06.17
Anyone purchasing tickets to the 2010 spring season of the Canadian Opera Company at the Four Seasons theatre based on what they saw in the COC’s winter offerings might have felt they’d stumbled into the wrong theatre, confused at the difference. The COC’s stolid and conservative February offerings (Verdi’s Otello and Bizet’s Carmen) bear little resemblance to the bolder approaches favoured in each of the three recent productions, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Mozart’s Idomeneo.
The COC are in transition since Richard Bradshaw, their former Artistic Director, conductor and inspiration, suddenly died of a heart attack in August 2007, eleven months after leading Wagner’s Ring Cycle to open the new house. 2007-2008, the first season without Bradshaw, was already completely planned and booked. Alexander Neef took over as Artistic Director in the fall of 2008, when the 2008-2009 season was already underway; therefore it would be fair to say that this past season (2009-2010) was the first real season for Neef. One can’t help but wonder whether the quirkiness in the spring has anything to do with the leadership transition.
Christopher Alden’s production of The Flying Dutchman was the most disorienting of the three. I thought I knew this production, one I’d long ago decided I loved. At least I felt that way about the version I’d seen with Allen Moyer’s design and costumes on the Hummingbird Centre stage a few years ago. Why did it bother me transplanted to the intimate Four Seasons venue where previously I’d found it uplifting in the cavernous theatre on Front St?
I can think of at least two possible answers. The theoretical explanation –which is much kinder to the COC—is to compare this experience to another comparable discrepancy. I had the pleasure of seeing the great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, one of the most important interpreters of the Wagnerian tenor roles onstage a few times in my life, and I always marvelled at his acting. However what I’ve seen of him on video mostly leaves me cold.
Why? Perhaps because Vickers produces Wagner resembling ancient Greek tragedy, making a mask of his face, and moving in a very still and sylized manner. From a distance he’s stunningly heroic, unbearably powerful to watch. On video he’s just a man, and no longer magical because the mask is broken by the indecent intimacy of the camera. I believe something comparable occurs for me at the Four Seasons theatre, where the acoustic coddles the voices, and undercuts the universality I experienced across the vastness of the cavernous Hummingbird Centre.
Another possible explanation would be in my expectations going to see the COC nowadays, and the excellence to which I am accustomed in their new home. In the Hummingbird I didn’t expect quite as much, and therefore was easily satisfied even when they were merely okay. Alden & Moyer give us a concept that plays with Wagner’s original, yet does not seem to violate it totally. Or at least I didn’t mind because in the other theatre I arrived with low expectations. Nowadays, however, I expect better of the COC.
The danger in the new theatre is that one can actually see what they’re doing. Oh my. The set? I was reminded of the house of the Wicked Witch of the East, after it had fallen from the sky, landing at a funny angle on the yellow brick road. For much of Act I we watch Daland and his crew struggle in this bizarrely angled bungalow that pretends to be Daland’s ship, somehow marooned on the Four Seasons stage. What looked electrifying and spacious in the old theatre now felt crowded, awkward and poorly conceived. For example, the Dutchman sang his entire opening aria “Die frist ist um” from a spot upstage that was concealed from view for a significant portion of the audience. In the old hall everything is so distant and impersonal, that one doesn’t quibble with such details. While that gulf is not usually a good thing it could serve those operas that strive to be mythic rather than individualized, Wagner being one of the chief exponents of a more symbolist style.
