand that that means we will have to engage with artists and audience members who may not share our views, and that is going to feel uncomfortable for us. We need some time to figure out how to frame those partnerships so that navigating that conversation benefits not only ourselves, or the artist, but the public.

TEIYA: We are definitely starting our initiative with artists from equity-seeking groups who have systematically been overlooked and who identify with groups who have faced tremendous barriers for years to be able to participate in this artform at the same level as predominantly white privileged folk, so that’s where we are starting. But by no means are we going to not include white artists. We pride ourselves on creating an environment on all levels of operating AO that is respectful, and inclusive. 

Barczablog: Is it too early to ask you about possible future commissions, whether among librettists & composers from the under-represented constituency OR in the content,  stories that might encourage your visibility and representing you in new works..?

TEIYA: Our mission, values and goals for AO is wanting to fill in the gaps of the industry – we hope that with AMPLIFY it will act as springboard for AO to grow its network in helping and serving artists, especially those of equity-seeking groups.

ARIA: I think if we identify a need, we’ll fill it, but for now we’ve observed that we have some amazing colleagues producing some impactful pieces across the country. No immediate plans for new works, but it’s absolutely on the table.

Barczablog: Do you anticipate to be funded and to identify donors from among the population you represent

TEIYA: Yes, and no. We hope that people who don’t identify from equity-seeking groups will see the value in the work we are doing with AO.

ARIA: I think that’s what it is really about. We believe there is value in the work we’re doing that extends beyond diversity for diversity’s sake. It’s diversity because when you engage with ideas that feel uncomfortable or foreign you stand to benefit from the insights, learning, and growth that accompany that discomfort. Sure, there will be a value for those who love opera (the chance to see new, extraordinary artists you may have otherwise overlooked), and there will be a value to our communities (the space and trust to find their authentic voice within the operatic medium), but there is a value to those who don’t appear to have any skin in the game as well.

Barczablog: Are you considering venues to perform among your target population: to show them what they’re missing, perhaps to get them on board?

ARIA: I think I would offer a reframe of that question, and say that we intend to engage with many communities, not so we can show them what they’re missing, but so that we can listen to them, and learn how we can better serve them.

TEIYA:. We hope that a large number of our projects going forward will be co-productions, in association with, in consultation with, etc. We want to work with existing frameworks and help better support them, not simply create something new on our own.

Barczablog: Is there anyone you can identify who has inspired this mission or energized you to start AO?

TEIYA: So many of our colleagues like Michael Mori and Jaime Martino at Tapestry Opera, artists and leaders in the Theatre community have been inspirations to us over the years: forging ahead to make opera relevant again. There’s a need for so many artists within the industry who are incredibly talented but aren’t getting the opportunities or support that others have, and I think without them, there wouldn’t have been a need to start AO. But our time is crucial. People are starting to voice their truth and people are starting to listen, and we are excited to help make that happen for people in opera!

ARIA: Honestly? Teiya inspired me. Beyond that, Laurie, Kenneth, Rich, Liz, Andrea, Trevor, and Michael inspired me. My colleagues in the Indie Opera Community inspired me. The people I met in San Francisco: Sean Waugh, the singers, administrators, directors, production staff, audience members and donors inspired me. We give ourselves a lot of grief, but there are so many thoughtful, passionate people who have a vision for an opera industry that is innovative, progressive, and inclusive. They are looking for a way forward, and we want to join the exploration team!

Barczablog: Thank you!

*******

For its inaugural series, AO is presenting three concerts:

Mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin

1-October 10, 2019: The Way I See It American mezzo-soprano and author Laurie Rubin (Do You Dream in Color: Insights from a Girl Without Sight), and pianist Liz Upchurch will speak to their unique experiences as individuals with blindness and vision loss navigating the world of opera, and how this element of their identity has informed their creative process. The concert will be directed by Aria Umezawa.

2-October 11, 2019: The Queen in Me An exploration of the ways in which the classical music world tries to control and limit queerness, gender expressions, and identities. This one-person show features soprano Teiya Kasahara as the Queen of the Night who, after 228 years, has finally decided to reclaim their narrative and challenge the patriarchy. The show is accompanied by Trevor Chartrand, and directed by Andrea Donaldson.

Pianist, vocal coach and pedagogue Liz Upchurch

3-October 12, 2019: What’s Known to Me is Endless A look at the African diaspora, and how experiences of Black identity differ in Canada and the United States. African American baritone Kenneth Overton is joined by Canadian pianist Rich Coburn to speak to how their understanding of Black identity was challenged while working on both sides of the Canadian-US border. Canadian American, Michael Mohammed, will direct the show.

Baritone Kenneth Overton

Each evening will feature a lecture-recital followed by a talk-back panel with the artists and guest speakers, to give audience members a chance to further explore the themes discussed in each concert. Talk-back panels will be curated and hosted by Margaret Cormier. Audience Activation Points around the venue will be designed by Matthew Vaile, and will create a more interactive experience.

