Canadian Opera Company's touring production of The Nightingale and Other Fables enchants New York City

With Canadian Opera Company music director Johannes Debus leading the way, the company is presenting The Nightingale and Other Fables at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 

The Associated Press distributed a glowing review, as did a theatre blogger for the New York Post. Here is the full text of New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini's excellent review from yesterday's paper:

Stravinsky’s Tales, Dunked in the Spin Cycle

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

The training regimens for aspiring opera singers typically include acting classes, movement workshops, dance lessons, sometimes even tips on fencing. But I wonder if the committed young singers who took part in the director Robert Lepage’s enchanting production of Stravinsky’s one-act opera “The Nightingale” on Tuesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music ever anticipated that one day they would be asked to perform demanding vocal parts, in Russian, while sloshing around in 12,000 gallons of water as they deftly manipulated puppet versions of the characters they were portraying.

At 50 minutes, this seldom-produced Stravinsky piece was the longest segment of “The Nightingale and Other Short Fables,” Mr. Lepage’s acclaimed staging of diverse Stravinsky dramatic works, choruses and songs, all involving stories about animals. The first half of the program employs nimble acrobats and the most affecting and intricate puppetry I have ever seen. This production, introduced at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto in 2009, is co-produced by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Opéra National de Lyon and the Netherlands Opera (in collaboration with Ex Machina in Quebec). The Canadian Opera Company’s orchestra and chorus were vibrantly conducted by its accomplished young music director, Johannes Debus.

The centerpiece is “The Nightingale,” which Stravinsky called a “conte lyrique,” a lyrical tale, with a libretto by the composer and Stepan Mitussov adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story. For its 1914 premiere at the Paris Opera, in a production by Diaghilev, the singers performed from the orchestra pit and actors mimed the characters onstage. Mr. Lepage’s production was inspired, he has said, by the 1,000-year-old art of Vietnamese water puppetry.

His ingenious collaborator here is Michael Curry, the production designer who created the puppets with the director Julie Taymor for “The Lion King” on Broadway and Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Metropolitan Opera. The scale of “The Nightingale,” however, is much smaller, which only makes the magic of the water puppetry more poignant.

By installing a rectangular pool in the academy’s orchestra pit, Mr. Lepage and his team have fashioned an inky lake, turned luminescent by the lighting of Etienne Boucher. There are platforms on either side of the pit. As the orchestra, placed toward the back of the stage, plays the wistful music that opens the work, we see a hand puppet of an old Chinese fisherman on his boat, returning at night from a long day of work. In between stroking the water with his oar, he stops to push back his hat and wipe his brow.

But guiding the boat, operating the puppet and singing the role is the tenor Lothar Odinius, in a colorful costume, one of a dazzling array designed by Mara Gottler. Being half-submerged did not seem to inhibit the beguiling singing of Mr. Odinius or any other cast member. The fisherman has come to a spot in the forest where every evening he is entranced by the singing of the nightingale.

Sure enough, the nightingale appears, here the sweet-voiced and technically agile Russian coloratura soprano Olga Peretyatko, dressed in a simple rustic outfit. A delicate, small nightingale puppet on a long pole is manipulated by an unseen puppeteer. The bird sometimes lands on Ms. Peretyatko’s hand, to be held aloft as the soprano sings Stravinsky’s elegiac, ornamented melodic flights.

Word of the nightingale’s singing has reached the emperor of China. For the palace scene an entire chorus of courtiers stands in rows before the orchestra, all brilliantly costumed. When they start to sing, they take out dazzlingly colorful puppet versions of themselves, and the effect is more splendid than the Imperial Palace scene in the Met’s popular production of Puccini’s “Turandot,” a Zeffirelli extravaganza.

The baritone Ilya Bannik is the sad-eyed emperor, burdened by his office, who is comforted by the alluring song of the nightingale. But when envoys from the emperor of Japan arrive with a bejeweled mechanical nightingale as a present, the real nightingale, now overlooked, returns to the forest.

In a gripping final scene, charged by Stravinsky’s piercing, ominous music, we see the despairing emperor dying. An aquatic roster of acrobats in wet suits transforms the emperor’s canopied bed into a skeleton with long bony limbs. The lake is covered by a shimmering midnight-blue sheet through which goblin-like creatures try to protrude and claim the emperor’s weakening body.

Six women of a chorus announce themselves as the emperor’s “misdeeds.” The figure of death (the excellent contralto Meredith Arwady) appears in the head of the skeleton to tell the emperor his time has come. But the forgiving nightingale returns, death is placated by the bird’s rapturous song, and the emperor is reprieved.