And there’s a curious process of deconstruction at work somewhere in the collaboration of Alden and Moyer, in their response to the chorus. The Dutchman is a spectre of sorts, commanding a ship full of ghosts. For much of the opera, we’re led to be fearful of the ghost ship; one of the musical highpoints of the opera occurs when the ghosts finally emerge in the penultimate scene to taunt and terrify Daland’s crew. Yet for some reason the strange costuming of the women and their odd choreography –both in the second and third acts—made them far scarier than you would expect. Wagner’s opera is written as a tale of redemption, an allegory with at least some religious overtones. But none of that survives in this production. Instead of a comparatively innocent town full of males and females, among whom Senta sticks out for her ambition to redeem the Dutchman, we get a smalltown freak-show. I was reminded of the Addams Family or the graphics of Edmund Gorey. Why is the Act II Spinning Chorus conceived as a kind of Zombie parade? As a result, the real ghosts are anticlimactic, and their ghastly thunder has been stolen by the scowling chorus. I would have to ask what the designer and director were aiming for; why would they deconstruct the fearfulness of the ghosts, by putting other scary creatures onstage? While I never objected to this (or noticed it!) in the big theatre, in a space that for me has been as suggestive of truth and sincerity as the new Four Seasons space, I was completely puzzled. I suppose it’s a good news / bad news story. The good news? What a great theatre space. The bad? Whenever the chorus sang I cringed, which is particularly odd given that the COC chorus is almost always my favourite part of their productions. But not this time.
Cringing, I awaited the mostly excellent soloists. At its core this production of Flying Dutchman was rock solid. Julie Makerov’s Senta easily rode the waves of the orchestra particularly in her 2nd act ballad. Her portrayal was often wide-eyed, seeming more inspired than deranged (as some Sentas appear), and genuinely conveying something between sympathy and love for the Dutchman. Mats Almgren had previously won over the Toronto audience with his portrayal of Hagen, one of the cornerstones of the recent Ring Cycle. As before, Almgren sang with a steel-edged precision as the Dutchman, unambiguously hitting his notes and enunciating clearly.
The show was stolen from under them by Robert Kunzli’s Erik, in a role whose potential isn’t always exploited. Erik gets some marvellous moments in this production, not just because he kills Senta in the last few minutes of the opera. Whereas I found this absurd and disruptive in the Hummingbird, there was an organic logic to that outcome in the new house, where the madness of the principals comes into a very clear focus. There’s probably a lesson in all this concerning the strengths and weakness of this wonderful theatre, and the kinds of shows that work best on that stage.
The COC production of The Flying Dutchman was not the only quirky production, however; there were also several troubling images in their new Idomeneo. In the first half hour I struggled mightily against the approach used by director François de Carpentries , the set design of Siegfried Mayer, and the costumes of Karine Van Hercke. In the opening aria of the opera, Ilia mourns the deaths of her family, lost in the recent Trojan War. As she sings of the death of her father Priam, this Ilia –Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian –is apparently handling an actual body, one of several onstage that appear to be nude. They’re not real dead people, nor are they actually naked but simply in some sort of body stocking; but that’s beside the point in this uncomfortably literal-minded exercise. Bayrakdarian does her heroic best with this brutal pantomime. While I was sympathetic to her stoic efforts, I felt that she was in the middle of a travesty.
Idomeneo is a challenging opera by any stretch of the imagination. Mozart’s music cannot always overcome the static limits of the opera seria style. The story includes elements that seem far-fetched even for an operatic plot. Idomeneo escapes from a storm by means of an oath he swears to Neptune, as he promises to sacrifice the next person he meets onshore to honour the god, not expecting that he would run into his own son Idamante.
Unexpectedly my resistance melted within two minutes of the arrival onstage by the Idomeneo of Paul Groves. His first entrance was a wonderful coup de theatre. Amid the noise and lightning of a thunderstorm we suddenly see a group of bodies thrown ashore as if tossed by waves. The bodies seem to be dead, and the sophisticated theatre-goer (me) thinks, “Hmm, they must be mannequins or dummies in their completely macabre stillness.” And then one of them moves. And this seaweed covered mess of a man begins to sing, full of distress at his moment of survival. Wow. Whereas the quasi-naked Trojans got my back up moments earlier, now I had shivers running down my spine, as I was engulfed in this magical illusion. I was persuaded also by Groves’ singing, first sounding so quiet in despair at the loss of his ship and comrades, then building bravely, including elaborated cadenzas in the da capo repeats in his arias.
The third important principal was the trouser role of Idamante, sung by Krisztina Szabo, in a convincing portrayal that, along with Groves & Bayrakdarian, played the opera completely straight. Tamara Wilson, on the other hand, injected a campy levity into every moment she was on stage as Elettra. Wilson easily stole the show, whether chewing the scenery in over-the-top displays of jealousy suitable for an old-fashioned diva, or channelling the 18th century version of the Material Girl in her fantasies of a happy future complete with matching luggage. But perhaps that’s inevitable when everyone else is serious, and poor rejected Elettra is so much fun, especially in her raging coloratura.