Amplified Opera Concert Series: AMPLIFY!
October 10, 2019 @ 7:30 – The Way I See It
October 11, 2019 @ 7:30 – The Queen in Me
October 12, 2019 @ 7:30 – What’s Known to Me is Endless

Ernest Balmer Studio, 9 Trinity Street Tickets:
$25 at door, or online at www.amplifiedopera.com
More information: www.amplifiedopera.com

While the music is very much Puccini’s Turandot, a regular opera fan attending the premiere of the Canadian Opera Company’s new production might have trouble recognizing it. That’s why the headline proclaims it as Robert Wilson’s Turandot.

Two words lurk in my head at the moment.

The first is kitsch. Some critics have a problem with Puccini,  his popularity, his blatant sentimentality. If you love Puccini of course, you go see Butterfly or Boheme without a trace of guilt in your pleasures, and embrace the tears he pumps out of your eyes.

Robert Wilson’s Turandot seems to be meant as an answer to the kitsch, to the jerking of your tears. You won’t cry at this production.  It’s a modern work of art, the set & singers like a colossal installation a tableau with human puppets dodging the kitsch or any excessive emotion.

The other word is orientalism. Some people find operas such as Turandot problematic in their appropriation of folk music from China, the reproduction of cultural stereotypes. While I am not sure that this opera offends anyone, it’s especially intriguing to consider what the COC gave us.

• The characters of Ping, Pang & Pong are renamed “Jim”, “Bob” and “Bill” ostensibly to fix this problem
• A program note explains the rationale
• Meanwhile, Wilson gave the three singers a movement vocabulary to rival Mickey Rooney’s outrageous performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, hopping and mugging and cavorting as though they were cliché figures.

Was this meant to be done with a knowing wink at the audience? Perhaps. I did hear a few weak titters of laughter. But I suspect that the result may have been even more offensive than the original. I’m the wrong person to ask, as I’m Hungarian.

But perhaps this show is safe from any sense of kitsch, genuinely modern and therefore not guilty of appropriation.

I can only shake my head at the predicament of the COC in the modern day, and their perpetual position of apology for the sins of past generations:

• The defects of Louis Riel that led to apologies & corrective composition
• The sins of emperor Hadrian that led to a bizarre conclusion to the opera we saw last year about that emperor, the scourge of the Jews
• And tonight, a program note that would apologize for Ping Pang & Pong, renaming them: even as the surtitles and sung lines continued to identify them as before.

So no it’s not the Turandot you may know if you’re a conservative opera-goer. At the end when Calaf and The Princess sing together and he supposedly kisses her, they never get close enough for anything more than perhaps a blown kiss, a gesture. And as they sing she is radiant bright red in powerful lights while he languishes in the shadows, eventually disappearing into the crowd at the end. The surtitles say that Liu dies, but it’s again some sort of gestural thing. She walks about for awhile, as indeed the chorus expresses fear that her soul will haunt them. Is she haunting them? If so she’s doing so in the company of Timur, who is still alive.

But maybe the expectations of the usual opera audience aren’t relevant, not when we saw one of the youngest audiences I’ve seen coming out for a Canadian Opera Company premiere. And that bodes well, considering that the subscription audience for most of the performing arts companies in the GTA is getting older. They embraced this production, including big applause for Wilson at the end.

Pardon me if I sound like a conservative myself.  I laid out some of this conflict in the earlier piece I wrote about Turandot (and Wilson).  The person I was sitting with was fuming about what they felt had been done to the original.

Wilson’s minimalist aesthetic has its pros and cons.

Turandot’s first appearance is electrifying, the colours and stage composition matching the big orchestral climax.

And the opening of Act II is brilliant, as Ping Pang & Pong…
(sorry but I refuse to call them by names that aren’t sung in the performance… if Ping can sing “Ola Pang Ola Pong”, that’s good enough for me!)
…make more sense of this scene than usual, even as a couple of the usual cuts were restored. Ah but then again at this moment? the opera came closest to resembling what we see in other productions, diverging hardly at all from the usual.  So thank you for that crumb Mr Wilson. It is my favourite scene of the opera.

Joseph Hu as Bill / Pong, Sergey Skorokhodov as Calaf, Julius Ahn as Bob / Pang, Adrian Timpau as Jim / Ping, in Act III of Turandot (photo: Michael Cooper)

Turandot is a messy opera about messy emotions. Wilson tidies it up considerably. The chorus stand still so that we can deal with the chorus in the abstract, and never mind if people don’t usually do that. Hey, people don’t usually sing either.  If you can buy the stylizations you’ll have a much happier experience. If you show up with stipulations & requirements, you’ll be frustrated.  No you don’t get the usual contact between characters. At times it resembles an oratorio. And I don’t say this as a consolation, but the musical side of this production is astonishingly good. You won’t hear it sung any better than this.

