Reviews
Opera vocals generously showcased
Two casts featured in production
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Sat. Feb 2, 2008 - 4:46 AM
Dalhousie Music Department’s opera workshop production of act two of Johann Strauss’s evergreen operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is a showcase for the lively young voices of the vocal department.
More than 30 singers, representing the first of two casts, filled the air with song and the stage with action in a production which, was for opera fans, the equivalent of a supersize meal at McDonald’s.
Not only was most of Strauss’s original second act intact, but since the entire act consists of a lavish party thrown by Prince Orlovsky for Vienna’s beautiful people, the production, directed by Nina Scott-Stoddart, made the most of the opportunity to stage an elaborate entertainment within the party in which 25 different singers sang solos, duets, trios, quartets, a quintet and a sextet from operas by Mozart, Offenbach, Rossini, Kurt Weill, Benjamin Britten and Douglas Moore.
It was, to say the least, a feast of melody and sweet singing.
Strauss’s music, as well as Mozart’s and Rossini’s, suit developing voices. They challenge virtuosity (as in Adele’s laughing song, sung Thursday by Katie Shelley with considerable brilliance of tone) as well as in Olympia’s song in which she’s a mechanical singing doll from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman (sung and acted most charmingly by Mary-Claire Sanderson) to the dramatic What Do You Intend To Do, Augusta? from Moore’s Ballad of Bay Doe and the dark Spinning Wheel Quartet from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia.
Pulling this all together in a less than two hour show was a tour-de-force. The pace never lagged and Scott-Stoddart took advantage of the potpourri of styles and stories of the operatic vignettes to poke a little fun at what she clearly loves with a passion.
In Mozart’s La Ci Darem La Mano, everybody’s favourite duet from Don Giovanni (sung by two of Prince Orlovsky’s guests) in which the Don seduces a naive serving girl, the Zerlina (Katrina Westin) clearly loathed the Don Giovanni (Ben Yeon). Her struggle to overcome her dislike in order to appear to be seduced was wonderfully comic.
Julie Rudolph, in a trousers role, singing the part of Count Orlovsky, found a delightful way of being bored by his own party, while singing in a Russian accent in a stagey, deep voice, that all but failed to disguise its treble quality. The simple set (designed by Melissa Maislin) employed an ivory grand staircase, a settee or two and a large open space defined by a square ivory dance floor to contain the entertainments.
Dean Bradshaw whipped his fingers raw through the piano reduction of Strauss’s colourful orchestra part and Gary Ewer conducted the ensembles as needed.
Act two of Die Fledermaus continues tonight at 8 p.m. with the same cast as the opening performance, while the second cast performs Sunday at 2 p.m.
Young voices soar in Giulio Cesare opera
Halifax Summer Opera Workshop
August 10, 13, 17 and 19,, 2007
Reviewed by Stephen Pedersen in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald
The Halifax Summer Opera Workshop production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto continued into its second week of performances Monday night in the Sir James Dunn Theatre.
It is staged in modern dress on a stark U-shaped set in front of two bare columns.
Stage director Nina Scott-Stoddart suggests a desert war with King Tolomeo’s soldiers masked in Al-Fatah style, checkered head-cloths, and armed with automatic rapid-fire rifles. Handguns replace swords for skirmishes and daggers for assassinations.
The opera takes place as Cesare arrives from Rome to confront his general Pompey, perceived as a rival for the Roman Imperial throne.
Meanwhile, King Tolomeo, who shares his throne with his sister Cleopatra, has misinterpreted Cesare’s visit as a punishment tour, and thinks to ingratiate himself with his Roman master by presenting him with Pompey’s head.
Wrong.
Cesare is appalled, but the consequences of Tolomeo’s rashness — he is an arrogant, violent man who seeks to become the sole ruler in Egypt —begin to embroil all the characters in plots, rebellion, assassination attempts and outright war.
Tolomeo’s general, Achilla, conceives a passion for Pompey’s widow, Cornelia. Her son Sesto, vows to kill Tolomeo in revenge for his father’s murder. Cornelia resists, and both she and Sesto are briefly imprisoned.
