Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✭✭
by Kaija Saariaho, directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
February 2-22, 2012
“Si tu t’appelles Amour je n’adore que toi”
First thoughts: Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin (“Love from Afar”) is an exquisitely beautiful opera given an absolutely dazzling production by Daniele Finzi Pasca. If you like Debussy and Ravel, you will feel right at home with Saariaho’s music that creates a soundworld so full of mystery and melancholy it draws you in and holds you spellbound.
The opera from 2000 is the first the COC has ever staged by a Finnish composer and the first ever by a female composer. Saariaho was there on opening night and the audience greeted her appearance with thundering applause and volleys of bravos, clearly as overwhelmed as I was by the depth and beauty of her achievement.
The insightful libretto by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf is based on La Vida breve of Jaufré Rudel ( died c. 1147), a prince and troubadour, famed for his celebration of unrequited love, specifically the love that overtook him for a noblewoman he had only heard about who lived in faraway Tripoli in Lebanon. Maalouf adds the enigmatic figure of the Pilgrim, who travels between the two, telling Jaufré of the woman and the woman of Jaufré and the songs that his love for her has inspired. The crisis comes when the Pilgrim persuades Jaufré to sail with her from Marseilles to Tripoli and finally meet his faraway love. Both Jaufré and the woman, Clémence, agonize over whether the real can ever match the ideal, or the mortal the divine.
Finzi Pasca, known for his work with Cirque du Soleil and Cirque Éloize, gives fantastic life to this mystical tale on stage. Each of the three characters is shadowed by two doubles who are also acrobats, expert in tumbling or aerial silks. They can represent the image one character has of another or the character’s internal emotions. This doubling is highly appropriate since mirrors, reflection and illusion are part of the imagery of the text and are expressed in the constantly shifting, wavelike music of the orchestra. On stage walls constantly appear and disappear. Characters split into three. Singers or their doubles fly over the stage. Finzi Pasca conjures up a magical world of constant metamorphosis that perfectly matches Saariaho’s music and the longing of Jaufré and Clémence for something eternal and unchanging in life.
All three singers--Russell Braun as Jaufré, Erin Wall as Clémence and Krisztina Szabó as the Pilgrim--are in top form and sing their roles with intensity and passion. Under conductor Johannes Debus, the COC Orchestra produces a gloriously lush and shimmering sound. Musically, visually and emotionally L’Amour de loin transports you to a fantastic realm so enthralling you feel sorry that it must come to an end.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: My full review of L’Amour de loin will appear in Opera News later this year.
Photo: Erin Wall and acrobat Ted Sikström. ©2012 Chris Hutcheson.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2012-02-03
L’Amour de loin