Tamara Wilson is in my second consecutive production where I am feeling sorry for her predicament. Just as her Desdemona was a standout in the Otello last season so too this time. Her vocalism is 99% of her role, as she gets very little opportunity to show us the usual character arc.

Sergey Skorokhodov is a very capable Calaf, somewhat dry in tone but accurate. Again, we don’t get to see any evidence of character interaction, no opportunity to get terribly attached to our hero, as that might be too much kitsch for us to handle. No, Wilson saves us from that unhealthy sentiment.

Similarly Joyce El-Khoury sings an impeccable Liu, and David Leigh a strong Timur, even if nobody hugs or makes a real human gesture.

Adrian Timpau was a standout as Ping especially given that Wilson gave him & his cohorts (Julius Ahn as Pang, Joseph Hu as Pong) so much physical business & hopping about, in addition to some very challenging music.  They were superb throughout the evening.

To make matters even harder, conductor Carlo Rizzi is sometimes going very quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. But this is tough music, especially for the trio that opens Act II. As far as I could tell Rizzi got perfect entrances from his soloists even while at times putting the pedal to the floor.

One of the intriguing subtexts is in watching Rizzi, a brilliant musician leading this production. One wonders what he’s thinking.

The COC chorus were wonderful both onstage & off.

Turandot continues at the Four Seasons Centre until October 27th.

I have been listening to Tafelmusik’s first CD with their new music director Elisa Citterio Vivaldi con amore. The title tells you what to expect, a recording affectionate as a love-letter, a promise of great things to come.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played through this lovely recording, a perfect companion as I drive home in rush-hour. You don’t mind traffic when you’re being kept company by Citterio, Cristina Zaccharias, Patricia Ahern & Geneviève Gilardeau (violins), Dominic Teresi (bassoon), John Abberger & Marco Cera (oboes), Lucas Harris (lute): just to name the soloists in the concerti, plus the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. So yes, this is a CD including concerti for lute, for two oboes, for bassoon, for 4 violins.

It’s a sign of the wonders on this recording that it functions as a kind of advocacy for the composer, arguing for his importance.

Do you like Vivaldi? You’ll adore this recording.

Not sure if you like Vivaldi? This recording will persuade you.

The energetic pieces make you want to dance. There’s joy throughout. When it’s slower you notice the beauty of your dashboard or the sun angling between the buildings as you cruise along in your car. There are some especially stunning moments. Vivaldi has a gift for melody, a very deep well overflowing with inventiveness & wit, bubbling over with life. If we think of the solos as a kind of discourse, their turns of phrase like conversation, we find bursts eloquence even though it’s non-verbal, a seductive invitation to surrender.

This is a perfect showcase for Tafelmusik, who sometimes seem to be an orchestra of virtuoso soloists. Everyone shines, many get a turn in the spotlight. Yet it’s a warm sunny glow, not a harsh glare, like a trip to Italy.

Who are Tafelmusik becoming? I pose the question only because they’ve been so amazing, one wonders what’s ahead, what happens to the chemistry with the contributions of Elisa Citterio. I’ve loved their work. Perhaps the best illustration I can give is to share this track from Tafelmusik’s recording House of Dreams, the slow movement from the D major lute concerto, played by Lucas Harris with Tafelmusik led by Jeanne Lamon.

Some might think of that as perfection, unsurpassable.

And so they undertake this marvelous lute concerto on the new Vivaldi CD, again featuring Harris’s luscious lute, Tafelmusik led this time by Citterio. It’s a bit faster I think. Dare I call it better? One doesn’t usually think about improving upon perfection, but I can’t stop listening to this track on the CD. Yes, I confess that when I really like a track I’ll listen to it over and over. Guilty.  No wonder I am hearing this in my head, especially Harris’s fluid elaborations. Wonderful as the earlier one was, the new one is breath-taking. Is Citterio perhaps adding a special something? I am not sure. But I’m glad that we can have both. We don’t have to choose. Lucky me, or more accurately, lucky Toronto.

Sorry you’ll have to get the CD to hear the new version of this movement. Trust me, you won’t regret getting it.

The composer centennials & bicentennials may be artificial stimuli to research, but the effect is real. Knowing that everyone is suddenly focusing upon a particular period seems to inspire all sorts of interesting studies, conferences where people share their research and even get some ideas. It can perhaps be the difference between something languishing in obscurity or finally getting enough attention to be published.

I stumbled on something in the library.

One day while driving home, I’d happened to hear a performance of the first “Valse oubliée” of Franz Liszt on the radio in the car: my usual place to hear music.
So I went to the library to get the music, which is one of the few Liszt pieces I play that I don’t own.

(although it turns out that I did…
Funny that I had forgotten…
hmmm literally a forgotten waltz).

When I think back, I realize that it’s one of several pieces I first encountered in Vladimir Horowitz’s “Homage to Liszt” album of live performances, an album dating from the early 1960s that someone brought into the house, forever ruining me.

