Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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music by George Frideric Handel, libretto by Deborah Pearson, directed by Ross Manson
Volcano and the Classical Music Consort, Gladstone Hotel, Toronto
August 20-31, 2012
“Heartless Bitch!”
If you want to prove to adult friends that opera can be fun, take them to see A Synonym for Love now playing at the Gladstone Hotel at 1214 Queen Street West. The opera is actually a staged version of the cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno from 1707 by George Frideric Handel given an entirely new libretto in English by British playwright Deborah Pearson. She transfers the action from the timeless pastoral world of shepherds and shepherdesses so beloved of 18th-century poets to not only the present day but to the Gladstone Hotel itself. Contrary to traditional opera, in Synonym, the action does not occur on a fixed stage but in the midst of the audience and we have to follow the three singers of a love triangle through the rooms of the hotel as they try to sort out their conflicts. It’s really something everyone can enjoy.
Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, subtitled “Cor fidele in vano speri” (“A faithful heart hopes in vain”) was written in Italy when Handel was only 22 and the air of buoyant, youthful inspiration infuses the whole piece. The cantata was thought to be lost until in 1960 a German musicologist happened upon the complete score, the only one in existence, in a library in Münster. Since then it has received much attention. In 2001 Lee Blakeley directed the staged world premiere at the Heaven nightclub in London, England.
As Blakeley’s production showed a work dealing with pastoral life can be surprisingly easily transformed to a modern urban setting. Pastoral literature depicts an idealized vision mankind living in harmony with nature and the seasons with herding animals as its only occupation. Early on, however, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s influential pastoral novel Arcadia (c. 1580), life in an idyllic setting does not mean that human beings get on perfectly with each other. Indeed, one of the principal subjects of pastoral literature is the conflicts in love among the various shepherds and shepherdesses. The idealized setting this serves as a constant against which the variability and nature of love can be analyzed.
Handel’s original libretto concerned the love of two shepherds, Tirsi and Fileno for the same shepherdess Clori, who encourages them both. By the end the two shepherds see through her double dealing and denounce her. Pearson’s new libretto actually hews quite closely to the twists of the original plot, but she adds interest by changing Tirsi from a man to a woman, Teresa, and making Clori bisexual. Pearson’s libretto may be modern and include the odd four-letter word, but part of the humour of the piece is to see how human expressions of love, betrayal and remorse have changed so little even with the change in time and setting from bucolic to urban.
When the audience enters the Gladstone Hotel, it is divided into three groups, one for each character, for whom guides are present in the guise of hotel staff to lead your group to follow your character. Ideally, you would attend in a group of at least three so that you could all compare notes about what happened for the middle 30 minutes of the 85-minute show when you are separated.
Pearson presents us with Clori (soprano Tracy Smith Bessette), who has left her partner Teresa (soprano Emily Atkinson) in Calgary to have a dirty weekend with her lover Phil (counter-tenor Scott Belluz) at the Gladstone. Clori faces two major problems. Unbeknownst to her, Teresa has followed her to the Gladstone from Calgary to confront her and Phil is starting to fall in love with Clori, even though Clori claims she wants to live commitment-free. The action begins in the Gladstone’s ballroom, proceeds in stages to a confrontation in the “Love Nest” bedroom that Phil has booked and ends after various encounters in halls and stairs in the ballroom again for a final reckoning.
Pearson’s adaptation abounds in wit. For the confrontation between Teresa and Clori near the end, Tirsi’s aria “Barbaro! tu no credi” becomes “Heartless bitch!” and the da capo portion is given to Clori allowing her to call Teresa the same thing. As in the original the show concludes with the trio “Vivere e non amar, amare e non languir” which Pearson renders as “Everyone who loves must love alone”, bringing to the fore the existential dissection of love inherent in the pastoral in the first place.
Director Ross Manson has managed the logistical problems of staging an opera in multiple sites with great imagination. I was assigned to Clori. While Phil and Teresa left the ballroom for different reason we were left alone with Clori nursing her drink. Only the bassist from the 14-member Classical Music Consort remained and the waiter Derek Kwan, who served as the Guide for Clori’s group. The bassist Joelle Morton began plucking her instrument in an ever jazzier style leading Bessette to launch into a rendition of Cole Porter’s “I’ll always be true to you darling in my fashion” from Kiss Me, Kate, which perfectly summed up her mercurial nature. The fun was only heightened when Kwan jumped in to harmonize.
When we arrived at the “Love Nest”, curtains pulled aside revealed most of the CMC already there as if they were one of the surprises Phil had arranged to impress Clori. When the orchestra had to exit to accompany Teresa, Phil tries to seduce Clori by dancing to a Barry White song played from his iPad. Clori says that kind of music does nothing for her and switches the channel to a recoding of the CMC playing the accompaniment for her next aria, thus creating a kind of baroque karaoke.
All three singers give fine performances as both singers and actors. Atkinson has to spend much of the time silent, consumed with anger and sorrow, and creates such intensity we can’t avoid looking at her and watching her reactions to the pleasure of Phil and Clori. Though Atkinson and Bessette are both sopranos, the former’s bright colouring contrasts well with the darker hue of the latter. Belluz give the lie to the notion that counter-tenors lack a richness of voice. He’s a strong actor and has a good sense of comic timing.
Ashiq Aziz conducts the CMC from the harpsichord with consistently lively, precise rhythms and emphasizes the change in key from aria to aria as a way of underscoring the change of mood each represents. Acoustically, the Gladstone is not an ideal venue. Sound leaks into the ballroom from the traffic outside and from the bar inside, but the point of this endeavour is to bring confound people’s notions that classical music can only happen in a few restricted spaces. Here the fun of the experience trumps any worries about isolation of sound. This collaboration between Volcano and the CMC is such a success, I look forward to more co-productions in the future.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Tracy Smith Bessette as Clori. ©2012 John Lauener.
For tickets, visit http://volcano.ca.
2012-08-21
A Synonym for Love