✭✭✭✭✩

by Alban Berg, directed by Lotfi Mansouri

Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto

March 31-April 13, 2006

Wozzeck was the final opera to open in the Canadian Opera Company’s soon-to-be-former home, the Hummingbird Centre.  To symbolize the end of an era, COC General Director Richard Bradshaw invited Lotfi Mansouri, COC General Director from 1976-1988, to direct the revival of his production that was a major success in 1990.  This Wozzeck was only the second opera production ever designed by Michael Levine, now designer for the first-ever Canadian Ring Cycle that will open the COC’s new home at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in September this year.

The production showed the company at its very best.  Levine’s design focused on half the stage at a time thus allowing a continuous flow of action.  Stage left, dominated by an oversized door in a white wall, was the domain of the Captain and the Doctor.  Stage right, entered through an undersized door in a grimy wall was Wozzeck and Marie’s dwelling.  The walls rotated inwards to form the tavern and the pond, the divide between the walls growing greater as Wozzeck’s madness progressed. 

It was announced from the stage at the first performance (seen March 31) that the Wozzeck, Pavlo Hunka, was suffering from laryngitis but would still perform.  In fact, the illness produced no noticeable effect on his voice that seemed just as powerful and resonant as ever.  Indeed, it was a pleasure at last to hear the role not barked out but truly sung.  Hunka thereby revealed the lyricism in Wozzeck’s lines appropriate to a character beset with visions of eternity.  He made devastating moments of Wozzeck’s insight that “man is an abyss” and his repetition of Marie’s phrase that she would rather be killed.  Soprano Giselle Allen’s began with a tone that seemed too warm for Marie, but that beginning served only as a foil for Marie’s later increasing anguished outbursts sung out with fearless precision.  Robert Künzli and Artur Korn created memorably satirical portraits of the cowardly Captain and the fanatical Doctor.  Tenor Richard Berkeley-Steele looked the ideal Drum Major but was the only principal to indulge in shouting.  The COC chorus, an animated gallery of George Grosz caricatures, sang superbly.  Mansouri drew highly detailed performances from the entire cast in a staging fully alive to Berg’s onomatopoeic references.  Bradshaw led the COC orchestra in a searing, incisive account of the score that clearly highlighted the formal structures underlying Berg’s massive torrents of sound.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2006-06.

Photo: Pavlo Hunka. ©Artists Management Zurich.