Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
by Dean Burry, directed by Duncan McIntosh
Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus,
Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto
May 15-16, 2004
Anticipation was high on May 15 when the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus unveiled The Hobbit, the work it had commissioned from Newfoundland-born composer Burry and the first opera based on a novel by JRR Tolkien. Both the opera and the production proved to be great successes.
Burry’s libretto for this prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy has the great advantage of avoiding the moralizing that spoils so many works for children. Through a series of exciting episodes it straightforwardly depicts the quest of various denizens of Middle Earth to wrest a stolen treasure from the dragon Smaug. Throughout his adventures the hobbit Bilbo Baggins is a reluctant hero, preferring in his wistful refrain to be back home “in my nice cozy house”. Burry implies rather than spells out that only cooperation among the peoples of Middle Earth can bring success. While he does not depict the death of the dragon itself, he does not shy away from the death of the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield and thereby makes the work more than merely an adventure for treasure but an adventure through life.
Musically he has given each of the beings--hobbits, dwarves, elves, goblins, wargs, spiders--distinctive rhythms and musical styles. Burry has correlated musically complexity with the age of the intended singers so that the six teenaged Elf-maidens, who act as guardians of the action, sing narration with a more advanced, Celtic-influenced harmonic language than do the younger hobbits with their strophic folksongs. Burry seems to have learned from Britten how spin spare, intriguing melodies that suit the volume level a child or group of children can produce.
Stage director Duncan McIntosh directed the cast of 80 with precision and imagination and drew animated performances from Stephen Robins as Bilbo, Gordon Hecht as Thorin and John Fanning, the sole adult, doubling as a grandfatherly Gandalf and the voice of Smaug. Julia Tribe created a set of scintillating blue strips and her design for Gollum was as shuddersome as her Smaug was marvellous. Conductor Ann Cooper Gay led chorus the four-member ensemble in a taut, highly committed performance. This is a work children will not only wish to see but long to be in.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera Canada 2004-09-22.
Photo: John Fanning with members of the CCOC. ©2004.
2004-05-16
The Hobbit