Opera in Review
CANADA
BANFF
The premiere of Veronika Krausas and André Alexis’ Ghost Opera played to a sold out audience at the Banff Centre’s 950-seat Eric Harvie Theatre on May 24th. The collaboration between the Centre, Calgary Opera and the Calgary-based Old Trout Puppet Workshop featured Calgary Opera’s eight emerging artists, eleven musicians and a host of puppeteers.
The 95-minute piece, which tells an ancient haunted house story uncovered by Canadian novelist Alexis, was presented as a dramma giocoso. Exquisitely crafted puppets, together with their human cohorts, delivered the oftentimes wacky, but ultimately morbid tale of murder, revenge, and suicide.
A rich old lady, Phillipa, is confronted by her deadbeat nephew looking for another handout. The parasite loses patience, stabs his aunt, and throws her body into a well. (This is easy to do when the body is a puppet.) The body lies in the well, preventing the soul from crossing into the underworld, and Phillipa’s spirit is stranded. Thus ensues the haunting.
The greedy nephew pitches the property to a family of four, but even before the transaction closes, strange things begin to happen. The family Pomeranian begins to fly. The puppeteer gave the stuffed pooch some Cirque de Soleil flair, and the crowd loved it.
Some of the humour lays in Alexis’ fine libretto, which traces the arc of the dark sitcom-like plot without creaky excursions into forced rhyming or needless exposition. Like much contemporary opera, a lot of the dialogue is delivered as recitativo, and Alexis’ phrases seemed easy to sing. A lot of the humour, though, certainly came from the fact that each character was both a human singer and a puppet avatar manipulated by one or two puppeteers who jerked and glided their charges about the proscenium stage while their associated singer delivered the story. The effect was, especially in Act I, often chaotic, not through any fault of Old Trouts founding directors Judd Palmer, Peter Balkwell and Pityu Kenderes (their blocking was highly focused and effectively fluid), but because so much core and peripheral business scattered one’s attention.
And there were crossover questions, as well. Baritone Adam Harris arffed and woofed as Bennington, the intuitive family pet who knew a leeching relative when he smelled one. But Harris also scooted about the stage on all fours beside the puppeteer handling the stuffed pup, confusing to a degree the duty of the human and the prop. In quieter moments, though, when a puppet held the frame and the singer stood aside to sing his or her part, the operatic feel of the piece was unequivocally serious and coherent.
This more staid effect was especially notable in the briefer second act, when the relationship between Philippa and the new tenant, the old philosopher Athenodorus, developed. (Baritone Jonah Spungin was a standout in the role, although all the singing was accomplished.) The rationalist boasted that he was not susceptible to metaphysical nonsense as he negotiated with the now exasperated owners, still desperate after decades of ghostly intrusions to unload the creepy property. The Trouts’ puppet design for the philosopher evoked the gravitas of a classical bust, and in the final scenes with the equally evocative old-lady puppet, there were moments when the character being a puppet or a person became irrelevant. While there was much giddy laughter in Act I, there was a subdued silence for much of the final act.
Krauses, who was raised in Calgary and teaches theory at UCLA, has written several chamber operas which have been widely performed mainly in the USA. The writing for this opera is compact, with many exposed moments for solo instruments. Krausas gave the two percussionists many interesting moments of pulsing effect. She also inserted some broad musical comedy and reverential choral writing. The Monty-Pythonesque gravediggers’ scene in Act I, with its oom-pah-pah rhythm and unpolished choreography, was a hilarious.
The set was simple, a truncated spiral staircase with a platform and the well on top, some narrow drapes that passed for columns, and a large classical statue in Act I that the nephew passed off as Philippa’s body in a sham funeral.
The orchestra, led with nuanced control by Kimberly-Ann Bartczak, sat stage right, and handled its role impeccably.
Ghost Opera moved to Calgary for eight performances after the Banff premiere.
Against the Grain Theatre’s Artistic Director Joel Ivany has a penchant for adaptations, or “transadaptations” as he calls them, and the incubation for much of his novel reimaginings of classic operas such as Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni took place at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where Ivany has just wrapped up his sixth summer stint as head of the Centre’s Opera in the 21st Century program.
The second show of this year’s opera development program, which I saw Jul. 4th and 5th at the Margaret Greenham Theatre, was a different kind of adaptation, an operatic version of Carlos Reygadas’s austere film Stellet Licht (Silent Light), which tells the story of infidelity in a Mexican Mennonite colony in the most unoperatic way imaginable. The film is hyper-attentive to the quotidian and is emotionally remote compared to typical operatic, or even cinematic, fare.
Operas drawn from films are now as common as operas made into films. In 2016, The Met staged Tom Cairns and Thomas Adès’s Exterminating Angel, inspired by Luis Buñuel’s film, and Opera Philadelphia mounted Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, based on the film by Lars von Trier. The librettist for both Breaking the Waves and Silent Light is Alberta-born, Brooklynbased Royce Vavrek.
The Reygadas film has no soundtrack, only natural sounds and the noises of everyday rural life—a clock ticking, vehicles on a dirt road, workers in a machine shop, kitchen activities, cows mooing to be milked. This musical void gave New York composer Paula Prestini a blank slate upon which to convey her reading of Johan, his wife Esther, and Johan’s lover Marianne’s emotional identities.
Christopher Rountree led a five-piece ensemble of trumpet, trombone, violin, cello and percussion, augmented by Foley artist Sxip Shirey. Using several soloists and a chorus drawn from this year’s contingent of emerging artists, Prestini laid out the vibe of a stolid Mennonite community inflicted with an underlying turmoil triggered by Johan’s unfaithfulness. One long note would catch up to another, shaping a feeling, a resonance, more than a melodic or chordal progression. The mood was often unsettled, at times acerbic, thanks to intermittent stabbing brass and spurts of glissandi, but Prestini resisted falling over the edge into melodrama, as befitted the generally phlegmatic characters she was portraying. And to add some realism to the musical commentary, the Foley artist spritzed water into a bowl to make the sound of cows being milked and took a grinder to a metal bowl to imitate the din of a machine shop.
The vocal writing for the soloists had a lot recitative, but Prestini has also written some intense