Meanwhile, Cleopatra, a young woman whose beauty is legendary, seeks to seduce Cesare, hoping he will help her in her struggle against her brother. But she falls in love with him, and he with her. And he undertakes to support her bid to re-establish herself as Queen of Egypt with the ardour of a lover.
As an opera, the conventions of the day required singers to elaborate upon their feelings in set pieces which halted the action. But the baroque was a time of flamboyant ornamentation. So not only the was the music ornamented but the actors and the sets were often lavishly attired.
But the focus of this rather stark production is on the singing.
The singers do not go overboard with ornamentation, nor does pianist and music-director Keith Chambers. But his stylistic flourishes were superbly executed and his accompanying of the recitatives both solidly supportive and unobtrusive.
His brilliant performance of the overture, with its fiery conclusion, drew applause, and for his bow, a standing ovation from the Dunn audience.
The voices are mostly young and developing at this stage, but Sarah Barrett-Ives as Cleopatra expressed a wide range of emotion in her beautiful voice.
Julie Rudolph as Cornelia proved a fine actress as well as a fine singer, while Jeremy Ludwig gave robust account of Achilla, as did Christopher Mallory as Cesare’s right-hand general Curio.
The roles of Cesare and Cornelia’s son Sesto were sung by women. Ariel Sinclair-Chin had the casual male mannerisms of a very young Cesare. Helen Bell’s extremely light, sweet voice, made Sesto sound even younger, little more than a child, though his role suggested he was in his late teens.
Countertenor Gerrod Pagenkopf camped up the role of Tolomeo, extravagantly winking at and flirting with the audience, making him a comic-book villain, but when required he found a threatening nastiness in his low notes that was actually quite chilling.
All of us enjoyed his performance as an actor singer, but were hoping his come-uppance as a character would be painful and violent.
Giulio Cesare in Egitto is double-cast. It will be performed Thursday at 7:30 p.m. by the “Port” Cast. The “Starboard” Cast, which sang Monday night, will perform again on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
The opera is sung in Italian, but English side-titles enable the audience to follow the entire libretto.
An American Triple Bill: Giancarlo Menotti and Samuel Barber
Dalhousie University Opera Workshop
February 1, 2, 3, and 4, 2007
Reviewed by Daphna Levit in Opera Canada
Halifax could well host an opera explosion, if the budding talent apparent in Dalhousie’s Music Department is a reliable indication. For its Opera Workshop it just produced three short operas: Menotti’s The Telephone and The Old Maid and the Thief, and Barber’s A Hand of Bridge (libretto by Menotti).
Double casting gave quite a number of students, at every level of their university training, an opportunity to tackle the challenges of these three entertaining pieces. This reviewer attended the Saturday production (Feb 3) which was sold out to a very receptive audience, as, reportedly, were all the other performances.
The evening started with The Telephone featuring a very attractive couple, Catie Shelley and Justin Simard, who comically conveyed a love story devoid of any depth and a corresponding shallow life in very good, strong voices. This was immediately followed by A Hand of Bridge, a tiny masterpiece, starring four singers who overcame their youth in tone, posture and expression to seem old, bored and even sleazy. Their roles gave them little opportunity to develop as individual singers, but their singing was perfectly suited to the bridge game that no one could ever win. It was a delight.
The second half of the evening consisted of the more elaborate The Old Maid and the Thief. Much thought was obviously given to the sets and the costumes, which established the appropriate time frame – early 20th century. The elegant Julie Rudolph (Miss Todd) had to achieve quite a dramatic stretch to be credible as an aging spinster stooping to such a dissolute conspiracy. Sarah Barrett-Ives (Laetitia), her co-conspirator, was equally more likeable than conniving. Nevertheless, musically, all four performers (including Kristi Assaly and Justin Simard) were impressive.
Dean Bradshaw on the piano provided a controlled and congruent interpretation of all three operas; Gary Ewer inconspicuously conducted The Old Maid and the Thief and kept it tightly moving; Nina Scott-Stoddart’s direction produced a professional and highly entertaining opera event.
