GARDEN OF VANISHED PLEASURES - REVIEW OF 2025 SOUNDSTREAMS PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Garden of Vanished Pleasures is an opera that bears small resemblance to what most of us have in mind when we hear that word. The music is provided by Canadian composer Cecilia Livingston and English composer Donna McKevitt who write modern, experimental songs. The texts are provided by the five writers listed below and the work is described by David Jaeger in the program  as “an emotional journey inspired by the details of the life and work of the English artist, author, film maker, stage designer, experimental gardener and queer rights activist Derek Jarman.

Tim Albery is credited as the Stage Director and Devisor. There are four vocal performers, namely sopranos Mireille Asselin and Danika Loren, mezzo-soprano Hillary Tufford and counter-tenor Daniel Cabena.  Hyejin Kwon is the music director and pianist with Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh playing viola and Amahi Arulanandam playing cello.

The program consists of some spoken text and songs performed by the four singers in various combinations. The musical accompaniment is provided by the three musicians listed above. Unfortunately, the lyrics are frequently not comprehensible and that creates a problem of finding a connecting link to the libretto if we can call it that, or the life of Jarman. We need context to understand the songs. 

One example is the following bit from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra which is spoken:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails, and so perfum’d

The winds were love-sick with them.

Cleopatra’s vessel is so luxurious that the winds were lovesick over the sails. If there is a reference to Jarman, direct or indirect, it escaped me. 

Scene fro Garden of Vanished Pleasures. Photo: Cylla von Tidenham

Kalypso, music by Cecilia Livingston with text by Duncan McFarlane, describes the pain of separation, and it may well refer to the goddess who was abandoned by Odysseus after seven years of cohabitation on an island. He chose to abandon her and return to his wife  

                         I don’t know why I should repeat this sad old fallacy:

somehow the weather thinks that we should be together;

night, night comes around,

but it’s too hot for me to sleep,

now so much of what we had you took, took with you, when you were away.

 The words may apply to Jarman but there is nothing in the opera to connect him to the text

Translucence is one of the longer songs composed by Donna McKevitt with text by Jarman. It has complex imagery that is all but impossible to decipher on a single hearing. Here are the first three lines:

A phosphorescent apparition translucent in my ghostly eye shimmers in the star-lit sky the stars shine through him, bright as a child’s sparkler The ghost, a Mister See-through from somewhere back before tiptoes across sea horses drifts along the corridor.

Sebastian, with music by McKevitt and text by Jarman, shows the arrow-ridden body of the Christian saint in the painting by Andrea Mantegna. But Jarman mixes the Christian with the pagan and after his death Sebastian goes to the sun and is united with Apollo. There is nothing Christian about him and he is not referred to as a saint. The connection of the poem with the life of Jarman as the opera is presumably presenting, escaped me.

The music of Livingston and McKevitt, call it experimental or modern, does not show enough variety even in a program that lasted only one hour. There is scant melody and without getting the lyrics listening becomes unprofitable.

The production has huge production values in the set and costume design. the lighting and projection design. Cameron Davis’s projection designs are brilliant as he shows videos of starry skies, snowflakes, the sea and the garden of vanished pleasures. We get a kaleidoscope of images that are quite stunning. Siobhan Keath provides imaginative and wonderful lighting and Michelle Tracey handles the costumes and sets with finesse and superb taste.

I tip my hat to the singers, musicians and perhaps the creative team. Albery no doubt had a vision of what he wanted us to absorb from the show but without content or context about Jarman, I got very little out of it. As for the composers and text providers (except Jarman) were any of their texts written for Garden of Vanished Pleasures?
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Garden of Vanished Pleasures by Cecilia Livingston and Donna McKevitt (music) and Derek Jarman, Janey Lew, Cecilia Livingston, Walter de la Mare and Duncan McFarlane (texts), in a production by Soundtstreams played from April 25 to 27, 2025 at the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. Toronto Ont.   

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture of The Greek Press