Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
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by Pauline Viardot, translated by Rachel Harris and adapted by the Cast, directed by Joel Ivany
Glenn Gould School, Mazzoleni Concert Hall, Toronto
November 18-19, 2016
Cendrillon: “De faire des heureux / et de s’en faire aimer”
The Glenn Gould School’s vocal programme has given Toronto an early Christmas present with its production of Cendrillon by Pauline Viardot. Not only is the production a treat because it brings to light a 1904 opera written by a female composer but it exposes the audience to a genre many have likely never heard of – the salon opera. The production is insightfully directed by Joel Ivany with the work’s salon origins firmly in mind and the opera showcases a number of exciting voices among the cast.
Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) was born to a Spanish family in Paris, the younger sister of the famous opera diva Maria Malibran. While Malibran lived (until 1836), Viardot’s father forbade her to sing, so instead she, a former student of Liszt and devoted friend of Chopin, gained fame as a concert pianist. After Malibran’s death she astounded Paris with her mezzo-soprano voice and composers like Gounod, Saint-Saëns and Meyerbeer wrote leading roles with her in mind. In Germany she sang the first public performance of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody.
As if these were not accomplishments enough, Viardot was also a composer. Among her many works she wrote over fifty Lieder and five salon operas. The libretti to the first three of these were written by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was enamoured of her. The last two, including Cendrillon, she composed to her own libretti. The work is written for seven voices and piano and had its premiere in Viardot’s own influential Paris salon. Though inspired by the famous tale of Charles Perrault, Viardot made her own changes to it. The setting is 1904, she changes the evil step-mother into a foolish stepfather and the fairy godmother appears as a guest at the ball.
Viardot wrote her operas with no expectation that they would ever travel beyond the venue where they first appeared – namely the salon. The salons of the 19th and early 20th centuries were presided over by women and served as meeting places for the artists, intellectuals and philanthropists of the time. Viardot’s salon operas are entertainments for the crowds gathered at a salon and their musical sophistication shows that she counted on the the best singers of the time to make up her cast.
Director Joel Ivany and his designer Anna Treusch have done as much as possible to recreate the atmosphere of a French salon at the beginning of the last century. In specific they have chosen the Hôtel de Rambouillet as their model. When you approach the entrance to the Mazzoleni Concert Hall, there are singers in early 20th-century costume sitting about a clavier in one alcove, sitting about a harpist in another, as if a musical soirée were in progress. In return for a ticket patrons are given a name card to hand to the major-domo stationed at the entrance to announce your arrival.
The stage itself is decorated as if it where a part of a salon with carpets, chairs and sofas, a screen and a grand piano at which music director Peter Tiefenbach is already seated and playing a selection of music. Singers in the chorus mill about the auditorium making conversation and sometimes speaking with audience members.
Thus Ivany and Treusch introduce us to the look and mood of a salon. Their notion is that the singers will present the opera without stage effects but using whatever might come to hand in a well-to-do household. For the big transformation scene performers rummage about in one of the two large trunks on stage for items to use as props. When the pumpkin is changed into a coach, two parasols are opened and twirled to become the wheels. When the mice become horses, two performers stick plumes in their hair and holds their arms up as if Lipizzaners prancing. The effect is of a group of performers using their imagination to appeal to our imagination and the experience is delightful.
Viardot wrote the opera for only seven singers, but Ivany and music director Peter Tiefenbach have given the work a chorus of another seven of whom three are given additional solos. Jonelle Sills is hugely impressive as Cendrillon. Not only does she have a gorgeous soprano but she is also a fine actor completely at ease on stage. The wistfulness of her first number “Il était jadis un Prince” sets the tone for the entire work and wins the audience’s empathy right from the start.
As her step-sisters Armelinde and Maguelonne, mezzo Lillian Brooks and soprano Jocelyn Fralick also display fine voices. The two sisters often sing together and the singers’s voices blend together beautifully. Thankfully the singers never push their characters’ vanity over the top.
