Swine flu the germ of an idea

Stephan Zielinski, a creative San Franciscan with too much free time on his hands, has written Swine Flu Hemagglutinin, a piece of ambient music based on the genetic sequence of the amino acids in the flu bug.

Inspiration really can strike anywhere, anytime.

Tenor Villazón cancels rest of 2009

Mexican-born tenor Rolando Villazón, 37, is going into hospital to have a cyst removed from his vocal cords, according to David Ng of the Los Angeles Times. He has cancelled his engagements for the rest of the year and expects to be back in action in 2010.

Ever since Villazón's voice broke up during a Metropolitan Opera gala concert two years ago -- and a long list of cancelled dates since -- there's been a lot of speculation in the business about the state of his voice.

Here's a fun clip of him hamming it up in a La traviata rehearsal.

Is singing child labour?

In a case of bureaucratic meddling that could have made even Franz Kafka blush, the prefecture of the Oise administrative region, directly to the north of Paris, banned a boys' choir from singing in the French capital tonight, insisting that the boys should be paid to sing at a paid concert.

The Nouvel Observateur website has the story of how the 102 year-old Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois were silenced yesterday.

The choir's administrators say they can't afford to pay the boys and that, after all, choirs around the world are meant to be part of a well-rounded child's education. The story reports that the parents don't believe the kids should be paid, either.

The concert organizers encouraged ticket holders to show up anyway and sing Schubert's Ave Maria at the 10th arrondissement church as a sign of protest.

No word yet on how the evening ended.

Here are the boys singing a song written for the choir's centennial celebrations:

Opera on the Amazon

There’s an opera festival underway right now on the banks of the Rio Negro where it meets up with the Amazon River in the Brazilian rain forest.

The theme this year meshes with a countrywide celebration of French culture. This week, the 13th annual Festival Amazonas de Ópera, presented Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila and Debussy’s Pélléas et Mélisande. 

May brings Bizet’s Carmen, Berlioz’ Les troyens and, on May 31, Offenbach’s La vie parisienne.

While the overwhelmingly Brazilian cast and orchestra rehearse the closing operas, residents of the Montreal-sized city of Manaus will enjoy art-song recitals and performances of smaller works, such as Stavinsky’s Apollon Musagète and Britten’s gorgeous Illuminations for soprano and strings.

The closing Vie parisienne will be performed in the town’s main square, to an expected crowd of about 40,000 people.

La vie parisienne is an interesting choice, as the city was known as the Paris of the jungle at the end of the 19th century, when Manaus had grown into a regional trading hub to service the thriving rubber trade.

The founding of the Amazonas opera festival in 1996 marked the 100th anniversary of the opening of the gorgeous, Iberian-style opera house. It had fallen into ruin during Brazil’s economic decline after World War II and was carefully restored to its colonial-age glory in the early 1970s. Its many murals and frescoes depict scenes of Amazonian life.

The festival was part of a well-funded effort to bring high culture back Amazonas state. The city now boasts its own permanent orchestra, chorus and, as the cast lists for this year’s production show, a rich supply of local vocal talent.

Tickets cost between 10 and 80 Real, or about $5.50-$44 (Cdn.). That may seem cheap, but, in 2005, the mean income in Manaus was the equivalent of $250 per month.

That local and national governments are giving sustained support to the enterprise is wonderful enough (France’s Le Monde newspaper reported yesterday that culture minister Roberio Braga has access to 2 per cent of the state’s budget).

Seeing that people are willing to pay a relatively high price for the pleasures of opera is, in its own way, the strongest endorsement of the artform.

There is no translation available for the festival's Portuguese-language website, but anyone who understands a Latin-based language should be able to navigate it.

I found a short, 1970s government-made documentary on the restoration of the opera house on YouTube:

Opera tweet contest takes off

Guelph, Ont.-based blogger The Omniscient Mussel – a.k.a. Marcia Adair, a French horn player – has struck zeitgeist gold. Earlier this spring, she challenged fans to condense notoriously convoluted opera plots into Tweet length -- 140 characters or less. The contest was such a hit, Mussel is back with another, sporting a star judge and a boatload of prizes. The deadline is Midnight, Eastern Daylight Saving Time, on Sunday, May 3.

 Background

The opera twitter exercise, like many inspired ideas,  started on a whim, Adair explains in a press release:

“I was writing program notes for the RNCM (UK) [Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester] and tweeted that I was having trouble with word creep....one of those mundane details Twitter disparagers claim not to be interested in.  @pattyoboe, an oboist blogger I have never met from California suggested I should tweet the notes.  That seemed impractical but then I thought, what about opera?  Tweets are the perfect antidote to convoluted plot summaries... so I launched the contest with a single Tweet.  I only had about 50 followers at the time but word got out and by the time the contest ended three days later, it seemed that the whole world (ok, the whole opera world) knew about it.

