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by Cecilia Livingston & Donna McKevitt, directed by Tim Albery

Soundstreams, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

April 24-27, 2025

“I stand at the edge of the sea”

In September 2021 Soundstreams gave Garden of Vanished Pleasures its world premiere. Since that was during the height of the pandemic the premiere was in the form of a video. Now Soundstreams is giving the piece its first live performances. I did not see the work in 2021 because by then I had found online performances of works for live audiences to be too depressing. Theatre and music companies were doing the best they could, but nothing can replace sharing the same physical space with the people who are acting or making music. I would have found this especially true of Garden of Vanished Pleasures which is very like a meditative ritual that that requires the presence of people to witness and be moved by it. Garden is a gorgeous work whose contemplative tone gradually deepens throughout its 75 minutes.

The idea for Garden comes from its director Tim Albery, who has directed operas in Toronto as different as Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (2006), R. Murray Schafer’s The Children’s Crusade (2009), Brian Current’s Airline Icarus (2014) and Richard Strauss’s Arabella (2017). The focus for Albery’s concept is Prospect Cottage Garden created by renowned British artist, filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (1942-94) who died of AIDS at the age of 52. Jarman is known for a series of controversial gay-themed films like Sebastiane (1976), a film about the saint of the 3rd century AD with dialogue in Latin; Caravaggio (1986) about the 16th-century painter; and Edward II (1991) based on Marlowe’s play about the 14th-century English king and his male lover.

In 1986 when Jarman was diagnosed with HIV, he moved from London to Prospect Cottage in Kent on the shore within sight of the Dungeness nuclear power station. On the shingle he built a cottage garden composed of flotsam and halophytes, i.e., plants that thrive in salty conditions. Jarman himself referred to his creation as a “garden of vanished pleasures”. Prospect Cottage and its garden represent the courage to live and thrive under the threat of obliteration.

Though advertised as an “opera”, Garden is really a staged song-cycle for four voices – two sopranos, one mezzo-soprano and one counter-tenor. Albery already knew of the song-cycle Translucence (1997) written by British composer Donna McKevitt based on the writings of Jarman. McKevitt had worked as a composer on Jarman’s last film Blue (1993). With the composers’ collaboration Albery chose selections from Translucenceand interspersed them with songs by Canadian composer Cecilia Livingston to texts by Walter de la Mare, Duncan McFarlane as well as poems by Livingston herself in order to create the emotional arc he wanted Garden to take.

In general, the 22 pieces that make up Garden move from a focus on the self to one looking beyond the self, from pain and anger to sadness and acceptance. The only one of the four singers who could be said to portray a character is countertenor Daniel Cabena. Cabena enters in a long black cloak which he sloughs off to reveal a white, gauzy nightgown with a lace-up bodice underneath. He undoes his pony tail to let his long hair flow, puts on earrings and lipstick and lies in the old-fashioned hospital bed that is the set’s main piece of furniture. This happens over the period of several songs and seems to indicate Jarman revealing his genderfluidity and onset of his illness it at the same time.

The two sopranos and one mezzo are clad in black and are not separate characters from Cabena’s nightgowned personage but act as internal voices. Texts by Jarman are shared by all four singers. As the cycle progresses, Cabena goes off-stage and re-enters again wearing his black cloak. The three other singers, who have at one point revealed red T-shirts under their black jackets, again don their jackets so that by the end all four singers are clad in black. Up to the very end the full-voiced Cabena has sung separately from the other three singers. As the end nears, the four finally all sing together as if Jarman’s personality is crystallizing before he reaches the end of his life, and end made clear in the penultimate song “I walk in this garden” (music by McKevitt, text by Jarman) stating: “My gilly flower, roses, violets blue, sweet garden of vanished pleasures. / Please come back next year / Cold, cold, cold, I die so silently. Good night boys, Good night Johnny. Good night, Good night”.

It is difficult to choose favourite moments from a work that flows so smoothly even when singers begin new sections through spoken introductions. Nevertheless, I admit I found the a cappella pieces sung in delicious close harmony by sopranos Mireille Asselin and Danika Lorèn and mezzo Hillary Tufford particularly enthralling, especially in “Translucence” (music by McKevitt, text by Jarman) about a ghost, Mister See-through, who seems to reflect Cabena’s own transformation as Jarman: “Today he’s changed his sex. / She wears a dress of silk gossamer so fine that any bride could pull it through a wedding ring”.

The highpoint of the cycle is the sequence of “Two Dreams” (music and text by Cecilia Livingston) followed by “Sebastiane” (music by McKevitt, Latin text by Jarman). “Two Dreams” beginning with hesitantly repeated words finally emerging as “I stand at the edge of the sea” feels like both a contemplation of suicide and a deep longing to merge with the immensity of nature. This theme is carried on in the exquisitely beautiful “Sebastiane” in which the saint martyred by arrows is also compared to an arrow, where the leaving of life is likened to joining a greater life: “Ad solem modo sagittae advolat / Nox non umquam eum occupabit / Diseessit ab horis orbis atris” (“Like an arrow he flies to the sun / No night shall ever shroud him / He leaves the dark hours of the world”).

It's rather too bad that the brash song “I am a mannish muff diving size queen” (music by McKevitt, text by Jarman) immediately follows “Sebastiane”. I realize the contrast of tones – hushed versus wild, sacred versus profane – is intentional, but “Sebastiane” conjured up such serenity I hated to have mood broken so quickly. At the same time, only I am a mannish…” and “Parting” (music Livingston, text by Janey Lew) of the 22 songs move at a faster tempo than the stately andante that characterizes the entire cycle. While the piece is meant to evoke a meditative frame of mind, the texts themselves seem to ask for more variety.

Both Livingston and McKevitt compose in a mode influenced by the sparseness of Arvo Pärt. The expert trio of pianist Hyejin Kwon, violist, Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh and cellist Amahl Arulanandam seldom play at once. Quite often soloists sing over a repeated figure in the strings or in the piano. In the final song “I walk in this garden”, one or two separated notes from the cello suggest there is any accompaniment at all.

The setting is as sparse as the music. Michelle Tracey’s set consists of an off-white backdrop long enough also to serve as a floorcloth. The most dominant feature of the set is a bed, but this is eventually rolled away. Another is a raised bowl of water in which Cabena washes his hands at the start as if beginning a ritual. That, too, is carried away. Third are rocks that towards the end the cast uses to form a circle, a circle in which they all four are found lying down at the conclusion.

On the backdrop Cameron Davis has composed continuous projections that illustrate the themes of the music. Unlike the use of projections in too many operas and musicals, Davis’s set the scene for each song subtly and unobtrusively. A mirror ball for one song fades out and the revolving beam on a lighthouse takes its place. An overhead view of water washes up on a beach plays throughout “Two Dreams” and dissolves into an upward scan of Andrea Mantegna’s painting of Saint Sebastian (c. 1459) during “Sebastiane”, creating a wonderful contrast between the beauty of nature and art and the suggestion that art can transform a horrible death like Sebastian’s into an eternal beauty.

Garden of Vanished Pleasures is a profound and moving work, beautifully sung and played and directed and designed with great sensitivity. The work itself provides a restful haven from the crassness and noise of the outside world, much like Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Garden must have provided for him.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Daniel Cabena, Mireille Asselin and Danika Lorèn; Daniel Cabena; Mireille Asselin, Danika Lorèn; Hillary Tufford and Daniel Cabena. © 2025 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets visit: soundstreams.ca.