There may be better performances out there but each of these has burrowed a deep hole in my psyche, as I realize now that I have attempted to play each piece on the album:

• Funérailles (and later the rest of the Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses)
• Au bord d’une source (and later, the rest of the 1st year of the Années de Pelerinage)
• that Valse oubliée (#1)
• the Rakóczy March (identified that way because Horowitz was paraphrasing rather than sticking to the Hungarian Rhapsody)
• Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6
• Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104 (and later, the rest of the 2nd year of the Années de Pelerinage: and the 3rd year as well, which was a disappointment compared to the first two years)
• Hungarian Rhapsody No2 (again with some free-form additions from Horowitz that I could never duplicate and had the good sense not to even attempt)

Most of the time I think of myself as a Canadian but there are times when I feel connected to the country where my family came from. Reading the poems of George Faludy, listening to Bartók or Kodaly, my heart swells with Hungarian national pride. And especially when I play Liszt, when I am hearing Horowitz playing Liszt: then I identify with the composer & virtuoso.

In each case I ruefully admit decades later that I was as totally under Horowitz’s influence as if he had been whispering instructions into my ear.

Flash forward to my recent trip to the library in 2019, finding a new edition of the four Valses oubliées, plural. While I had always known there were others besides that first one, I had never listened to the others, never encountered them, never seen the music. The new edition had a Preface dated 2010, the inscription for the new acquisition by the library was dated from the summer of 2011. Was this a project inspired at least partly by the Liszt bicentennial, I wondered?

Liszt was born Oct 22nd 1811
(a cool number when you think about it: 22-10-11),
on the cusp of Scorpio I suppose.

I had known even in childhood listening to Horowitz playing the #1 that this must be the first in a series if it was numbered.

But this edition edited by Peter Jost takes me far deeper into the process of Liszt’s compositions, partly because I’m looking at the entire group of four forgotten waltzes, partly in response to an inspiring preface by Mária Eckhardt.

Eckhardt is co-president of the Liszt Society & a great authority on Liszt.

Pardon me if I stop for a moment to muse about those titles. Valses oubliées, or forgotten waltzes..? If we were hearing old tunes that had been forgotten, that might be odd enough. But when you listen to these pieces, Liszt is doing something else, resembling a stream of consciousness. The tunes are fragmentary, almost as though we’re seeing the process of remembering and forgetting writ large in the scores. We seem to capture the bits of a melody but can’t fully remember.

Look at that first one. I’m fond of Horowitz so why not play one of his wonderful performances, pushing the virtuosic envelope of the piece. It can be played slower (for instance, the way I play it…). We’re in a realm that’s asking questions, making some rhetorical gestures that don’t always lead to the usual slam-bang finish: as this is the late Liszt. He is a different man with a different understanding of his instrument, of virtuosity, of life itself.

Perhaps I should mention his life-changing accident, a fall leaving him wounded, unable to walk as easily, confronted with mortality once again after living to see two children die before him. The piano perhaps had now become something new, no longer a vehicle for effortless expression, but a mirror to mortality, disability. Did he experience pain while playing, I wonder?  But that doesn’t mean he wrote music that was easier to play.

And that’s just the first one.

Eckhardt’s Preface is illuminating. We read about his Romance oubliée published in 1881 in different versions, a work employing a melody Liszt had written decades before.

Liszt’s work on the Romance oubliée apparently provoked a strong emotional reaction within the nearly 70-year-old composer, for shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1881, he composed a valse oubliée. The piece was written after he had suffered a fall on the staircase of his Weimar residence on 2 July and was obliged to keep in his bed to eight weeks. During this time he had ample opportunity to reflect upon his life and works.…
“Oublié” (forgotten) became a kind of emblematic concept for the composer: it stood for remembrance and at the same time, for certain musical forms and genres that time had passed over…
While not disclaiming virtuosity or elegance, Liszt permeates the piece with nostalgia and irony, and alludes to the historical position of such pieces by embedding typical melodic and rhythmic formulae of the salon waltzes into an innovative, non-tonal framework that is characteristic of his late style. However, the romantic title page of the first edition, which is adorned with colouful flower, a sleeping genius,, musical instruments and a ribbon inscribed “Souvenir,” does little to convey this aspect of the music.

Eckhardt is being scholarly in confining her commentary to that which is certain. I like to speculate even if I don’t really  know.

Only the first has been performed so regularly as to become a familiar work. I don’t believe it’s because the other three are inferior. Perhaps they’re so quirky as to make themselves automatically obscure, the province of nerds & scholars.

I wonder though if we’ve really penetrated yet, as to how one properly plays these pieces. There’s room for whimsy & playfulness possibly something else that I haven’t imagined.

