The King’s Singers are My Boy Band

I don’t mean to say that the King’s Singers are like a boy band (although they do have some jaunty choreography), but that there might be some internal squealing involved on my part.  The sound of this six-person men’s chorus has been weaving in and out of my life since I was a child.  Naturally, the wife and I jumped at the chance to meet these fine fellows at the post-concert meet-and-greet, Saturday night.

Here’s the proof that we were totally in the same room:

P.S. David Hurley and Paul Phoenix were so nice!

“Yo, Bitch” – Next Time Don’t Miss One World Symphony’s Breaking Bad-Ozymandias

This looks like an amazing, in-depth and well-thought out treatment. Go to the One World Symphony site and read the artist’s statement. Awesome.

RaveReviewsNYC

If you don’t know about New York’s One World Symphony it’s about time you learned. This orchestra/opera company has been in existence for about 13 years and now, because of its founding director and conductor-composer’s new work, it may gain the notoriety it justly deserves. Last night’s program titled “Addiction” included pieces from Wagner’s Der fliegende Hollander, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Berlioz’s La mort D’Ophelie along with his own Breaking Bad-Ozymandias.

Not a fan of opera, it exposed me to a great performance in a small venue. This intimate setting allowed the audience to be fully engaged with the performers and, likewise, the performers were right there with the audience. Everyone had fun.

Hong connects with the audience through discussion and participation. He explained his obsession with the series Breaking Bad and how beginning in October he quickly composed the opera. He even included audience participation by cueing the crowd…

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A Year at the Opera.2 – Albert Herring

Sunday came and it was the year’s second foray into operaland, this time to the delightful comedy, Albert Herring.  Possibly, the complete opposite of Tosca, this is the story of a shy youth, tied to his mother’s apron strings, who is crowned “May King” by the local town leaders when they decide the that none of the girls of the village are virtuous enough.  It is a celebration of pleasure, youthful rebellion and the liberative powers of rum.

Vancouver has been hit by an irregular cold snap – we get them every few years, and for a few days it’s almost like real winter instead of the general sogginess that chills your bones in a different way.  Bundled up in what passed for cold-weather clothes, we made the 100-metre dash from the car to the theatre doors.  Shaking off the chill as we entered, the lobby was transformed with a sunny festiveness by hundreds of union jacks, all hung like streamers across the room.

Albert Herring, written by Benjamin Britten in 1946 for a recovering post-war audience, is a very British cultural artefact.  The plot centres around the English tradition of May Day festivities, a subject that would have been incredibly banal and familiar to it’s original audiences.  I can only assume that VO decided to produce this springtime opera at the beginning of the Christmas season because of the recent celebration of Britten’s 100th birthday (check out www.britten100.org for more centenary coolness).  The use of the May Day celebration is a perfectly cheeky way to discuss the opera’s main drama which is the battle between the parochial status quo of Britten’s small-town England and the youthful pursuit of pleasure and liberation.  May day is a holiday to which a thousand small traditions are attached, traditions which would have been entrenched into the normative Christian English narrative, but the root of many of these traditions are the essentially pagan fertility celebration of the passing from winter to summer. The VO production underscored this by featuring Morris Men and the traditional May day pole dance – keeping the true meaning of May Day festivities an underlying current below the puritan exercise of the May Day council’s quest to “reward virtue”. In keeping with the theme of the changing of the seasons, the narrative is about an older generation butting heads with a younger, and old orders being overthrown to be replaced by youthful regeneration, excess and sex drive.

Ultimately, this is a universal narrative, but my fondness for it comes from the fact that it is also an outsider narrative, in which the strange, lonely and fearful Albert ultimately wins the day and seizes his freedom. To me, it speaks to my queer experience, admittedly something I went into it looking for knowing that Britten himself was gay. Towing the social line, being afraid to live life on one’s own terms for fear of society’s punishment, being unable to connect with others – to me these are things that speak to the queer experience, especially in a small town. Albert is always longingly looking at the romance between his friends, Sid and Nancy, as if through a window pane, with a particularly palpable sadness as if it is something he will never be able to touch. It is not a huge stretch to imagine that Britten’s portrayal of Albert was influenced by his own experiences. Especially when the loss of Albert’s virginity is one of the events of his liberation – he gets drunk, becomes rowdy, gets in a fight and spends the night in the company of strange “men…and women”. The programme notes totally back me up, as they referenced that there was a possibility that Albert’s sexual escapades involved men. Reading the opera as a queer narrative, doesn’t interfere with the storylines of regeneration or fertility – instead they reinforce the celebration of multiplicity, of choice, desire, hope, love and self-actualization.