I had been hesitant at the beginning to accept the central story-book conceit of the production. The stage picture suggested that we were reading an ancient tale, framing the action behind a scrim, and matching the artificiality of Mozart’s setting of the story. But I was especially impressed by moments near the end in Idomeneo’s closing recitative & aria, when he seems to step outside the story (in front of the scrim). The structural conceit is brought full circle, when the close of the opera echoes the utopian implications of the plot, as the people of Crete (a.k.a. the chorus) step through the scrim, out of the book, and make a kind of contact with the audience.
The third opera—a rental of Stephen Lawless’ Dallas production of Maria Stuarda—is the most innocuous of the spring season, a whimsical reading showing a far lighter touch than the other two. That should scarcely surprise anyone, considering that a bel canto opera naturally supports theatricality, being at its core highly artificial, and without the heaviness found in either the Mozart or the Wagner. We’ve seen comparable flamboyance in such celebrated productions as the recent Metropolitan Opera Fille du Regiment, or the Italiana in Algieri at the COC of a few years back.
Lawless’s choice to attempt that lightness in a serious opera seemed risky. From the first scene we’re confronted with a daring re-imagining of the story of the love triangle among Elizabeth the 1st, Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Leicester. Lawless, Benoit Dugardyn (set designer), and Ingeborg Bernerth (costume designer) choose to invest Donizetti’s opera with the charged atmosphere of a play within a play (or opera within an opera), as if the principals strut an Elizabethan stage. The stage picture resembles the view from inside such a stage staring downstage at the audience; for royalty, as we’ve seen in our own century through the lenses of the paparazzi, such is life.
Donizetti’s opera is comparatively unknown, having been withdrawn from production in the composer’s lifetime and only revived in the last half-century. As with so many operas, Donizetti’s creation requires two rival divas, but in the process we get a version of Elizabeth I almost unrecognizable to modern Canadians. This is not the heroic Elizabeth English speaking audiences know from films or the sympathetic figure we associate with Shakespeare, but a jealous and insecure woman scheming to kill the beautiful Mary Queen of Scots.
Some of the design-direction choices seem rather odd, and have little if anything to do with the Elizabethan stage conceit mentioned above. For example, in the second act, when Mary has a secret meeting with Elizabeth on the pretext of a hunt, we see several stags on the stage portrayed by dancers. While the intention may be to suggest that Mary herself is in a comparable danger, the imagery jars the eye because of a sudden momentary shift in sensibility, an air of inexplicable mystery and symbol to which the design team never choose to return for the remainder of the opera.
Later in the same act we go in an entirely different and unexpected direction, namely comedy. The jealous queens confront one another in a scene playing up their vanity, earning several well-deserved laughs from the audience. We’d already seen a bit of slapstick in the first act, when Elizabeth and her retinue stumble in a broad ensemble display. It is only in the third act that Lawless fully surrenders to the tragic tone of the work.
Donizetti’s priority was to furnish virtuosi with great vehicles to sing rather than to tell an accurate version of the history of England, and it is on that basis that Maria Stuarda is persuasive. The casting was especially supportive. Alexandrina Pendatchanska brought an edgy sound to her reading of Elizabeth, in contrast to the sweeter sound of soprano Serena Farnocchia as Maria. Pendatchanska’s choice to sing so much of the role in her chest may have been motivated simply by the low writing in the role, but nicely matches Donizetti’s creation of Elizabeth as a volatile diva in her own right, underlining the angrier moments. Farnocchia’s softer sound seems to surrender to the harsh fate in store for Maria. The triangle is completed in Eric Cutler’s reading of Roberto Earl of Leicester. While he did manage to sing completely in tune, many of his high notes were in a head-voice bordering on falsetto, an approach that I do not find satisfying in this type of opera.
The COC transition continues in the autumn with productions of Verdi’s Aida and Britten’s Death in Venice.
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