Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
written by James Rolfe, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, Enwave Theatre, Toronto
February 22-March 1, 2009
The world premiere of Inês by Queen of Puddings Music Theatre (QoP) on February 22, 2009, brought together the talents of Canadian composer James Rolfe, best known for QoP’s breakthrough opera Beatrice Chancy (1998), and British librettist Paul Bentley, acclaimed for his libretti for Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale (2000) as well as QoP’s The Midnight Court (2005). If the 77-minute work (seen February 26) seemed more like a draft for a longer opera than a fully satisfying one-acter, it is because Bentley’s libretto focused so tightly relaying the details of the plot it provided little room for the characters to reflect on their situation.
The opera recounts the tale of Inês de Castro (1325-55), the subject of recent operas by Thomas Pasatieri (1976) and James MacMillan (1996), famous for being posthumously declared Queen of Portugal by her lover Pedro I. Bentley reset the tale in the Portuguese community of 1960s Toronto, where many had fled the dictatorship of António Salazar. Reflecting their 14th-century namesakes, Pedro (baritone Giles Tomkins), trapped in a loveless arranged marriage with a Spanish woman Constanza (soprano Shannon Mercer), falls in love with Inês, a fado singer in a local nightclub (sung by real-life fadista Inês Santos). When Pedro’s parents (bass-baritone Thomas Goerz and mezzo Elizabeth Turnbull) find Pedro, tragedy follows. Bentley’s highly compressed libretto allowed characters only the briefest expressions of feeling--”I love you” or “It is my duty.” Pedro and Inês did not expand upon love’s power as much as retell the tale of their 14th-century counterparts. Bentley may have intended this to create a sense of fate, but instead it overrode the impulsiveness of the lovers’ actions with deadening self-consciousness.
Rolfe’s orchestral music, built both from accretions of repeated figures and the tension of drawn-out tone clusters, created a volatile atmosphere for the gratefully written soaring vocal lines of the protagonists. Rolfe helped integrate the amplified, hauntingly beautiful fado songs given Inês by including an electric guitar in his five-member orchestra. His skilful blending of amplified and unamplified voices reached it height in the powerful trio arising from Constanza’s discovery Pedro with Inês. While fado sung in Portuguese and amplified was meant deliberately to set Inês apart from rest of the operatic English-language cast, one wished that Rolfe had allowed the exquisitely melancholy melodies and subtle rhythms of fado to infuse more fully his entire score. Flawlessly sung, incisively conducted by Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and insightfully staged by Jennifer Tarver, this Inês suggested greater possibilities than it achieved.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2009-05 online.
Photo: Ines Santos and Giles Tomkins. ©John Lauener.
2009-05-01
Inês