Monday, June 14, Elgin Theatre, Toronto.

The plangent opening strains of the first act overture redolent of Puccini and Mascagni signal that Rufus Wainwright’s debut opera Prima Donna is going to be a  trip down operatic memory lane. But my spirits lifted when the curtain went up to reveal Antony McDonald’s awesome exterior architecture of a Paris apartment enhanced by Thomas Hase’s lighting. Framed in the window appears Regine (the diva queen) who has been hiding out for six years since the premiere of her greatest hit as queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Soprano Janis Kelly sings and acts convincingly, though the music is pretty boring, and the libretto, co-written by Wainwright and Bernadette Colomine, floats us in the atmosphere of self-indulgent, injured narcissism that this prima donna is hoping to step out of if today’s visit by a young journalist goes right.

Most of the first act is free of any drama beyond the fuss by butler and maid to get the place ready to receive a visitor. The music is emotionally flat.  Enter Colin Ainsworth as the visitor. His good looks and piercing tenor brighten the scene considerably. Towards the end of the first act, Regine seduces him into a duet which she actually leads at the piano, and that is the first superior musical moment.  The first dramatic moment is when they almost kiss. This heightened mood is sustained by a vocal  quartet when the maid and the ‘heavy’ butler ably played by baritone Gregory Dahl get into the act.

The second act, right from the overture, is more satisfying than the first: more passion, more drama, better music–some minimalistic pulses behind the neo-romantic pastiches, and an inspired dreamlike flashback to six years ago and the night of Regine’s original triumph in music and disappointment in love. Set and costumes dazzle. It’s a high when you can feel that an aria is going to be applauded as two are: Charlotte Ellet as Marie the maid hits a high note that earns one, and Miss Kelly’s signature aria ending on the word “tristesse’ is truly touching.  You can get past the claustrophobic ‘Sunset Boulevard’ ravings of an old queen and feel for her as she lets go of everyone in her life who stand between her and her naked loneliness.

In the final scene, she is again at the open window of her apartment, alone, in her slip, watching the fireworks in the street below, blessing the happy revellers and accepting with some grandeur the prison of her loneliness.

Friday, June 11, 2010, Massey Hall, Toront.

“You all came, because you want to know the truth…You want to know, if I killed that women? Or twelve others?”  says John Malkovich as real-life convicted lady-killer Jack Unterweger speaking directly to the audience during the closing moments of this excellent entertainment. And does  John-Jack-Malkovich-Unterweger tell us the truth? Not in so many words. Instead we get this excuse: “I am longing for the truth as much as you are…but it has not been given to me. I cannot produce any true word.”

In fact, there is a great deal of truth in this endlessly engaging stage-play for a Baroque Orchestra, two Sopranos and one actor written and directed by Michael Sturminger. The truth comes out in Malkovich’s acting, and the in the music of Vivaldi, Gluck, Boccherini, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, performed by  the Vienna Academy Orchestra and affectingly sung by Bernarda Bobro and Marie Arnet.

For example, early in the play, Malkovich-Unterweger tells the audience he will sit at his book-signing table (the stage is set up as for a ‘reading’) and look over his notes while the onstage orchestra behind him plays Boccherini’s “Ciacona” from the 1766 sinfonia La Casa Del Diavolo. After a few bars, though he does nothing overt to show it, you can sense how the music is irritating him, and sure enough, after a few more bars, he gets up, waves to the conductor to stop the music and says to the audience,”I am not able to stand this kind of music. It makes me physically stressed… 
Especially, when I am trying to think.” His words are so right, that we laugh at the rightness of them. The inescapable truth here is the truth of the feeling—the nervous irritability that Malkovich generates even before he actually shows it. That kind of genuine ‘acting’ is the truth of Malkovich’s art, the kind of consistent performance that I believe the poet John Keats had in mind when he wrote the lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty…”

Then there is the truth of the musical passages. There is a rightness from the start because the music is so totally incongruous. The  opening instrumental piece played even before Malkovich saunters onto the stage is the final Ciacona–”L’enfer”–from Gluck’s Don Juan’s Journey Through Hell. Unless you are the one in a million or more who would recognize the passage and its aptness to the concerns of the play, you have to wonder about the choice of a stately 1760’s composition to introduce the life and death of a serial killer who flourished from 1980-1994. Yet it turns out with this piece, as with the six exquisite love arias sung by the two soprano’s whom we witness being dominated and strangled onstage, their very incongruity is what makes them beautiful artifices or monuments to the truths of love that rise above and reign over the squalour of the story spawned by Unterweger’s base urges. Their seemingly out-of-place beauty glows like  innocence trust you might see in the eyes of a famine-starved child.