Here’s #2

I sense that the most important part of each of these compositions is in the final minute or two, the reflective passages that are still and soft, retrospective. Liszt contemplates life and virtuosity from a place where his body isn’t working quite so well, both as an older man and perhaps as one at least temporarily disabled by injury. Those bits of melody suggest a process of one grasping for fragments, reminding me of my poignant family encounters with dementia. Whether it’s the mind or the fingers or the body imposing limiting factors, the fragility of these creations grabs me, even if so far they haven’t become popular.

And here’s #3

The waltzes are quirky, at times reminding me of something you’d hear from a circus calliope, at other times as delicate as a memory in the mind’s eye. It’s not a big jump from here to the waltzes in Der Rosenkavalier, ranging from one key to another without worrying terribly about beginning middle & end. Maybe I’m asking too much, but I wish that an interpreter could make more of these madhouse variations (another phrase stuck in my head, as I recall a show from years ago).

And here’s #4, the shortest of the set.

Tonight’s Toronto Symphony concert reminded me of someone I haven’t thought of in ages, a piano teacher in my teen years. At every lesson we’d begin with small-talk, and then he’d say “now play for me!” It was a wonderfully intimate invitation, making the music-making into a kind of communication, and very personal. It made me feel that he wanted to see what I was doing and that what I was bringing to him each week was a kind of gift, making me feel special (even when I wasn’t thrilled with how a piece was going).

He inspired me.

I was reminded of that magical chemistry as I watched the TSO playing at Roy Thomson Hall tonight, a huge difficult program that they’re repeating Thursday & Saturday:

• Connesson’s Aleph: Danse symphonique (a TSO co-commission)
• Prokofiev’s 3rd Piano Concerto with Beatrice Rana, soloist
  (intermission)
• Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest Fantasy-Overture
• Ravel’s Suite #2 from Daphnis et Chloé

Did I say it was a huge difficult program? I loved three of the four pieces, although all of them were challenging. Yet the orchestra played like a bunch of kids wanting to impress their new best friend: Gustavo Gimeno. It doesn’t hurt that he knows how to lead them, with a solid beat, a sense of meter and clear interpretive ideas.

TSO’s CEO (left) interviews incoming TSO Music Director Gustavo Gimeno

The piece that I didn’t love? It’s not the orchestra’s fault. Tchaikovsky’s Tempest piece is about 5 minutes too long, a series of lovely episodes and one too many climaxes. It ends with a stunning elegiac passage that reminds me of the ending of the Manfred Symphony¸ although it would be hard to find two dramatic works more different than Byron’s Manfred and Shakespeare’s Tempest.

I suppose the word “kitsch” is in my mind after Wilson’s take-down and deconstruction of Puccini at the COC, although what impressed me was how Gimeno got commitment from his players.  A conductor can’t have his players only making an effort when they’re playing a brilliant high-quality score, oh no; they need to play even when it’s schlock.  No the quality of the piece didn’t stop anyone from putting their heart boldly & lovingly on their sleeve, and that’s what a conductor wants ultimately.  There were stunning moments when you saw the beginnings of a beautiful relationship. The cellos en masse emoting a big romantic melody, the trombones & tuba in a perfect choir, the horns (!) both at the beginning & ending making magic..? THAT is why I thought of my piano teacher, watching the eye contact as Gimeno seemed to invite his players (the orchestra he is about to lead after all): to play for him.

And they did so.

The other three works are the reason you should try to get to this concert.

Pianist Beatrice Rana

I reviewed Rana’s debut CD of Chopin & Scriabin back in 2012, a masterful display of technique coupled with a very mature sensibility. She has wonderful taste, as she showed us tonight. The Prokofiev is an invitation to bring out different facets of her playing in the varieties of sound she gave us. We started with soft relaxed noodling that led to moments of big angular octave passages, easily penetrating the thick orchestral textures. Whether it’s more Gimeno or Rana, we always heard the solos clearly, sometimes floating on the orchestral waves, sometimes sparkling in their firmament. This is the most impressive display of piano playing I’ve seen in awhile.

Because we screamed so enthusiastically for her, Rana honoured us by playing the 5th Chopin etude in E minor as an encore, a stunning jewel.

The TSO concluded with the Ravel, Gimeno illustrating a maxim that’s deceptively simple. To make a good crescendo you have to make sure you start softly. This might be the softest beginning to this piece that I’ve ever heard: making the inexorable build-up that follows so much more powerful, so much more beautiful. Much of the piece was kept in check, so that when a big loud brass passage spears out of the surrounding texture, it’s that much more effective if it’s in the midst of mezzo-piano or mezzo-forte, rather than an orchestra already blaring away at forte. Not only does this spare the audience –who maybe shouldn’t hear everything blared—but it also conserves the chops of the players. It was an especially busy night for the brass: and they were excellent.

To open, we heard something more than a mere curtain raiser. Gimeno explained in a post-concert talk-back, that the piece, titled “Aleph”, which is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is an apt symbol of the beginning of Gimeno’s relationship with the TSO.

