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by Igor Stravinsky, directed by Robert Lepage

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

April 13-May 19, 2018

Le Rossignol: “Ah, joie empli mon coeur”

The first revival of Robert Lepage’s production of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables by the Canadian Opera Company since its debut in 2009 proved that it has rapidly become one the most loved new productions the company has created.  A co-production with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and Opéra national de Lyon, Nightingale focusses not on new technology but instead on the use of traditional crafts and ancient story-telling practices.  The result is even more colourful and ingenious than this reviewer recalled. 

Inspired by several Asian puppet theatre traditions and Stravinsky’s own iconoclasm in Renard (1916) and The Nightingale (1914) in banishing singers to the pit, Lepage reconfigures the auditorium’s performance space.  He places the orchestra on stage and fills the pit with a tank holding 17,700 gallons of water.  The water becomes the aquatic stage for The Nightingale for the second half of the evening.  Two Chinese-style platforms on either side of the tank plus another behind the orchestra half-hidden by a long, narrow screen become the prime

playing areas for the first half, for which Lepage has chosen seven short instrumental and vocal pieces by Stravinsky using Ragtime (1918) as an overture and concluding with Renard.

The introductory non-operatic folksong adaptations are illustrated by amusingly inventive hand-shadows cast on the screen by six amazingly talented acrobat/puppeteers.  Renard is illustrated by the same troupe who combined tumbling with Balinese-inspired shadow puppets behind the screen.  The Nightingale itself is accompanied by a fantastic display of Vietnamese water puppetry, where lavishly costumed singers, waist-deep in water, move boats across the pit while animating the intricately detailed bunraku-like puppets on board. The costumed chorus hold doll-sized versions of themselves that react to the various events in Nightingale. 

Thus Lepage takes us on a journey not just through Stravinsky’s works but through theatrical representation itself. Two-dimensional hand shadows accompanying the introductory songs are followed by shadows of arms, legs and torsos for Renard to fully-seen three-dimensional performers manipulating puppets.  The great concluding irony is that Death as a puppet, manipulated by many invisible puppeteers, is seen as manipulating the fully human Emperor in The Nightigale. The ending where the Nightingale’s song frees the Emperor from the gigantic puppet of Death seems to symbolize the victory of art over mortality.

Johannes Debus, not looking entirely comfortable when on his platform cantilevered over the pit of water, nevertheless draws tart harmonies and and precise syncopation from the COC Orchestra in Stravinsky’s Ragtime (1918) and Renard. The orchestra produces a rich and gorgeous sound-world for Nightingale that clearly relates the early Stravinsky work back to Rimsky-Kosakov. 

In the “Short Fables” section of the evening following the introduction, Allyson McHardy shines in Pribaoutki (1914) as does Lindsay Ammann in Berceuses du chat (1916) and Danika Lorèn in Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont (1911).  Members of the COC Chorus give an account of Four Russian Peasant Songs (1914-17) full of wry humour.  As interludes between song sequences, Lepage has placed Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet: No. 3 (1919) that fascinatingly combine jazz and folk influences and are played with great vivacity by Juan Olivares.  

The quartet of tenors Miles Mykkanen and Owen McCausland, baritone Bruno Roy and bass Oleg Tsibulko give a lively performance of Renard, with Mykkanen especially humorous in altering his tone to suit the fox’s several disguises.

In Nightingale, Jane Archibald’s brilliant but emotion-laden coloratura lends the Nightingale more personality than did Olga Peretyatko in 2009. Owen McCausland’s smooth, sensitive tenor highlights the warm humanity of the Fisherman and his deep sense of longing. Oleg Tsibulko’s resonant bass expresses both the pride and humility in the Emperor. Once again Lepage’s production overwhelms us with its wit, its beauty and its celebration of the theatrical traditions of so many countries working together in aesthetic harmony. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a version of the review of this production that will appear later this year in Opera News.

Photo: (from top) Jane Archibald as the Nightingale and Oleg Tsibulko as the Emperor; Miles Mykkanen as the Fox and Owen McCausland as Tenor 2 in Renard;  Michael Uloth as the Bonze, Anatoli Sivko as the Chamberlain, Lauren Eberwein as the Cook and Jane Archibald as the Nightingale. ©2018 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.