Viardot’s alteration to the traditional story is to give Cendrillon a step-father rather than a step-mother, the Baron de Pictordu. Viardot’s satirizes both his and his daughters’ aspirations as those of the nouveaux riches. Viardot gives the Baron a comic ballad, “Hier je vis circuler une voiture immense” very much in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, where the Baron explains his rise from his former lowly station as a mere greengrocer to his present position in the lower aristocracy. He mentions that he spent 20 years in prison but no one cares. Ivany provides a reason by having the Baron admit that he repackaged ordinary Maxwell House coffee as high-end organic coffee and sold it at exorbitant prices. Full-voiced baritone Kjel Erickson brings off this ballad perfectly with the comic sense that the more we know about the Baron the more foolish we think him.
Cendrillon’s fairy godmother known only as La Fée has been cleverly costumed as a pre-Raphaelite maiden from the end of the 19th century. Soprano Irinia Medvedeva makes La Fée into a lovably eccentric character, perhaps a bit dotty but nevertheless caring. Medvedeva tosses off the coloratura passages Viardot gives her with ease.
Viardot doesn’t give Le prince Charmant all that much to sing. She has him appear to Cendrillon first as a beggar and then as his own valet to give out the invitations. Patrick Simms has an English-style tenor and sings what Viardot gives him, notably the duet “C'est moi, ne craignez rien!” with a pleasing rounded tone though he is rather less at home on stage than the others. As the Prince’s comic valet Comte Barigoule, John-Michael Scapin is quite the reverse. He has a high, light and agile tenor but basically takes over the entire stage in his big number “Puisque me voila Prince” in which Barigoule revels in his chance to play the prince for a day. Scapin is not only a fine comic actor but has clearly also had training as a dancer given how gracefully he glides and even leaps about the stage.
Cendrillon is invited to a ball given by the Prince, but what Viardot emphasizes is rather different. At the “ball” the guests mostly sit about on chairs and sofas while Barigoule, still impersonating the Prince, asks the ladies to provide a little entertainment (“Eh bien, mesdames, faites un petit concert”). Thus, Viardot in effect presents a salon within a salon with Viardot’s invited salon guests watching a mildly satirical vision of themselves on stage.
One built-in joke is that Barigoule asks both of Cendrillon’s step-sisters to sing, but they are too embarrassed. Instead, in the original, La Fée, who has attended along with Cendrillon, enthusiastically agrees. The number of songs inserted at this juncture is rather like the number of performances inserted into the ball scene in Die Fledermaus (1874), the plot basically is put on hold for a selection of entertainment for its own sake. Rather than have La Fée sing, Ivany and Tiefenbach have assigned songs to three performers in the chorus – Lynn Isnar, Kendra Dyck and Joanna Burt. Of these Isnar’s seductive Carmen-like ballad is the most effective because of her greater control both of voice and acting.
Not only is Viardot’s writing for the individual singer unfailingly attractive, her writing for the chorus “Quelle est cette belle inconnue?” when it is astounded by Cendrillon’s beauty is absolutely gorgeous and filled with unusual harmonies. It is also a deliciously ironic moment when the Prince still xin disguise does not at first recognize Cendrillon because of how she is dressed.
Viardot’s Cendrillon is filled with such beautiful writing and so many subtly delicious scenes that we owe the Glenn Gould School a major debt of gratitude for choosing to stage the work and to Joel Ivany and his cast for bringing the work so engagingly to life. It may seem greedy, but I certainly would be happy to see an encore presentation of Cendrillon, especially since its two performances were already sold out before it opened. Perhaps Ivany could have his own opera company, Against the Grain Theatre, stage it so that more people have the chance to experience it. Cendrillon is a gem in itself. The Glenn Gould School production proves that this work and its composer deserve to be much more widely known.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) John-Michael Scapin as Le Comte Barigoule, Jonelle Sills as Cendrillon and Patrick Simms as Le Prince Charmant with ensemble; Irinia Medvedeva as la Fée, Jonelle Sills as Cendrillon and Patrick Simms as Le Prince Charmant with ensemble. ©2016 Nicola Betts.
For tickets, visit http://performance.rcmusic.ca.
2016-11-19
Cendrillon