The piece was more than that however. I only wish I could catch the concert again later in the week, as I suspect it will get better. New music is always a challenge, not just to learn how to play, but also in the more fundamental sense of discovering what it’s really doing, knowing how to listen. The first time you play a piece you’ve heard others play is a different level of difficulty from making sense of a brand-new composition.  Connesson’s work is fascinating composition that I want to hear again. It features a lot of odd bar-lengths, the meter elusive to perceive, and likely a stiff challenge to the players AND Gimeno. His background as a percussionist seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered, as the orchestra seems ready & willing to follow his lead. At times this piece reminded me of Frank Zappa especially in the long & daunting passages for unison percussion, executed brilliantly I might add.

The concert will be repeated Thursday & Saturday, Oct 10 & 12.

Both works currently playing at the Canadian Opera Company feature a famous aria known by people who might otherwise not know the whole work.

In Turandot it’s “nessun dorma”, a piece associated with Luciano Pavarotti, and maybe a little bit with Aretha Franklin.

Perhaps they’re discussing it in the afterlife, …somewhere …. Up there?

Excuse me I can’t help thinking that way, because of the other opera and its big number.

The “Song to the moon” from Dvořák’s Rusalka is heard in recitals and on the radio, while the full opera, not so much. If you know the aria you may already know why I put that funny headline on this little meditation.

Suppose I play you a famous tune by Harold Arlen, that is closely associated with Judy Garland and the film The Wizard of Oz.

That opening phrase of the song, an octave leap upwards, seems to capture a wistful hope for a new life in a new place.

Arlen might have heard something like this before. Did he know Rusalka? I have no idea. But listen to the “Song to the moon” and judge for yourself.

And fortunately the soprano in this little clip happens to be the same one we’re hearing in Toronto namely Sondra Radvanovsky.

Which one do you like better? (i like both)

Today I went to the library to get a copy of the score.

I was cautioned as I took that particular score out.  There are 3 in the collection:

• one all in Slavic languages,
• one stiffly new meaning that the pages don’t stay open,
• and another older one that I took…. )

I was cautioned!  A page was missing.

You only get one guess as to which page it is. Yes, the first page of the aria.

See how the score jumps from page 44 to 47? 45 & 46 are missing in action.

Did someone rip it out? …a water-sprite unable to follow civilized rules in a library? Talk about getting into character..!

I was thinking about singing it. Yes I know, I’m a guy. But it sits in the same keys as two tenor pieces with which it might have some superficial resemblances
(…NOT like Arlen’s tune by the way!),
namely

1) “O Paradiso”– Meyerbeer

2) “O terra addio” (which is a duet not an aria…)–Verdi

In both cases I think the composer was trying for something gentle rather than imposingly difficult for the singer. The high notes for these (meaning the Verdi & the Meyerbeer) don’t have to be big and loud, although haha that doesn’t stop singers from turning the bel canto into can belto. But in fairness none of these operas are bel canto, they’re all grand operas.

I’ll be seeing Rusalka Saturday night, including Sondra. The librarian said the production is wonderful having seen the dress rehearsal yesterday.

Oh boy.

The title tells the story.

Night #2 in the Amplified Opera opening concert series at the Ernest Balmer Studio was The Queen in Me, a performance piece straddling the line between surreal confessional and stand-up comedy, a brilliant piece of satire for a specialized audience.

The Queen is that badass character in The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night, soldiering against one of the most misogynistic storylines going. Sometimes the Queen sings what’s written and sometimes she bursts out of the strait-jacket of the character, both in the mechanical sense of her costume and the subtler implications of the role written for her. She is a perfect mechanism for the exploration of the mad world of opera, the many females co-opted into rituals celebrating female subjugation: except the Queen won’t do it anymore.  She seems to be on a quest, exploring different roles as ways to articulate the feminist position, sometimes working within a role, sometimes fighting or subverting it. I can recall previous satirical pieces in different decades that were knowing nods to the audience, while more or less keeping the artform & its creators (this time Mozart & Schikaneder) on their pedestals. This time it’s more in keeping with the mission of Amplified Opera, as a site for activism and shit-disturbing, largely in fun yet with an underlying seriousness to its mission. They appear to be fearless.

Do you mind a few words about astrology?

Amplified Opera was born yesterday, October 10th. That birthday in some ways couldn’t be more perfect for this new company. 10-10, in the astrological sign Libra, the scales, which signifies balance, the symbol of judgment & justice. Yesterday we saw Aria Umezawa direct a piece with some wit & humor but mostly seriousness, followed by an intense talk-back session.

