Reviewed by James Karas
The Canadian Opera Company’s choices for its second production for
2015-2016 can best be described as bold, innovative and commendable. It is advertised
as Pyramus
and Thisbe, a world premiere of a Canadian opera by Barbara Monk
Feldman but there is more than that.
The first piece of the programme, which lasts only an hour and twenty
minutes, is Lamento d’Arianna, a scene for solo soprano and orchestra and
the only surviving fragment from Claudio Monteverdi’s second opera
L’Arianna. Mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabo sings the role of Ariadne, the
Cretan princess who showed Theseus how to kill the dreaded Minotaur and find
his way out of the Labyrinth. Theseus promised to marry her but on his way back
to Athens he abandoned her on the island of Naxos.
Phillip Addis as Tancredi and Krisztina Szabó as Clorinda.
Photo: Michael Cooper
Szabo as the betrayed and grief-stricken Ariadne sings of her love for
Theseus, her anger and her desolate state. She is alone on an empty stage with
only a chair to sit on. The music and the singing are elegiac, plaintive and
heart-wrenching with bursts of anger when she curses her betrayer. A
beautifully rendered piece.
The second part of the programme is Il combattimento di Tancrdi e
Clorinda, a piece for three voices from another Monteverdi opera. The
three voices are Szabo as Clorinda, baritone Phillip Addis as Tancredi and
tenor Owen McCausland as Testo. Il combattimento has a plot. The Christian
knight Tancredi does battle on the walls of Jerusalem with an infidel. He
wounds the infidel who reveals that she is in fact his beloved, Clorinda – an
infidel. She asks to be baptized before she dies on a note of Christian
forgiveness.
Testo gives us a blow-by-blow description of the battle but the
narrative rarely matches what the two warriors are doing. No problem. We are
there to listen to the singing and not watch a brawl.
(l-r) Owen McCausland as the Narrator, Krisztina Szabó as
Thisbe and Phillip Addis as Pyramus. Photo: Michael Cooper
The last work and I suppose the pièce
de resistance of the evening is Barbara Monk Feldman’s Pyramus and Thisbe. Although the lovers are called Pyramus (Addis)
and Thisbe (Szabo) we are quickly disabused of any notion that this is a
retelling of Ovid’s tale of the tragic lovers or Shakespeare’s hilarious take
on them in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream.
Monk Feldman treats the lovers’ story as a tone poem sung in a slow,
deliberate, often dream-like fashion. In addition to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Monk Feldman uses William
Faulkner’s The Long Summer, St. John
of Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul and
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an
Orpheus. The opera is sung mostly in English but there are sections in
German and Latin.
The slow and deliberate pace used almost throughout the opera eventually
becomes ponderous. Banal phrases seem to take a very long time to sing. There
are some beautiful passages for the singers and the chorus but not enough to
keep one from looking at his watch.
Director Christopher Alden takes a minimalist approach to the three
pieces and that is commendable. Ariadne’s lament does not need any movement and
the last thing we want is a swashbuckling scene between Tancredi and Clorinda. Pyramus and Thisbe as a tone poem for
the stage is not entirely satisfactory.
_________
Pyramus and Thisbe by Barbara Monk
Feldman opened October 20 and will be performed a total of seven times until November
7, 2015 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen Street West, Toronto,
Ontario. Tel: 416-363-6671. www.coc.ca
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