Opera workshop Don Giovanni feast of song
[Saturday August 5, 2006]
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter for the Halifax Chronicle Herald
There is a delightful clarity about Nina Scott-Stoddart’s Halifax Summer Opera Workshop production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
It opened in the Dunn Theatre Thursday night with lyric baritone Mark Gough as the lecherous Giovanni, Todd Trebour as his much put-upon servant Leporello, Neil Robertson as his murder victim the Commendatore, and Cara Adams, Olga Tylman and Kristin Hoff, sopranos all, as his female targets Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and Zerlina.
Under Scott-Stoddart’s guidance, the youthful cast follows a strong, consistently comic line in this rowdy tale, at times farcical, at times semi-tragic, at times romantic, but always awash in ravishing Mozartean melody in which the music itself flashes through quicksilver moods of comedy, despair, ecstatic anticipation and high theatre.
The voices are splendid, consistently powerful and expressive, and impeccably in tune (except for a lapse into stubborn flatness during tenor David Manford’s long crescendo in Il mio tesoro).
Pianist Tara Scott accompanies with ideally flexible tempi, energy, and expressive tonal shading.
The story line is clear: Giovanni’s indifference to danger, coupled with his lascivious sensuality, set him up to murder Donna Anna’s father, the Commendatore, in a duel during an attempted assault on the daughter.
His abandoned wife Donna Elvira tracks him down and joins forces with Donna Anna and her fiance Don Ottavio to try to capture him. The squad of those intent on revenge widens as another of Giovanni’s victims, Zerlina, and her stolid fiance Masetto, she having been seduced, and he having been savagely beaten, join in the hunt.
Giovanni’s fate catches up to him at the dinner and he is hauled off to Hell by demon.
Scott-Stoddart has staged the opera in modern dress. Giovanni is a celebrity with a seamy private life, shooting and sniffing drugs, quelling opposition by his willingness to use his gun, and single-mindedly pursuing women.
There are side titles in English (the opera is sung in the original Italian), and, during the overture, mock-ups of magazine covers — from Esquire and Billboard to Time and Stud Weekly featuring photos of the principal characters and lurid headlines are projected on the Titles Screen.
During Leporello’s Catalogue Aria (Madamina . . .) in which he details Giovanni’s thousands of conquests to Donna Elvira, they are hilariously reproduced on the title screen with a power-point presentation complete with bar graphs and pie charts.
Trebour is a slender, sylph-like, nervously nimble Leporello (Kyle Rostad plays the role in alternation), who takes notes on a Palm Pilot and prepares Giovanni’s drugs. His physical comedy is a highlight of the show, an acrobatic tour-de-force, with a strong element of Sganarelle-like irreverence and instinct for survival.
But above all, the production is a feast of song. No one, not even Schubert, could write music conveying feverish passion, anguish and despair, and sheer, innocent joy — sometimes all of them in a single aria — as did Mozart. Especially in the female arias, the women not only bare their hearts but unwittingly expose their sub-conscious desires with superb dramatic irony, underscored and paced by the piano/orchestra.
Gough makes a remarkable Don, capturing a side of this eternally mercurial character we don’t often see — his ugly brutality and utter indifference not only to his victims but to his own fate. Yet it is that defiance that makes us admire him in spite of ourselves. He takes dangerous chances and wiggles out of them with a combination of threat and cynical manipulation of others’ weaknesses. Gough is strong vocally as well, with a voice as clear as steel.
Don Giovanni is an outstanding production, all the more admirable for how it finesses its budget restrictions. The costumes are simple, and there is only one set-piece — a long, diagonal platform running from downstage right toward upstage centre. It serves. And the rest is achieved by the Dunn Theatre crew chief Colin Richardson’s canny lighting.
The same cast plays tonight at 7:30 p.m. On Sunday at 2:30 p.m. it will be the alternate cast with Kyle Rostad (Leporello), Erin Bardua (Donna Anna), Laura Higgs (Donna Elvira), Julie Grieve (Zerlina) and Arthur Wright (Masetto). Don Giovanni (Gough), the Commendatore (Neil Robertson), and Don Ottavio (David Manford) sing in both casts.