Teiya Kasahara

Tonight it was the turn of Aria’s artistic partner Teiya Kasahara, a tour-de-force requiring brilliant singing, acting in multiple languages & several layers of irony. As I look at the two nights (and muse upon Saturday night’s program which I must miss) there is certainly a kind of balance at work between the two. It feels very much like yin & yang, the complementary sides of the operatic coin of dramaturgy and virtuosity, the director and the singer. The perfection of the symmetry whether in that 10-10 or in the balance between their personas or even their names is boggling my mind. My jaw drops as I think of what lies ahead for this intriguing company and its brilliant collaborators.

Afterwards we had another wonderful talk-back session, contemplating such things as the limits in the current operatic industry, proposing ways to break through to something new & wonderful. Watching Teiya sing parts of roles that one wouldn’t expect (thinking of the “fach” system, which categorizes the vocal requirements, and Teiya’s remarkable voice that transcends the usual limits), we went on to discuss the ways that pedagogy & the industry condition a culture resistant to change & newness. It’s breath-taking to imagine what the industry might become, especially through the injection of this new company’s creativity & politics of inclusivity.

Trevor Chartrand was a supportive presence at the piano, sometimes playing the piano part of the arias Teiya was exploring, sometimes taking us to wholly other realms –for instance in a soft & seductive reading of the Dance of the Seven Veils—in perfect partnership with Teiya. The piece was developed with Director Andrea Donaldson, a work in progress that I understand is coming back. If and when that happens don’t miss it, both for the amazing musical performances and the quirky satire.

The third night of the series (Saturday: October 12, 2019 @ 7:30 – What’s Known to Me is Endless at the Ernest Balmer Studio) concludes this brilliant launch of AMPLIFIED OPERA.

I offer Teiya & Aria my congratulations for an auspicious beginning.

Ernest Balmer Studio, 9 Trinity Street Tickets:
$25 at door, or online at http://www.amplifiedopera.com
More information: http://www.amplifiedopera.com

Tonight the Canadian Opera Company premiered their take on the recent Lyric Opera of Chicago production of Dvořák’s Rusalka directed by Sir David McVicar.

It stands in rather stark contrast to the other current COC production, Puccini’s Turandot¸ whose mise-en-scene seems at odds with the score.  Richard Wagner would recognize McVicar’s reading of the story as “Gesamtkunstwerk”, his ideal of the total art work where all the components work together to tell us the story.  While it may be that both Puccini & Dvořák would have wanted a unity between all interpretive elements, McVicar’s approach is recognizable in the usual sense as a production honouring the work.  Yes it’s still the story of a mermaid who becomes mortal because of her love for a prince.  While it’s a bit edgy and up to date in its portrayal of nature and humankind’s relationship to the environment, the conservative audience would take it to its bosom –especially after Wilson’s minimalist stylings—for its willingness to follow the score.

Ballet makes a welcome return to the Four Seasons Centre stage even though holy cow it’s not December / Nutcracker season.  Yes Virginia, they do sometimes put ballet into opera. In fact many were written that way, although you’d never know it from COC productions such as the Aida they’re reviving later this season.  Andrew George’s choreography brings the work extra dimensions, sometimes symbolic sometimes a wacky diversion.  The energy dance brings to the work helps propel the story during a rather long evening.

Whatever else one might say about this show, it belongs to Sondra Radvanovsky, who sounds better this year than ever.  While the opera is sometimes a little melodramatic and not to be mistaken for Shakespeare, Sondra’s toolkit matches the work perfectly.  There’s a different movement vocabulary for each act, creating a different tone.  There’s a long stretch where the character is silent, unable to make a sound as a condition of becoming human; Sondra does these scenes as well as I’ve ever seen them done, with some brilliant moments incorporating the ballet.  In the last act she reminded me of a wounded animal, heart-breaking…

(centre) Sondra Radvanovsky as Rusalka (photo: Chris Hutcheson)

Anthony Tommasini’s book The Indispensable Composers does not include Antonin Dvořák in its list of the most important composers: and perhaps it should.  Rusalka is one of the most beautiful opera scores.  Tonight we heard stunning work from the COC Orchestra led by Johannes Debus in an idiomatic reading.  At times we might mistake Dvořák for his near contemporary Brahms, who did make Tommasini’s list even though he is not Dvořák’s equal (in my opinion if not Tommasini’s). Sometimes Dvořák descends into a splendidly ethnic sound for instance in the opening to Act II, a delicious scene with a decidedly Czech flavour.  Debus keeps things moving, while the orchestra let their hair down, sounding properly Slavic.

This is one of the strongest recent COC casts. Alongside Sondra, Pavel Cernoch’s Prince is more than a pretty face, especially moving in the last scene.  It’s a bit of a miracle that he can be so sympathetic in this role (the Prince being one of the least sympathetic characters in all opera). I was surprised by a flood of tears in the last scene: although Sondra deserves some credit for the impact of the final moments.  And Keri Alkema is again a dramatic standout giving the Foreign Princess a somewhat feminist edge in her scenes with the Prince, while sounding terrific as well.