Here one must acknowledge conductor Martin Haselbock’s brilliance in choosing scores that are historically and thematically related to each other and to the themes of this play. The Haydn and Beethoven arias (”Scena di Berenice”, and “Ah, Perfidio”) celebrate the same doomed heroine Berenice lamenting the death of her ‘perfidious lover (as if in sympathy for Unterweger who committed suicide in his jail-cell). The songs by Mozart (”Ah, lo previdi”), C.M von Weber (”Ah, se Edmundo fosse”), and Vivaldi (”Sposa son disprezzata”) also involve the longings of frustrated lovers who have failed to reach their beloved and incline towards reunion in death. Sung, before during and after episodes where Malkovich writhes on the floor convincingly strangling the women with their own bras, these exquisite musical performances by Mlles. Bobro and Arnet actually show us how the incongruous truth of beauty can coexist within hopelessly sordid deception.

I have to add, to be accurate about the total effect of the play and the pleasure it gives, these words from an interview with Malkovich himself:“It’s actually a comedy.Quite a bleak one, but it’s mostly funny, if you ask me.”

April 29, Walter Hall, Toronto.

Janina Fialkowska’s strength at the keyboard is her ability to rest. When you appreciate the daring silences she allows between passages, you begin to understand how these rests enable her precisely placed tones to flow along finely modeled musical contours that express the beauty of the compositions she is interpreting for her audiences.

The Schumann portion of her recital was exciting particularly because of Fialkowska’s artistry in bringing out the highly polarized nature of the compositions. Faschingsschwank aus Wien Op.26 begins with a boisterous figure that repeats and then shades down into a restful, poetic mood. The high spirits return frequently in the opening “Allegro”, once marching in a defiant “Marseillaise”, and once, mysteriously imbued with a singing quality that unaccountably reminded me of William Bolcom’s Ragtime compositions. The brief “Romanze” that follows is tender and reflective in character, resting between slow steps that lead into a  playful “Scherzino” that floats like the dance of a butterfly. The “Intermezzo” is emotional in a plaintive way, and the “Finale” is built out of high velocity runs that are modulated on a scale that includes loneliness as well as extraverted celebration.

Schumann describes the origin of his Humoreske, Op. 20 in a letter to Clara: “All week I sat at the piano composing, writing, laughing and crying, all at the same time.” The title indicates that the piece is about the flow of moods—humours—outbursts of passion, sweetly innocent passages, lyrical turns, eccentric twists, quick rhythmic shifts of texture. Fialkowska played with the music as if it were a mouse that she felt free to hold and release, pursue and suspend, until the “poignant and triumphant coda.”

Everyone knows or ought to know Fialkowska’s Chopin. The Polonaise in C-sharp Minor, Op.26, No.1 sounds the heroic note of the Polish patriot in exile pulsing with new harmonic energies. She follows The Waltz in A-flat Minor, Op.34, No.1  through a briar-patch of moods and tempi with a sensitive and fluid ease, while also bringing out the sparkle that attracted the title “Valse Brillante”.The Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 62, No.2, poses the question “What to make of a piece that is so well-know it is ‘over-familiar’?” Answer: Listen to the even tone of Fialkowska’s walking bass line. The trilling of nerves sing in Nocturne in B Major, Op.62, No.1. A study in texture and colour, the final melody is poetic, meaning it gives us a glimpse into a world beyond the ordinary.

The first of the recital’s two Preludes, the F-sharp Minor, Op. 28, No.8 is a work that Liszt describes as being “replete with enormous difficulties”. Nonetheless, Chopin’s rolling periods are woven into what seemed like a fantastic narrative discourse. The Prelude in A-flat that followed was a calmer composition with a gorgeous melody that appeared like the vehicle for a journey through a romantic landscape into a realm where a single bass note tolls what begins to sound like the penultimate hour. The Scherzo in B-flat Minor Op. 31, No.2 is built, like the first movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata in C Major, out of a brief, quirky high-pitched figure contrasted by an extended grand theme. One notices as the dramatic complexities unfold, that Fialkowska’s playing makes it easy to hear everything that is going on in the music.

The audience would not let Fialkowska rest until she offered an encore which she announced simply as—Chopin.

Saturday, April 24, Elgin, Toronto.

The Elgin Theatre refurbished to its plush and gilded elegance is the perfect setting for Opera Atelier’s picture perfect new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

The semi-transparent sound of the iconic stand-alone “Overture” performed by Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, conducted at a stately pace by David Fallis, induces a Mozart state of mind in which the serio and comic moods seamlessly unscroll like  engravings round a timeless urn.

The curtain rises on a living tableau of dancers arranged as a porcelain china group with a commedia del’arte flair that—no surprise—reflects the style of characterization librettist da Ponte ‘analogised’ into the cast of this opera. What is a surprise, and a delightful one, is that as the opening tableau of dancers dissolves, and Figaro and Susannah appear to discuss measuring the set  labeled “THE BRIDAL SUITE”, they sing in English. Jeremy Sam’s  colloquial translation, sparkles with its own brilliant wordcraft allowing a whole new level of relaxation and fun.