“The original prizes were $30 Arkiv gift certificates I paid for myself. There was a lot of chatter on Twitter and the international press and people were sad they missed out on the original, so I decided to hold the competition again.   Opera is dramatic, so it seemed only right that the contest be reimagined on a more epic scale. Tickets seemed like the right prize because while DVDs and CDs are great, opera is all about the live theatre experience.

“I wrote to 80 houses in 6 countries to see if they would like to participate [32 agreed]...  It’s a no brainer PR-wise because the most it can cost is a pair of tickets.  The more houses that join up, the less likely it is that their tickets will be chosen.  It's a beautiful system.... everyone's a winner.”

Animated opera plots in 30 seconds

Kim Thomson, an opera buff from the Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences in Oklahoma  has condensed popular opera plots into a fun video available on YouTube since 2006. The show starts about a minute in:

Monteverdi opera's massive creative challenge

There is something special about Claudio Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea -- currently being staged by Opera Atelier at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre -- that even an experienced operagoer may not realise: 

The full score of the 17th century opera has never been found.

What people see on stage is based on a score containing an unornamented vocal melody and an instrumental bass line. 

The orchestral accompaniments have been fleshed out by period-performance scholars, while the continuo parts (the small ensembles that accompany the long stretches of recitative -- there are two groups in this opera) are improvised, based on carefull planning and rehearsal.

The singers add their own ornamentation and shading to the sung parts, under the guidance of the music and stage directors.

Unless a singer or instrumentalist is steeped in the traditions of Baroque opera, they can't flip open the score to any section and start singing or playing something that sounds like what we hear in the theatre.

Contrast this massive creative effort with the interpretive duties of an opera performer being given a full, detailed score of Puccini's La bohème. You can, literally, flip to any page and begin playing or singing without need for any more information.

As I mention in today's review in the Star, the music is gorgeously rendered in the current Opera Atelier production. The singers, orchestra and, especially, conductor David Fallis, have made months of heavy preparation look easy.

Director Marshall Pynkoski explained some of the challenges of rehearsing Poppea to me when I popped by the rehearsal hall a couple of weeks ago.  The building process from bare outline looks little like that of most modern operas.

Last summer, the singers assembled to learn the music. About a month ago, they met again to learn their blocking on stage. “So everything they had learned musically got thrown out the window,” Pynkoski added.

Then everyone left the blocking behind to rehearse with the orchestra and Fallis, who stops conducting during recitative sections and will even play the continuo organ when necessary.

Everything came together in final form only days before the dress rehearsal.

“At the theatre, the musicians take all their cues from the singers. It’s like jazz – they’re improvising, but they know exactly what they’re doing,” Pynkoski explained.

“This is not just learning notes and repeating them.”

Here is a lovely exceprt of Nero singing of his love of Poppea, thanks to French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. You see an example of the vocal score (in this case not needing much in the way of ornamentation):

Take a Mahler moment

Here are a few moments of Sunday reflection, courtesty of “Urlicht” (First Light), from Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony (No. 2). Legendary Canadian Maureen Forrester sings, while Glenn Gould conducts (proving he made the right decision in becoming a pianist).

I have no information on when or where this was recorded, but can only guess that it’s from an early-1960s  CBC-TV broadcast.

Sit back and savour the performance (rendered as Mahler indicated: “Sehr feirelich, aber schlicht” – Very solemn but simple).

Here's a translation of the text:

O little red rose,
Man lies in greatest need,
Man lies in greatest pain.
Ever would I prefer to be in heaven.
Once I came upon a wide road,
There stood an Angel who wanted to turn me away.
But no, I will not be turned away!
I came from God, and will return to God,
The loving God who will give me a little light,
To lighten my way up to eternal, blessed life!

So easy to catch the Blu-Ray blues

I couldn't help thinking of "The Gasman Cometh," the notorious music-hall song about home-repair blues by the late-and-lamented British comedy team Flanders & Swann, as my partner and I wrestled with the latest home entertainment technology.

If I had a sharper brain -- and more free time -- I'd write new lyrics to go with the tune.

Here's the prosaic version of what happened -- a cautionary tale of technology upgrades run amok:

With the increasing number of opera titles being released every month in Blu-Ray format, I had to get a Blu-Ray player. I'd been waiting for the technology to mature. We also wanted an opportunity to get a brand-name home audio setup that would combine Blu-Ray, surround sound, and iPod dock with audio for our 2-year-old-old 40-inch LCD TV.