Stefan Kocan’s Vodnik was vocally tremendous, but again benefits from a production that lends gravitas to his every word as a kind of voice for Nature.  Elena Manistina seemed to be having a great time as Jezibaba, injecting real star power both with her solid sound & her readiness to camp it up. Every time she showed herself it felt like a party was going to break out, and come to think of it, that’s more or less what happened.  Matthew Cairns & Lauren Eberwein took over the show whenever they were onstage, playing up the comedy in their roles as the Gamekeeper & the Turnspit, and sounding terrific.

(sitting centre) Lauren Eberwein as the Turnspit and Matthew Cairns as the Gamekeeper (photo: Michael Cooper)

I’m seeing the show again, and would suggest you do so too.  Rusalka continues at the Four Seasons Centre until October 26^th.

Tonight I was present at the Canadian premiere of Yang Zhen’s third installment of his “Revolution Game Trilogy”, Minorities, a Red Virgo production presented by Canadian Stage.

You will recognize many things in this show.

We watch five female dancers later joined by a singer.  We begin with the stillness of a minimalist tableau that reminded me of Robert Wilson’s Turandot, until the cartoon faces unexpectedly start singing, including a comical Mao Zedong.  The energy is wildly happy, with the subtlest overtones of disrespect.

Minorities, with a smiling Chairman Mao peering over their shoulders (photo: Dahlia Katz)

And then each one presents herself as a member of an ethnic group associated with a place.

Macao: Lou Hio Mei

Uyghur: Guzhanuer Yusufu,

Mongolia: Aodonggaowa

Tibet: Gan Luyangzi

Chinese Korean:  Ma Xiao Ling (I did not know that there were Chinese Koreans)

At times we heard them speaking their language, at least I think so because of the variety we heard.  These are very beautiful to hear, whether or not they are also mixed with a few English words.  When have I ever heard so many languages in one short evening’s program?

They were dancing their national dance, attired in their folk costume, sometimes singing or playing music.    For awhile it moves along very conservatively, each one showing us something about themselves, teaching us about their past even as we get glimpses of complexities & conflicts.

We’re told of the pressure to conform & to blend into the bigger cultures while abandoning one’s authentic language.  I’m reminded of the cultural genocide here with the Indigenous populations.

At one point the safe and conservative music is juxtaposed against something wildly provocative, in costuming that’s modern.  I won’t say much because I don’t want to spoil the effect, other than to say that they are on the edge of a kind of satire, where lip service is paid to the Cultural Revolution & Madame Mao even as those values are mocked & parodied.

It’s among the subtlest satire I’ve ever seen, from a group of performers who were always positive, smiling & welcoming to the audience.

I had a wonderful experience.  Before the show began the young woman sitting next to me said a quiet hello, which I wasn’t sure whether it was directed at me or the person beside me.  I think perhaps it was meant for both of us? We both quietly said ‘hi’ back.

A couple of minutes later she said hello again and this time it felt more like it was for me, and so I answered.  We began to chat.

I was fortunate to be sitting beside Ma Xiao Ling, who pointed to her picture in the program and said “that’s me” in a very friendly voice.

And so we chatted. I asked her how many languages she speaks (a few… including a fair grasp of English), asked her about her discipline (she’s a dancer, she started at the age of 7 and has been dancing for 20 years… so I concluded she must be 27), and the future of the show (after 10 days here they’re off to San Francisco).  After she had told me who she was (pointing at the program) it only seemed fair that I should give her my business card with the blog’s address although I don’t know if she will see this review.

And when the loud music began, she and a few others seated in the audience got up and began to dance ever more vigorously in place before going to the stage.  At times it’s the folk dance that conforms to the values of the Cultural Revolution, at other times much more modern & radical.

If you go see this show and one of them addresses you I recommend that you talk to them. You won’t regret it.   It’s truly immersive, as we they sometimes came right into the audience to interact with us, and then taking some of us onto the stage to dance later on.

More and more I think that a discipline can be like a fortress that offers a place for people to hide.  Canadian Stage have become a company curating experiences that mix disciplines while challenging our expectations, and avoiding the safe & easy pathway.  We’re in the presence of music, dance, layers of meaning in the words & images, animation & text.

I didn’t know what to expect when I came in, and indeed am a bit mystified by the cool surface of Minorities. There’s a sentence in the program that I have come back to more than once, as I seek to unpack the layers of irony:

“Yang explores the constant conflict between social prejudice and individual consciousness—how one can express oneself and relate to the world in which they live—and examines how minority identities in China fit, or don’t fit, in the narrative of a harmonious One China.”

At times we’re hearing of the 56 different ethnicities, reconciled into the One China especially in big loud songs that sound like communist propaganda.  The dancing is enthusiastic, even if we’re given images to problematize their ideal utopia.

Minorities is a piece of dance theatre to challenge preconceptions & assumptions even while offering you something that feels very sweet & kind, continuing until October 27th at the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre aka the Berkeley St Theatre.