I found the music to be very interesting and enjoyable, but it didn’t overpower my senses the way Tosca did. Britten is very contemporary and cerebral to listen to – his melodies are beautiful, but less pre-patterned into my brain. My favourite scene was the council meeting in the first act – where the gravity of the characters and the drama of the music were hilariously contrasted with the trivial nature of the subject matter. Britten uses the same effect in the second to last scene where the whole town thinks that Albert’s overnight disappearance must mean he is dead, and sing a grave ode to the nature of mortality only to be interrupted by the dishevelled and happy Albert. I found the actual final scene to be a bit disappointing, as having once been in Albert’s shoes I know the transformation to confident and brazen takes more than one night of debauchery, but all in all the singing was once again fantastic, the acting engaging and hilarious (I loved all the bit characters in the May Day council and everyone who played them) and the staging good. It was a pleasant and sunny interlude on a cold winter’s day.

A Year at the Opera

So we got ourselves season tickets to the Vancouver Opera!  In a rare case where cold calling worked, a representative at VO called us up after we went to The Magic Flute last year and offered us some very tempting seats.  That’s how I found myself in row two (centre) at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre a week ago, some very butch tears seeping out of my face while watching an absolutely fantastic rendition of Tosca.

Because the spirit of my English degree compels me to analyze every artistic experience I have (as well as every television experience I have), I’ve decided to blog about it!  After Tosca, we have Albert Herring, Don Giovanni and Don Carlo to look forward to, all of which I will be relating to you in vivid, gory, redundant detail!

I have to note now that while I love listening to classical music, I am totally uneducated, especially in the realm of opera. I am an enthusiastic chronicler of my new adventures in this strange and fantastical land.  All opinions contained in this log are the ramblings of an enthusiastic initiate.

As an opera n00b, I like to approach my opera watching experiences (which until recently have been largely relegated to YouTube) by thoroughly consulting Wikipedia on the matter, and potentially listening to some arias to train my ear up for maximum enjoyment.  My Italian is shit, but that’s also part of the fun – recognizing words where I can and trying to make due without the surtitles, which is especially effective if I already know the plot.

With Tosca I did none of this.  I’d given Tosca only a cursory YouTube listen ages back and life had caught up with me, so I had no time to do my usual investigation.  In the ten minutes before the curtain rose I was frantically tearing through the programme, trying to get my bearings. The synopsis. The conductor’s notes. The director’s notes.  And then at the end of that ten minutes, with the barest understanding of what was going on, I got totally Puccini’d.

I thought that my ‘in’ to opera was through early music: Monteverdi and Handel.  I like the structure, space and light that refracts through late Renaissance polyphony and Baroque music. I was completely unprepared for Puccini to kick down the door, take a flying leap over the overture, land in situ and run at full speed towards some of the most famous romantic arias in the Western cannon.

Puccini seems to me the master of manipulating emotions musically. Every moment has a mood. We’re feeling the moods of the characters, the moods of the situation, the anticipatory moods of things yet to come. it’s all happening at once, and he’s yanking around our heartstrings expertly.  It was two seconds in and my eyes were already prickling as Cavaradossi was talking about the colour of Tosca’s.

VO rented the set from the Kansas City Lyric Opera. It was a classic take set in the original period. Now I enjoy a good reinterpretation of a historical work, but I really appreciated the period setting. In addition to being an epic story of love, lust and violence, it is specifically about a historical period and geographical/cultural location. Yeah, you could set it in the future, in some conceptual political struggle, but then you wouldn’t get the commentary on the joining of church and state, and the hypocrisy of masquerading the pursuit of power under religious paternalism. The power of the Te Deum scene banks on the contrast between the sincere religious sentiment of the crowd (celebrating a political victory) and religion as a tool wielded by Scarpia. Half the action takes place in a church, which is a site of intersecting functions in 19th century Italy – it is a place of hope, devotion, sanctuary, economic exchange, art, power, and punishment. Given Cavaradossi’s anti-religious sentiment (and Tosca’s pleas to an unresponsive God) throughout the narrative, we should have known Angelotti was f*cked the minute he was looking for salvation at the foot of the Madonna. As “followers of Voltaire” – the label Scarpia spits at Cavaradossi – they weren’t just engaging in a secular political conflict, they were taking on the whole system.  You can’t take the Catholicism out of this plot – the church as public space and defining institution, that speaks directly to its setting in historical Italy.

