On Opera

Lepage Takes on Stravinsky

12a The undoubted highlight of the fall season is the world premiere of “The Nightingale and Other Short Fables,” directed by the renowned Robert Lepage. This is only his second project for the Canadian Opera Company – after his Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung of 1993, which caused the COC to be invited to festivals all over the world. Lepage has more of a hand in this production than the earlier one, since he also chose the various vocal and instrumental pieces by Igor Stravinsky that make up the evening’s programme, along with the two short operas The Nightingale (Le Rossignol) and Renard.

For The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, Robert Lepage draws on ancient and contemporary storytelling traditions, incorporating singers, acrobats and Asian shadow puppetry geared to appeal to audience members of all ages. A co-production with the Festival d’Aix- en-Provence and l’Opéra national de Lyon, in collaboration with Lepage’s Ex Machina company, this is the production’s only North American engagement. It runs October 17, 20, 22, 24, 30, and November 1, 4 and 5, and is sung in Russian with English surtitles.

The programme begins with a selection of short, non-operatic pieces: the jazzy octet Ragtime (1916), a set of four nonsense songs called Pribaoutki (1914), the four lullabies that comprise the The Cat’s Cradle Songs (1917), Two Poems of Constantin Balmont (1911), Four Russian Peasant Songs (1917) and Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1919). The songs introduce the theme of animals central to the two operas presented after the intermission.

Both The Nightingale and Renard were unconventional works in their own time. The Nightingale had its first performance in 1914 at the Paris Opera in a production by Sergei Diaghilev with the singers in the pit and their roles mimed and danced on stage. The next year the Princesse Edmond de Polignac commissioned Stravinsky to write a piece that could be played in her salon. Stravinsky envisioned Renard as a new form of theatre in which acrobatic dance would be connected with singing while declamation commented on the action. As it happened, the premiere of Renard never took place in the salon, but as part of a double-bill with Mavra in 1922 by the Ballets Russes, again at the Paris Opera. As with The Nightingale, the singers were part of the orchestra, while their roles were danced on stage.

In The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, Lepage takes Stravinsky’s innovations several steps further. The orchestra pit will be filled with water to become a pool where the singers perform and manipulate puppets designed by award-winning American puppet designer Michael Curry. The COC Orchestra, under the baton of Jonathan Darlington, performs on stage. The set is designed by Canadian Carl Fillion, who has worked with Lepage on many projects, including Lepage’s upcoming Ring Cycle with the Metropolitan Opera. The lighting designer, Canadian Étienne Boucher, is also part of Lepage’s Ring Cycle team. The Chinese-inspired costumes are by Mara Gottler, resident costume designer with Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival. Lepage’s notion, as explained in several video interviews available through the COC website (www.coc.ca), is to have the course of the action recapitulate the development of puppetry, from the simplest hand shadows to larger two-dimensional variations, and finally to the three-dimensional complexities of Vietnamese water puppetry.

12b Renard was last seen in Toronto in an imaginative COC Ensemble production directed by Tom Diamond. The story is based on Aleksandr Afanasyev’s popular compilation, Russian Folk Tales, and follows the Fox’s attempts to outsmart the Cock, who luckily is rescued by the Cat and the Ram. The cast includes Ensemble tenor Adam Luther and baritone Peter Barrett, who were both in Diamond’s production, tenor Lothar Odinius and bass Robert Pomakov. The cast is joined by five acrobats/puppeteers.

The Nightingale, based on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, is narrated by a Fisherman (Odinius), who tells of an Emperor (bass Ilya Bannik), who longs to hear the song of the Nightingale (coloratura soprano Olga Peretyatko) at court. The bird appears, but when Japanese emissaries unveil a mechanical nightingale at court, the real bird flies away and the furious Emperor banishes it from his realm. Later, when the Emperor is ill and confronted by Death (contralto Maria Radner), the Nightingale contravenes the edict and returns to save the Emperor in an unexpected and moving way. Tickets are available online at www.coc.ca or by calling 416-363-8231.

Christopher Hoile is a Toronto-based writer on opera. He can be contacted at: opera@thewholenote.com.

A Big Year for Opera

The 2009-10 season is a very rich one, with much to please those who favour the tried and true and those curious about opera off the beaten path. Two events are certain to draw international attention to Toronto – the COC’s production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables; and the North American premiere of Prima Donna, by Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright – but Toronto’s expanding number of smaller companies also have diverse treasures on offer. What follows is a small selection of some of the season’s highlights

17Butterfly

The season begins on September 26 with the COC’s revival of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in an extended run to November 3. This will be the first presentation at the Four Seasons Centre of Susan Benson’s gorgeous, much lauded traditional production directed by Brian MacDonald. If you happen to have any friends who somehow have not yet visited the FSC, this is the perfect opportunity to invite them along.

The second COC offering is The Nightingale and Other Short Fables from October 17-November 5. For this production, director Robert Lepage links two short operas by Stravinsky, Le Rossignol (1914) and Renard (1916), with a miscellany of non-operatic pieces--the octet Ragtime (1916), Pribaoutki, a set of four nonsense songs (1914), the four lullabies that comprise the The Cat’s Cradle Songs (1917), Two Poems of Constantin Balmont (1911) and Four Russian Peasant Songs (1917). Lepage will be using the techniques of Southeast Asian puppetry in his staging, and the COC says the programme is aimed at an audience of all ages.