The first half of the program was equally amazing. Mr. Debus set the mood by conducting Stravinsky’s “Ragtime” for orchestra. The clarinetist Todd Palmer, dressed like a Cossack, played Stravinsky’s rhapsodic Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet as interludes between the dramatic works.

In “Pribaoutki,” four nonsense Russian rhymes for voice (Wallis Giunta) and chamber ensemble, and in “Four Russian Peasant Songs” for small female chorus and four horns, the costumed singers performed onstage while a troupe of puppeteers created intricate images of cats, old men, a woodcock, a partridge and even a fidgeting, crying baby.

The first half ended with “The Fox,” a moralizing burlesque for four male singers (Adam Luther, Peter Barrett, Mr. Bannik and Mr. Odinius) about a preening rooster boasting of his harem of hens, the sly fox that is out to eat him, and the ram and the cat who come to his aid. Here acrobats enact the tale behind a scrim, so that we see their bodies, decked with animal headdresses and tails, silhouetted in black. And the nuanced evocations of the animals were just as impressive as all the full body flips.

As Mr. Lepage continues to unveil his production of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Met, he is sure to win some new admirers with this Canadian Opera Company production. Whatever one thinks of his “Ring,” and opinion has been mixed, that he is an enormously gifted director cannot be denied.

 

Opera house photographer David Leventi adds Four Seasons Centre to portfolio

Photo: The Four Seasons Centre of the Performing Arts, by David Leventi

Bau-Xi Gallery, across from the AGO on Dundas St., has extended the show of opera-house photographs by New Yorker David Leventi to March 8. While in town for the opening of his show last month, Leventi took a beautiful shot of the Four Seasons Centre, which is now available at the gallery, as well.

John Adams (almost) takes over Toronto opera and symphony stages

I've heard marketing experts speak about how people need to get the same message several different ways for a name or brand to get lodged in the brain.

American composer John Adams is having that sort of marketing triumph right now. Right on the heels of a successful run of his opera Nixon in China comes a residency with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which begins tonight at Roy Thomson Hall. (Check out Adams' presence at the New Creations Festival here.)

As part of his visit, Adams will introduce a free lunchtime concert today of section from his operas (they can't properly be called arias), sung by Betty Waynne Allison and Peter McGillivray, at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre inside the Four Seasons Centre (details below).

Tomorrow evening, Adams delivers the annual Herman Geiger-Torel Lecture at University of Toronto's Walter Hall. The programme starts at 7:30 p.m. with some of Adams' chamber music. The lecture follows at 8 p.m. This is free, too.

Eugene Fodor, the American violinist who couldn't live up to youthful glory, dead a few days short of 61st birthday

An excellent obituary in yesterday's Washington Post mentions how American Eugene Fodor, who died on Feb. 26, was dubbed the Mick Jagger of the violin by New York magazine back in the 1970s.

Even back then, people were trying to give classical music a bit of popular sparkle. It's too bad that Fodor didn't really live up to his early promise.

He was 24 when he placed in the finals of the Tchaikovsky violin competition in Moscow in 1974. For a decade, he was a star -- even making regular appearances on late-night TV talk shows. But then he self-destructed. The public nadir came with a drug-related arrest in 1989.

I was struck by one particular paragraph in the obit:

"I think that cocaine was sort of a crutch for me," (Fodor) told CBS News in 1996. It helped him "rid myself of the pain of not having the career that I felt would make me happy."

Fodor's website cuts off in 1999. The contact information is a personal email address, meaning he had no agent, making it difficut to quickly check up on what he was up to in recent years.

But what, exactly, would have this dream career been? Doing more big violin concertos with big orchestras? Being able to do just chamber music? Teaching?

For me, the moral in Fodor's unfulfilled life is in being careful with prodigiously talented children. Too much focus on a goal and not a journey is a set-up for getting lost of once the goal is fulfilled.

I found a nice reminiscence of Fodor and his first (and third) wife, Daniella Davis, on the blog of Salt Lake City resident Peggy Pendleton, who blogs as Utah Savage. This was written in 2008:

This was the Eugene Fodor I knew. His fiance was a student of my husband's in the mid to late 1970's. I remember entertaining them in our tiny apartment in the Cherry Creek section of Denver. She was a small, voluptuous, dark haired beauty and she and I hit it off immediately. I was not so sure about Eugene. He was more politically conservative than she, and if I remember correctly, an ardent gun enthusiast. And when we met them, he was already a virtuoso concert violinist, world famous, and with a certain rock star following of lovesick young women. So I watched him for signs of arrogance, but what I saw instead was inexperience with anything other than his doting mother and his ambitious father whose talent was not so great, but a fierce desire for his sons to have what he could not. Eugene was a boy who grew up on a large ranch with an older brother who was also a talented violinist. Eugene was both a young genius and a strutting cowboy. And then it came so early, this star stature. Underneath that wattage was a sweet, generous, romantic young man with great good looks, a bit of a rough edge and a monster talent.

