Volume 9 Issue 7 - April 2004

OPERA ON DVD
by Phil Ehrensaft
Walklire und Fledermaus
OPPOSITE POLES OF German-language
opera grace Toronto stages
this month. The human condition
is dramatized with relentless Schopenhauerian
seriousness in Richard
Wagner's Die Walkure. Our poor
species is satirized with relentless
good humor in the ultimate Viennese
operetta, Johann Strauss Il's Die
Flede rl71£lus.
Universal has two very different reference-quality
box sets of Wagner's
Ring Cycle: a 1989-90 Metropolitan
Opera traditionalist production, under
James Levine's baton and Otto
Schenk's stage direction, and a 1979-
80 modernist Bayreuther Festspiele
Cycle conducted by Pierre Boulez
and staged by Patrice Chereau. Brian
Large, ·a master opera video director,
handles the cameras in both
productions. Each of the four Ring
episodes can also be purchased individually.
The new 1989 Ring production
celebrated the centenary of the Met's
first production of the cycle in grand
style. As the world's wealthiest
performing arts company, the Met
pursued Wagner's intentions in ways
that even the composer could not pull
off at Bayreuth. The huge scale, and
parallel good taste, of the Met Ring's
staging draws audiences right into
Wagner's mythic world.
Parallel to Sol ti's pioneer Ring recording,
price was no object in engaging
singers that Levine consid-
. ered the best in the world. A select
list of this Ring's cast includes:
Hildegard Behrens, Siegfried Jerusalem,
Christa Ludwig, Kurt Moll,
James Morris, and Jessye Norman
Then there's the Met's orchestra,
which Levine. transformed from a
competen\ pit ensemble into the jewel
of Carnegie Hall.
The Boulez-Chereau Ring leapt
into new ways of performing standard
repertoire. First performances
provoked fistfights in the audience,
a reliable sign that somebody's on
to something good.. Their Ring
stands apart from both the romantic
realism of traditionalist Rings arid the
abstract symbolism that Wieland Wagner
introduced at Bayreuth in 1951.
Cherau'~ staging is realism transferred
to the industrializing Europe
of Wagner's time. Boulez takes
wide interpretive latitude, replacing
thick romanticism with limpid orchestral
textures . .
Given Boulez' key role in contemporary
composition, we are definitely
not in the gimmicky realm of
performing Mozart in black leather
motorcycle jackets rather than creating
new music. Boulez and Chereau
comment on the meanings of Wagner's
mythic operas for our own industrial
era. Their comments do
resonate: some ofmy musically conservative
colleagues find that the
Boulez-Chereau Ring speaks to them
like no other.
That being said, there is an unequaled
majesty in the Met's romanticism,
even with outlandish costumes
that are continual fodder for
cartoonists. Vocally, the Met's cast
is several cuts above the 1980 Bayreuth
production. The best index of
this majesty is the amount of German
spoken by the audience during
a Met Ring cycle. Germans fly
across the Atlantic to get Der Echter
Wagner.
The bottom line: start with the Mel's
Ring on Universal's Deutsche Gramophone
label. If you're a Wagnerite,
you will eventually want the
Boulez-Chereau Ring on Universal 's
Philips label.
AFTER ALL THAT DEADLY serious
Wagner, I suggest indulging in
the Royal Opera's delightful 1984
Flederl71£lus production, now available
as a Kultur DVD. That's what
I'm doing now after reviewing three
audio and two video Ring cycles.
I'm no fan of Strauss waltzes,
which are right and proper for skating
rinks. However, the marriage
of Strauss' music to text by Offenbach's
librettists, Meilhac and
Halevy, is letter perfect. It takes as
much talent, maybe more, to be consistently
funny as it does to be tragic.
The scenery on Covent Garden's
large stage is appropriately
palatial. Above all, there's superb
singing by Kiri Te Kanawa as Rosalinde
and Hermann Prey as Eisenstein.
