✭✭✩✩✩ / ✭✭✭✭✩

by Harry Somers

Soundstreams, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto

May 26-29, 2004

Soundstreams has revived two works by the late Harry Somers that had not been performed since their premieres in the late 1970s.  The Death of Enkidu (1977) had been intended as Part One of an unfinished operatic trilogy based on the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.  Despite committed performances from both orchestra and singers under Les Dala, the work emerged as an intractably flawed piece. 

The libretto by Martin Kinch wherein the dying mythic hero Enkidu internally relives turning points in his life is static and undramatic.  Kinch’s text is allusive to the point of obscurity.  His mixing of ancient Akkadian with English along with Somers’ penchant for long sustained vowels ensures that only the few scraps of spoken English are comprehensible. In creating an atmosphere of exotic barbarism though a compendium of stale percussive effects, Somers generates little forward momentum. 

David Pomeroy unfurled his heroic tenor in the title role.  Julie Nesrallah’s rich mezzo shone in her various ululations.  Alain Coulombe, Gregory Dahl and Doug MacNaughton took the thankless roles of the Three Soldiers.  The work was presented in concert with three members of Dancetheatre David Earle embodying reactions to the events while leaving the story itself unillumined.

In contrast, Somers’s The Merman of Orford (1978), a originally a mime, now reimagined as a ballet by David Earle, was a delight.  The sequence of folk-influence rhythms and wistful sonorities from an eclectic quartet of instruments under Les Dala gave dramatic thrust to the intriguing tale of a stranded merman, danced with great sensitivity by Graham McKelvie, who copes with the alien environments of land and human conventions until a sympathetic soul leads him back to the sea.          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera Canada 2004-09-22.

Photo: Graham McKelvie. ©2011 Dancetheatre David Earle.