Keep in mind that we are treated to 3 hours of Mozart’s greatest hits, performed in a set that Gerard Gauci designed to make the audience feel they are invited into “the atmosphere of a private performance taking place in the interior courtyard of a country residence.” Keep in mind, too, that the romantic characters are all young and beautiful, dressed by Martha Mann to display marmoreal contours of flesh above and below, front and back, while the problematic older generation of characters, Bartolo, Basilio, and Curzio are costumed and masked in ‘commedia’ style as if they were a monstrous race living among ‘us’. Let it also be said about this cast, that everyone can really act, and that they are brilliantly directed in both subtle and broad mannerisms that draw and hold the attention for the whole 3 hours.

The singing is generally photographically sharp and clear and punchy: you could understand every word, catch every vocal nuance. Carla Huhtanen’s Susanna comes across as a woman capable of taking charge of her newly emerging life—her voice reflecting a mental clarity with a particular feminine strength and the sense of humour she would surely continue to need. Oliver Laquerre has an ingenuous comic style that served him well in a previous Atelier production as Papageno. He is attractive as Figaro but doesn’t quite clarify the depths of the resources Figaro employs to survive and overcome the weight of his lord and master, Almaviva. Phillip Addis brings the same sort of strengths and style to his top dog role as Jonathan Rhys-Meyers brings to his role as Henry VIII in The Tudors. He is a young hot and heavy guy with more fire than weight, more bravado than brute authority. As such, his voice is clear, bright, vivid, pleasing but not so moving.

Peggy Kriha Dye has the voice that dominates this production. Her sound is thrilling. As the Countess who unaccountably has lost the affections of her once ardent husband, she is literally a-tremble with unhappiness, and the depth of her complaint  soars at every moment. Wallis Giunta’s Cherubino is mercurial, juicy and warm; Marcellina and Dr. Bartolo are well paired—Curtis Sullivan’s “La Vendetta” is impressive, Laura Pudwell’s Marcellina goes smoothly from rapacious to maternal and she manages by her bustling warmth to be an attractive monster. The Artists of the Atelier Ballet directed by Jeanette Lajeunesse Zingg never fail to delight in the way the are used to seduce the modern mind into enjoying the beauty and charm of period balletic tableaux.

This is Mozart at his bubbly best that Opera Atelier plays with zest whirling us along from one operatic artifice to the next without losing a drop of drama. Go see it and catch the high.

Thursday, April 8, 2010, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto

The Tokyo String Quartet breathed life into Beethoven’s last three ‘Middle Quartets’ and made love to them. In the opening measures of Op.95 (the ‘Serioso’) they give us all the power and beauty of Beethoven’s mind condensed. They explode a sharply contoured opening phrase in unison : the individual voices heavily accented by agitation, rebound against each other, followed by —silence—a suspenseful, enigmatic pause. Clive Greensmith’s cello repeats the unison figure solo against a finely textured held chord by the ensemble, Martin Beaver’s first violin utters the first tender, plaintive phrase of the conversation which gets a rising arpeggio out of the cello, then Kazuhide Isomura’s viola  leads the ensemble to a forte repetition of the opening unison statement, followed by another abrupt halt.

In these few measures, the audience gets the gist of how Beethoven’s feelings—passion and sorrow, exaltation and despair—follow each other in quick, unpredictable, succession, and how he expresses the force and sensitivity of his inner drama without compromise. We also get here an encapsulated glimpse of what this Tokyo String Quartet can do working together, as if one great sculptor, to bring out the smooth planes, the sharp lines, the delicate curves, the detailed textures, and the polished tones of a Venus or a David. The result is hearing each piece of music—Op. 59.3, Op. 74 “The Harp”, and the aforementioned ‘Serioso’—animated by musicians in such perfect accord with the composer that we can ask, with the poet Yeats,” How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Beethoven’s music of this period, around 1810, is black and blue: his “Immortal Beloved” had left him without explanation; the last vestiges of his hearing were literally being assaulted by the thunder of Napolean’s army during the conquest of Vienna; his hopes for some kind of normal family life were forever ruined. In the long night of despair Beethoven the man’s only protector was Beethoven the artist—”the splendour and joy of his genius, and the craving to excercise his creative power and to spend it recklessly,” as his friend Bettina Brentano wrote. You can literally hear the triumph of creative power as it resolves despair into a feeling of unity with all of life in the final movement of the ‘Serioso’. It is very pleasurable to hear amidst the original tones of Beethoven’s emergent maturity, charming echoes of Mozart in the ‘trio’ portion of Op. 59.3. This ensemble’s rendering of the pizzicato portions of Op. 74’s “Allegro” (that give it the nickname “Harp”), is stunning in it’s virtuosity, particularly the crystalline tones of Kikuei Ikeda’s second violin, which also sometimes tickles the tearful flow of the “Adagio”.

Beethoven’s three-in-the-morning blacks, blues, and moods indigo, the splendorous rose tones of the dawn, and every colour of the rainbow pour out of the famous four Stradivarius instruments in the hands of this impeccable ensemble. When they come back to Music Toronto in 2011, The Tokyo String Quartet will give two concerts of Beethoven’s later period quartets that will complete their recording project with Harmonia Mundi.