On October 25, Opera in Concert presents Rossini’s La Donna del lago (1819) based on the narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott. Alison d’Amato is the music director and the presentation will feature Virginia Hatfield, Amanda Jones, Paul Anthony Williamson, Graham Thomson and Gene Wu. At the end of the month, October 31-November 7, Opera Atelier presents a revival of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), last seen in 2003. The principals will be entirely new with Kresimir Spicer as Oreste, Thomas Macleay as Pylade and Peggy Kriha Dye as Iphigénie. Andrew Parrott conducts the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Marshall Pynkoski directs.

In November, Opera York, which has focused primarily on warhorses, takes a new course by presenting the Canadian premiere of And the Rat Laughed, an Israeli opera from 2005 by Ella Milch-Sheriff sung in Hebrew with English surtitles. The libretto is by Nava Semel based on her novel of the same title. Opera York presents the work in partnership with the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. It runs November 5-12 at the Richmond Hill Centre for Performing Arts.

In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s death, the University of Toronto Opera Division presents Haydn’s Il mondo della luna (1777). The comic story tells of the would-be astrologer Eccitico, who convinces the wealthy Buonafede that he has been transported to the moon. The opera runs November 5-8 conducted by Miah Im and directed by Michael Patrick Albano and Erik Thor. Also in November, Opera By Request, a company whose singers choose the repertory themselves, offers concert performances of Ponchielli’s once popular La Gioconda (1876) featuring Caroline Johnston in the title role with Melanie Hartshorn-Walton, Karen Bojti, Peter Whalen and Melchiorre Nicosia.

December begins with a new work commissioned by Toronto Masque Theatre, The Mummer’s Masque, written by composer/librettist Dean
Burry in celebration of the Newfoundland mummer tradition. The singers will include Laura Albino, Krisztina Szabó, John Kriter, Giles Tomkins and a children’s choir. The production runs December 3-6.

February 17-21, Toronto Operetta Theatre revives its popular production of Canada’s own operetta, Leo, the Royal Cadet (1889) by Oscar Telgmann. The tuneful tale follows the lives of cadets at the Royal Military College in Kingston, their departure for the Zulu Wars in South Africa and their return home.

In March, the Royal Conservatory of Music will give Toronto audiences a rare chance to see Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon (1899) sung by members of the Glenn Gould School and accompanied by the Royal Conservatory Orchestra under the baton of Mario Bernardi. Performances run March 20-25. March will also brings us a world premiere from Queen of Puddings Music Theatre: Beauty Dissolves in a Brief Hour – A Triptych. The work comprises three chamber operas sung in three languages (Mandarin, English and French) commissioned from three different Canadian composers – Fuhong Shi, John Rea and Pierre Klanac – and scored for two sopranos and virtuoso accordion player Joseph Petric.

April begins with another world premiere, Giiwedin, by Catherine Magowan and Algonquin poet Spy Dénommé-Welch. This, the most ambitious project in the history of Native Earth Performing Arts, is written in Anishnawbe Mowin, French and English and tells the story of a 150-year old Aboriginal woman fighting for her land. It runs April 9-24.

May 1-30 the COC presents its first-ever production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (1835), written the same year as his Lucia di Lammermoor. It stars Serena Farnocchia, Alexandrina Pendatchanska, Eric Cutler and Patrick Carfizzi, and is conducted by Antony Walker with direction by Stephen Lawless.

The season ends with the North American premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna, as part of Luminato, running June 5-14. The opera was originally commissioned by the Met, but when Wainwright insisted that the libretto be in French, Met Artistic Director Peter Gelb abandoned the project. Thereupon it was swiftly picked up by Luminato along with the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Manchester International Festival, where it had its world premiere in July this year. Also in June, Tapestry New Opera Works will present the world premiere of the staged “operatic oratorio” Dark Star by Andrew Staniland, a requiem about AIDS. Wayne Strongman conducts and Tom Diamond directs. This season, also look for Tryptych’s world premiere of Andrew Ager’s Frankenstein. Stay tuned for further developments!

The Children’s Crusade Leads the Summer Parade

The highlights of June are the world premieres of two ambitious Canadian operas: the first a huge production by one of the grand masters of Canadian music, the second by a recent University of Toronto graduate. As the latest expressions of Canadian contemporary opera, both demand to be seen.

Tim Albery, director: “Murray’s written a dream story - the journey of a child that he calls the holy child, who meets a strange dark man, in the night in the middle of a storm, who gives him a letter for the king of France asking permission to travel. ... Like many dreams it takes strange byways and highways. There are temptations, characters who appear out of nowhere. And the audience follows the child through the multiple rooms of this old 1930s warehouse never knowing quite what’s coming next in the same way as the crusading children never knows what’s coming next. They are all poor, all desperate, on a ridiculous journey to conquer Jerusalem with love, not weapons. ... From a production point of view, the logistics are just as scary: How on earth do we get from place to place?”

On Opera: May 09

The undoubted operatic highlight of May is the world premiere of the "The Shadow" by Omar Daniel to a libretto by Alex Poch-Goldin. The work is presented by Tapestry New Opera Works and features baritone Theodore Baerg, counter-tenor Scott Belluz, soprano Carla Huhtanen, tenor Keith Klassen and baritone Peter McGillivray.

Alex Poch-Goldin (above) & Omar Daniel

FOCUS On Opera: April is Opera Month

Once again the stars have aligned to make April the most opera-intensive month in Southern Ontario. At time of starting to write this article there were no fewer than fourteen examples of music theatre on offer spanning the 17th to the 20th century. (There have been a couple of hiccups, as you will see, but opera lovers will still have quite a task deciding how to fit them all in.)

Here they are in chronological order.