Puccini’s weaving of elements into one complicated whole was one of my favourite things about this opera.  In the Te Deum scene he has the contrast between Scarpia’s plotting and the celebration of the community.  In the beginning of Act Two, Scarpia is plotting dastardly things again, while Tosca sings with the chorus off stage.  The world of this opera isn’t just confined to what’s in front of us – its characters continue to move around their world once they have passed out of view.  Bells ring. Shepard boys sing conveniently morbid songs about love.  The world continues.  Puccini uses sound to create depth and texture (and in the VO’s case, smell is also added through the incense in the church) that make this opera seem incredibly immediate. And then, after providing this rich and enveloping experience he snuffs it out as abruptly as he began it, Tosca leaping from the ramparts.

Tamara Mancini (Tosca), Adam Diegel (Cavaradossi), and Gordon Hawkins (Scarpia) were all amazing, and the experience at Vancouver Opera was so much fun.  I am extremely stoked for Albert Herring in December.

 

The secret of the Secret Garden…

The Secret Garden was one of my favourite childhood reads, as it was the first book I’d encountered that helped me deal with my anxiety disorder and exposed me to the concept of taking control of my own mood.  Hark! A Vagrant has another take, suggesting that perhaps The Secret Garden was really more altering one’s mood through the use of certain organic substances…

Britten’s War Requiem live from the Albert Hall

I’m currently on a bit of a Britten bender, and coincidentally found out it’s the 100th anniversary of his birth this November. I may have to tune in to the BBC Radio 3 online and observe the spirit of Remembrance Day this weekend with his War Requiem.

Flaming. Singing. Together at last.

So my lovely wife is working on an interesting new project, and as the president of her fan club I am doing whatever I can to aid the endeavour.  What is this fab new venture?  Only a professional-level LGBT chamber choir that performs music by LGBT composers.  NBD.  “Cor Flammae” (heart of flame) is just in the infant stages so far, but the response from the Vancouver choral community has been really positive and it’s galloping at great speed towards becoming a real thing.

A central question, is of course, “why”.  The instantly positive response she’s received from queer choristers has been, I suspect, at some level instinctual.  Musicians put a lot of work and risk and love into their chosen profession.  For vocalists especially, music is something that is deeply embodied.  Being a musician is at some level an issue of identity as well.  The desire to unite two outwardly disparate facets of one’s identity is very attractive – to be seen in the fullness of who you are.

Queers also take great delight in recognizing our kin (whether from across the room or across time and space), in seeing that we are not the only lonely travelers in the larger world.  Performing historical works by queer composers allows us to anchor ourselves within the past, and divine a continued connection throughout time.

The mainstream narrative of western culture erases the queerness of even openly gay composers, presenting their music as discrete objects separated from the personal lives of their creators.  But when music is an act of passion (“If music be the food of love, play on…”), how can the listener fully appreciate it when half the emotional story is missing?

What happens to Britten’s music when you listen to it knowing he wrote many roles for his life partner, tenor Peter Pears?  If you look at Menotti’s “The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore” (which is about a strange man who lives alone in a castle, and will not go to the Countess’ ball or to church on Sunday, but is instead a poet and a dreamer whose fantastical pets represent his creativity) through a queer lens, you see a narrative of isolation that celebrates individuality and rejects the blindness and hypocrisy of the status-quo in favour of a richer inner truth.  To me, this story vibrates with my own personal queer narrative and I love reading it as one, and connecting with it as one, instead of covering it with the blanket of assumed heterosexuality.

So this is the essence of the project: to celebrate the incredible talent of queer performers and to make this music come alive with its full intent by changing the way we listen to it, illuminating the rich and furtive spaces left out by the usual account.

Life is excellent! Now let the hibernation begin!

I’m so tired, but life is excellent.

Running around from one project to the next, I’ve been on the go constantly since the beginning of July. We had five weddings to attend:

1) an adorable tattooed lesbian beachside wedding with new and old dear friends;

2) a fantastically fun and musical northern BC wedding that required 16 hours of driving each way, dancing in a paintball studded rugby club, with never-ending views of neon canola and much wildlife included;

3) a lesbian military wedding in full dress navy and air force uniforms, complete with sword party, on Vancouver Island;

4) a picture perfect cousin-in-law wedding with loads of family reunion-ing for my spouse, and me meeting people I didn’t previously know but are now related to me;

5) the most epic rock-star-fashion-gay-royalty-esque wedding of my bandmate’s, held in the Vancouver Art Gallery. I got to sing and play the ukulele with my choir and listen to butch tuxedo-wearing taiko players and eat charcuterie, while my wife danced like a fiend wearing a dress she had christened “Beethoven’s Cravat”. Not all at the same time, but almost.

God, I love weddings. If I didn’t have to go to another one for a while, though, I think I’d be okay.