Last Saturday morning, an ad in the Star set the electrons in motion.

Purchasing the new system, we were told that, to get the best-quality picture and sound, we should ditch the old component cables and purchase an HDMI cable to connect the Blu-Ray player to the TV.

OK. Bought the most expensive cable in the store.

Got home, unpacked and assembled the stuff (almost losing the dog amidst a landfill's-worth of boxes, wrappers and bags). It worked.

We wandered down to the video store and, with a tingle of excitement, rented our first two Blu-Ray discs: Doubt and John Doyle's fabulous recent Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Company.

An hour and a half into Doubt, the TV screen went blue, complaining of a lost signal. The Blu-Ray player's screen flashed a code  identified in the owner's manual (which could double as the instructions to run a nuclear generating station) as an HDMI communication error.

My partner -- the technological brains in the household -- fussed and fiddled for an hour, with no luck. The Blu-Ray player appeared to be working fine, but the TV wasn't getting the signal. Logically, we concluded that the cable was to blame. We connected the old component cables and watched the last few minutes of that excellent movie in semi-colorized, lo-def black-and-white.

The next day, the store tested the cable and found nothing wrong. They cheerfully agreed to exchange the Blu-Ray player.

We returned Doubt and picked up Slumdog Millionaire.

Five minutes in, same problem.

I decided to visit the techie forums on the Web to see if anyone else had had a similar problem.

It turned out that HDMI is not like older connections, in that it helps the Blu-Ray player communicate intelligently with the TV. Our TV was too old, and therefore, too dumb. The likely solution was getting a new motherboard installed for the TV's HDMI connectors.

The next day, we called Samsung (our TV brand) customer service  (their promptness and courtesy are on a par with Apple's), who were not aware of any problems. Since our unit was out of warranty, they referred me to an independent service centre.

There, the person on the phone also claimed never to have heard of the problem. We'd have to pay for a service call to diagnose the error.

I called Samsung back and asked for more contacts. They had nearly a dozen for the GTA.

I finaly spoke to a guy in Montreal (with technicians in Ontario), who immediately recognized the problem and could tell me what the solution would cost. He referred me to a person in Toronto who told me we'd lose the TV for several days and face a repair bill that could go as high as $400.

Several people on the Net had mentioned that the replacement motherboards don't necessarily deliver the same picture quality as the original, likely because they haven't been calibrated together with the TV at the factory.

We added cost plus risk and decided to opt for a new TV. It took only a few hours to sell the old unit on craigslist. We replaced it with a 46-inch Samsung, the top-rated LCD in Consumer Reports tests.

End of story?

Not quite.

As an experiment, my partner connected our digital PVR to the TV using the fancy HDMI cable to see what the difference in picture and audio quality would be. It was gorgeous, but our weary wallets weren't ready to spend another $100 on another HDMI cable.

So he replaced the old connectors and, behold, we were getting colorized black-and-white from our digital cable box.

Evidently, once your TV has experienced HDMI -- from whichever source -- there's no going back.

My partner did some more research, reporting back that many experienced people don't believe there's any difference in quality between a $20 HDMI cable and a $129.99 HDMI cable.

While I was out at the Toronto Symphony on Wednesday night, my partner walked the dog down to Best Buy, picked up a cable for $24.99 (+ tax) and had enjoyed a couple of hours of fine, high-definition audio and video by the time I came home.

We are now a full-HDMI household. Yes, the picture and audio quality from a Blu-Ray player are nothing short of fantastic. But we still haven't had a chance to watch Company.

Musicians and mental illness no strangers

The Soloist opening today in wide release is a reminder that music can moderate some effects of mental illness, but it’s no antidote.

Here is but a small sample of the many classical performers and composers who have suffered from emotional disorders:

Australian pianist David Helfgott, born in 1947, became an international sensation with the making of the 1996 movie Shine, which claimed an Oscar win for Geoffrey Rush for his portrayal of the musician locked in a stubborn fight with schizoaffective disorder.

Toronto’s own Glenn Gould (1932-1982) was never diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, but one expert believed he may have suffered from Asperger Syndrome, a mild sort of autism. He lived as a partial recluse for the last dozen years of his life. To get an idea of his wacky mind at work, there's a great little video snippet where, near the end, he ends up singing to (and annoying) a group of elephants.

André Mathieu (1929-1968) was hailed as Canada’s Mozart, showing a special talent at the piano and with composition. But his early promise was quickly drowned in a sea of alcohol and depression. Montrealer Alain Lefèbvre has tried to keep his music alive on a series of recent albums.