Placido Domingo, just
beginning his career as a conductor,
is not above singing from the podium
to draw laughs. All in all, a
witty, delightful performance of Vienna's
wittiest and most delightful
operetta.
•
Music THEATRE SPOTLIGHT
by Sarah B. Hood
Openings Galore for April
A CAD IAN INCURSION
This is the busiest month on the
Toronto music theatre scene in years!
One of the biggest openings is the
world premiere of Pelagie, A Musical
Dml71£l by Allen Cole and Vincent
de Tourdonnet, a co-production
between CanStage, the National
Arts Ceqtre and the Atlantic Theatre
Festival that runs from April 5
to May 1 at.the St. . Lawrence Centre.
The show uses 17 performers
and a band of seven to dramatize the
acclaimed novel Pelagie-la-Charette
by Antonine Maillet, about the fictional
Acadian heroine Pelagie and
her lover, real-life Acadian hero
Joseph Beausoleil.
Its creators had rnany discussions
about how to use the wonderful body
of Acadian music in the production,
says de Tourdonnet. "It made sense
for us to say that Allen's score would
be a unique idiom for this show, but
. when a character plays a fiddle or
when there's a wedding on stage,
they will play traditional Acadian
music," he explains. "The show
could be said to have a kind of magic
realism; the story has the shape
of a people's history, with the magic,
mythical dimension that comes
from that," he adds.
Meanwhile at its Berkeley Street
site, CanStage presents a second
musical, The wst 5 Years, from
April 22 to May 19. Written by Jason
Robert Brown, the show - about
a five-year relationship - won the
2001 NY Drama Desk Award for
Music and Lyrics. It stars Tyley
Ross (Sweeney Todd, Tommy) and
Blythe Wilson (Stratford's Threepenny
Opera).
MUSIC HALL MEMORIES
"Brecht says: If you want to learn
how to write a play, just see Karl
Valentin," says Peter Froehlich. If
you've never heard of Valentin, you
probably haven't spent much time
in Germany, where the memory of
the multitalented Bavarian music hall
performer is very much alive. Froehlich
's new play Simpl explores Valentin's
doggedly apolitical career
through the years leading up to the
Third Reich. John Millard supplies
a musical score that reflects the preca
baret tradition known as
Volkssiinger. "We try and get the
flavour of the kitsch music of the
Viflcent de Tourdonnet
beer halls, and then it begins to take
on the tones of the very strident,
militaristic - and quite appalling, in
some cases - music of the Third
Reich," Froehlich elaborates. Simpl
runs from l'\pril 27 to May 30 at
Tarragon Theatre. (Like CanStage,
Tarragon is also presenting a dou- .
ble-bill of theatre with music. Mieko
Ouchi's The Red Priest, about
an aristocrat who bets that his young
wife can learn to play the violin from
composer Antonio Vivaldi in only
six weeks - runs in the Extra Space
from March 30 to May 2.)
TRACY'S IN TOWN
Mirvish Productions has announced
the Canadian cast of the
Broadway smash Hairspray, which
begins performances on April 8 at
the Princess of Wales Theatre, before
a May 5 gala opening. Heroine
Tracy Tumblad. will be played by
22-year-old Vanessa Olivarez, the
popular, pink-haired finalist on
American Idol; her mother Edna will
be portrayed by Vancouver's Jay
Brazeau. Also among the principal
cast are Tom Rooney, Michael Torontow,
Susan Henley, Tara Macri,
Fran Jaye, Matthew Morgan, Paul
McQuillan, Jennifer Stewart, Kevin
Meaney and Charlotte Moore. Tickets
are available for an initial run to
September 26, 2004.
IN A WEILLMOOD ...
Once again, Theatre fran~ais de
Toronto's artistic director Guy Mignault
has crafted a musical review to
answer the c;ompany's pan-Francophone
mandate. With Autour du Kurt
CONTINUES NEXT PAGE
APRIL 1 - MAY 7 2004 WWW. THEWHOLENOTE .CO,\\ 29