We also had: Vancouver pride (a.k.a. loads of drag and volunteering), Vancouver Queer Film Festival (a.k.a. more drag ), my best friend’s dirty thirty, my Dad’s birthday, my brother’s birthday, two different grandmothers’ birthdays, my sister-in-law’s birthday, another good friend’s birthday and a big ‘ol concert for my butch choir. Also, me practicing my face off in preparation for my road test and researching the night classes I’ll be taking shortly. No pressure.

This has culminated in last night, which consisted of me hiding under a pile of blankets and watching “Mädchen in Uniform” (thank you for the most obscure stuff, Netflix) while eating English pudding.

I have to differentiate that this pudding is English, so that you know it’s not the cold chocolate or vanilla kind espoused by Kraft in North America, but instead the warm kind with brandy-soaked fruit in it that you steam for two hours and then flambé with more brandy. If you are not of English decent, you may find this repugnant and relegate it to the realm of cold toast with tomatoes or the brick-like fruit cake Safeway tries to pass off as real. You may be repulsed by any food item that takes months in a dark cupboard to mature. However, if you do have a little English in your family culture, it might remind you of Christmas time and comfort.

I am looking forward to fall, and hibernation and brandied fruit. See you next year, Summer; it’s been a slice!

Not a flaming piece of tar, but a delicious food item!

I can’t even Handel it.

OMG. So the wife and I went to the performance of “Israel in Egypt” put on by the Vancouver Early Music Festival and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra this past Wednesday. We were excited, as we knew several of the singers that had been hand-picked for the chorus, and we were there with bells on to support what we felt would be an excellent event. To say that we were not disappointed would be an understatement.

We had bought our tickets late in the game, and when we got there realized that meant not that we were shoved somewhere in the nosebleed section of the Chan, but that we were actually in the second row.  I’m told these are bad seats because apparently you don’t get optimum sound, and you have to crane your neck up to look at anybody.  Neither of these things impacted our enjoyment of the show, and we got the total thrill of being up close and personal with some simply stunning singers. Of particular note to me, were Reginald L. Mobley, Laura Pudwell, Charles Daniels, Tyler Duncan, and of course, Suzie LeBlanc.

I listen to classical music, but my knowledge is fairly limited (my spouse and father are the real experts in the family, and I mostly get to ask them what’s happening), so these names were new to me with the exception of LeBlanc.  I found her when I was first educating myself about opera through the wonders of YouTube, and her “Lascia ch’io pianga” was the first “ooooo” moment of my own discovery.  Sufficed to say, I was fangirling over the fact that I was at shoe level with her.

Everyone had very excellent shoes.

It was a fantastic show to watch.  Alexander Weimann conducted like he was slaying a dragon, all fire and ferocity, while simultaneously playing the harpsichord whenever necessary.  The second harpsichord was played by the organist, who kept switching between the two instruments in a deft game of musical chairs.  We also had the pleasure of watching the PBO break in their brand-new-very-old timpani.  Everything was clean and expressive, with wonderful pace and sense of movement.  It was a huge piece, but it seemed to fly by, as the ensemble brought to life the narrative that Handel had written into the score.  The section where the plague of flies descends upon Egypt! So good!

It was an epic performance and we had huge, blissed-out grins on our faces the entire time.  When the ending sadly came, we were on our feet for a well-deserved standing ovation along with the rest of the audience.

It was too hot to Handel.

Operavox

So I just watched six operas in a day. Okay. so I cheated. I watched Operavox.

This 1995 BBC series is essentially the Coles Notes of opera. It’s for kids, and the libretto is translated entirely into English (which is great for me, as now I know what all the major arias are actually about), but give me animation and beautiful music and I’m a happy camper.

Seriously, though, some of my favourite art is made for kids. Projects like these are about making timeless works accessible to new audiences – training new ears and eyes to classic subjects by using contemporary mediums. And though often relegated to being a “kids'” medium, animation allows you to go on a journey that a regular staging simply can’t take you on. Nothing can replace seeing a live performance, but a fairy tale plot, like The Magic Flute for example, just begs to be explored in a medium where dark queens can fly and sorcerers can conjure fantastical visions.

Also a plus is that Operavox manages to whittle down Das Rhinegold to less than thirty minutes!

I’m sure true opera buffs would find that much editing out of content to be blasphemous, and the limitations imposed by whittling these operas down to half an hour undoubtedly does massacre music meant for a much, much longer presentation. For an opera noob like me, though, they’re the perfect intro.

Here’s a charming rendition of The Barber of Seville as performed by dolls (and ironically subtitled back into Italian in this video). It’s just the first in a series of six, also including Carmen, The Magic Flute, Das Rhinegold, Rigoletto and Turandot. Engage YouTube spiral!