Another child-prodigy pianist, Hungarian-born Erwin Nyiregyhazi (1903-1987), was the subject of a book-length analysis as a child, but later successes slipped through his fingers, due to serious emotional problems. After being found homeless in Los Angeles, he attempted a comeback in the 1970s. He was the subject of a fascinating biography, Lost Genius, by Canadian music historian Kevin Bazzana, published in 2007 by McClelland & Stewart. (Bazzana also wrote Wondrous Strange, considered to be the definitive biography of Glenn Gould.)

Famous composers who battled emotional demons include: Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848), who died in an insane asylum; Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) suffered from severe depression; Robert Schumann (1810-1856) spent his final years in a psychiatric institution; Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) was institutionalized for a while following a nervous breakdown; Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was manic-depressive and is believed to have killed himself; and Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), also a concert pianist, dedicated his Piano Concerto No. 2 to his psychiatrist.

Toronto Masque Theatre's winning King Arthur

King Arthur

*** (out of 4)

By Henry Purcell. Toronto Masque Theatre. Repeats tonight. MacMillan Theatre, Edward Johnson Building, University of Toronto, 80 Queen’s Park Cresc. 416-410-4561

Five years ago, tenor and violinist Larry Beckwith and a group of enthusiastic friends introduced us to Toronto Masque Theatre, a new company focused on the 16th century English ancestor to the modern opera – a combination of spoken-word, dance and singing knit together by a loose narrative.

On Thursday night, the still-fledgling company celebrated its fifth anniversary at University of Toronto’s MacMillan Theatre with its largest and strongest production yet, a solid recreation of King Arthur, a five-act semi-opera created in 1691 by composer Henry Purcell and writer John Dryden.

There is a second performance tonight – one well worth catching.

The barrenness of the large stage is a constant reminder of a tight budget. But even in this discount version of King Arthur, there are 25 people on stage for the rousing final scene, which includes the enduringly famous aria, “Fairest Isle.”

In the orchestra pit, 14 period-instrument performers do a fine job, led by Beckwith from the first-violin desk.

The title (originally King Arthur, or the British Worthy) probably makes you think of Camelot, but this is something different: A straightforward, five-act tale of Britons vs. Saxons – a thinly veiled allegory addressing the political and religious troubles afflicting Britain in the late 16th century.

Briton king Arthur tries to free his beloved Emmeline from the clutches of Oswald, the Saxon ruler of Kent, with the help and hindrance of a cast of magicians, nymphs and spirits. It’s a plot straight out of a fantasy novel.

The main characters speak. The supernatural powers sing and dance. If the play were a city works truck, it would carry a “frequent stops” sign, warning that the musical entertainment can take over from the spoken word at any time.

King Arthur’s main strength is a masque within the play about the power of love – offering a chance for the music and singers to truly soar.

Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière has done a fine job in choreographing the dance sequences in Baroque style, making the most of herself and three other dancers. The nine vocal soloists double as chorus, sounding beautifully balanced whenever they sang as an ensemble.

Soprano Teri Dunn gave us a sweet, affecting rendition of “Fairest Isle,” while baritone Giles Tomkins was another standout among the competent vocal cast.

Even though the singers are not entirely off book, everyone was nicely prepared, with actor Caitlin Stewart a charming ingénue as Emmeline. Director Derek Boyes deserves a  much credit for moving everyone smoothly and unobtrusively around the stage.

The set consisted of three small benches and a sad little projection of still images on the backstage curtain. Fortunately there were a few colourful period-inspired costumes and nice lighting by Gabriel Cropley to tickle the eyes a bit.

Toronto Masque Theatre has now hit its stride. Beckwith & Co. have the right idea and the right attitude, thinking not only of the past, but of the present and future. Next season, they will reprise a programme from a couple of seasons ago, pairing Purcell's Dido & Aeneas with a new work by James Rolfe and André Alexis called Aeneas & Dido, which Toronto Masque Theatre commissioned.

Clearly, with a bit more financial backing, they could make an even more significant contribution in this unjustly neglected form of musical theatre.

The other extreme of masque

I know it's not fair to compare Toronto Masque Theatre, which doesn't even have the means to take photographs of their productions, with big-budget companies. But to give you an idea of what King Arthur can be when people have a lot of money to throw around, here is a snippet from a totally over-the-top production from the 2004 Salzburg Festival starring Canadian tenor Michael Schade, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Don't be put off by the German dialogue, as the singing is done in English. The first half of this video is from Act One, where Oswald and his shaman, Osmund, invoke the Saxon dieties to grant them victory over the Britons.