We were invited to the family ranch for an engagement party. It was a Spanish style event with a Mariachi band. And a short time later we were invited to the wedding. They moved to New York and I remember working on a painting in a new medium to send to them for a wedding present a few months later. 

Shortly after that we moved to Missouri, where my husband got a teaching job at one of the lovely State Universities. We used to see Eugene play now and then on Johnny Carson. 

They wrote letters, called occasionally, and then we got a call that they were playing in a concert in another Missouri City and wanted to come stay with us the night and day before the concert and that we would be their guests for the event. We were both delighted and worried. I more worried than my husband. Eugene's wife, my friend, whose name I can no longer recall I'm embarrassed to say, was very pregnant with twins. I worried that the bed in the guest room wasn't big enough or comfortable enough. But they were both so sweet. We had a lovely afternoon. Fixed dinner at home. We ate simply, at their request. And when she went to bed, he wandered into the backyard and played. So under a cool autumn sky full of stars on the edge of the Ozarks, we listened to perhaps the worlds most famous Paganini virtuoso play Paginini. It was the most magical, transcendent musical moment of my life.

And again, late the next afternoon, he wandered the backyard and played for at least an hour. Then the black limousine came to pick us up for the two hour ride to the concert hall. When we got out of the limousine, hordes of girls began screaming. Eugene signed some autographs and then we were herded into his dressing room. We had champaign, caviar, cheeses, fruit. And then we were taken to the first box in the balcony to look down on the stage. Before he began playing he blew his wife a kiss, and people rose from their seats to look up at us, she looked around and smiled and then the concert began. 

I had never been a fan of classical music. I grew up with jazz. Oh I'd certainly heard plenty of classical music. My dad's mother loved it. But not until high school had I gone to concerts or listened to classical music of my own accord, until I heard Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead did I find something other than Jazz that really moved me. Then I discovered Stravinski's Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. And then Vivaldi, and so it went. Yet still, I did not like Beethoven, or Motzart, or Wagner, especially not Wagner. Then later found Bach and that was the sweet spot, classically speaking.

After the concert in an unnamed city in Missouri, there was a reception. As we walked into the room, a wave of applause swept over us, Eugene's wife grabbed me by the hand, asked me to come with her, approached the nearest matron in a flowered dress, and asked her where the ladies room was, all the while tightly clutching my hand to her ample bosom. She dragged me to the crowded ladies and then, just inside the door to the packed room, put a hand to either side of my face and pulled mine to hers and planted a juicy kiss on my startled lips. And the room went silent for just a moment as most of the waiting women held their breath. Then my hugely pregnant friend spoke in her rich musical contralto and asked to cut in line, as her husband was waiting for her, and because she was so very preggers, she needed to pee so very badly. And we walked into the first available stall together, since she still held my hand. Once inside, she opened her little evening bag and pulled a tiny silver vial out, unscrewed the lid, dipped in her little finger and scooped out a nail full of coke. She snorted rather noisily, then giggled and kissed me again. She had me backed against the wall, leaning into me slightly as she bent back and scooped another nail full. She whispered, don't breathe or you'll blow it all around. Then she snorted another. She said, close your eyes and hold your breath. I did. She said, "breathe" and I sucked air in through my nose along with a powerful hit of coke. And again. Then she pulled a joint from her purse and hiked her skirt and sat on the toilet. I whispered, "Do you think this is wise in here?" Never mind, "You're pregnant, aren't you?" She lit it, and we giggled through a joint while the ladies room emptied.

That is my last memory of them other than a birth announcement and a couple of letters. His career was in full swing, and she was hanging around with the guys in Divo and going to all the hot clubs and parites. I heard she was studying Opera Singning. Then silence.

Here is the final item mentioned in the "events" section of Fodor's website, an interview/performance segment from NBC's Today Show from 1999:

American violinist Hilary Hahn comes to town toting a heavyweight recital programme

American violinist Hilary Hahn (the photo shows her at the Grammy Awards two years ago) arrives at Koerner Hall for a solo recital tonight -- some of it accompanied by pianist Valentina Lisitsa. It's a gruelling programme:

-Fritz Kreisler: Variations on a Theme by Corelli (in the style of Giuseppe Tartini)
-Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Sonata No. 5 in F Major, Op. 24 "Spring"
-Charles Ives: Violin Sonata No. 4, Children's Day at the Camp Meeting, S.63 
-Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita No. 1 in B Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1002
-George Antheil: Violin Sonata No.1, W. 130

In case you're not familiar with the Antheil sonata, which dates from the early 1920s, here is the third (of four) movements, "Funebre, lento expressivo:"