Soulpepper’s 6th annual Global Cabaret Festival brings together some creative minds from Toronto’s art music world starting today with a fresh take on a favourite baroque opera, a musical version of a hit one-man show and a peek into the lives of two famous French art music composers.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
To provide an overview of these three very promising shows (and there are several others worth checking out, as well), I got in touch with the creative minds behind each one: CBC host Tom Allen, Larry Beckwith of Toronto Masque Theatre, and consummate new-musician/musical rebel Gregory Oh.
Although each of these three people has stepped outside their usual realm to create a 60-minute spectacle for Young Centre audiences, each of these shows is a very clear window into the soul of each artistic leader.
Beckwith takes us back to the 17th century in a play augmented with period music, yet also rooted in a modern sensibility. Oh has, coincidentally, also reached back to the 17th century, in order to radically update Henry Purcell’s tiny-perfect opera Dido and Aeneas. Allen, who brims with insightful details and anecdotes about composers past and present, conjures up the Paris of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy during a tumultuous time in European history.
I interviewed Beckwith, then asked Allen and Oh to write their own précis on each show.
Here they are, in order of appearance at the Distillery District, starting tonight:
DIDO AND AENEAS: 21ST CENTURY REMIX
- Garland Cabaret space, Thurs. @ 8:15 p.m. & Sat. @ 9:30 p.m.
Gregory Oh on history vs authenticity:
When I was a young pianist, I learned my Beethoven sonatas most specifically from the Tovey and Craxton Associated Boards edition. Later on, I learned that [pianist Arthur] Schnabel was the way to spiritual enlightenment. In undergrad, a few hundred bucks bought my membership into the Urtext society of authenticity. Finally, I decided that the whole exercise, investing in an understated and overpriced slate-grey library, was at least a little fishy, seeing as I was playing everything on the wrong instrument anyway.
I have neither the brains nor the discipline to discuss authenticity in any meaningful way, but it is something that I’ve always been curious about. Bach’s keyboard music, to my 21st century ears, sounds better on a modern grand; more interesting, more intricate, more colourful and ultimately more comfortable. So why not experiment with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas?
Dido is one of my two or three favourite operas, and my favourite recordings are those on period instruments. When putting this project together, I didn’t want to make something better or more relevant; I wanted to make something more fun. I’ve always felt that given the multitude of options for purists and academics, there’s no need to feel any guilt while meddling in the centuries-gone-by pile.
Imagine the premiere of the work in 1689, by Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls in Chelsea. Now imagine a production by our own Canadian Opera Company, designed and directed by, say, Atom Egoyan. Then forget them both and join me at the cabaret.
This particular realization is a collaboration in the truest sense of the word. In my three years as a resident artist at Soulpepper, I’ve worked quite intensively with the other resident artists and guests, and while we often think about music in very much the same way, it’s never quite the same.
Suba Sankaran (South Indian classical), Patricia O’Callaghan (cabaret), Miranda Mulholland (country), Alex Samaras (jazz) and John Millard (bluegrass) plus a host of guests, are collaborating with me in our Global Cabaret version of Dido and Aeneas, which I’ve dubbed “a 21st century remix.”
Much of the score exists as a vocal line and a bass line, which gets turned into music at the discretion of the performers. No two performances, even with the same performers, would ever, or at least should ever use the same notes. Where to dot and how much to dot is a discussion that happens between continuo groups and jazz combos alike. Walk into U of T and count the number of performance traditions being taught that regularly discuss improvisation (a.k.a. ornamentation) as a part of essential practise.
For tasteful, look elsewhere, because we’re going for tasty.
I’m not someone who thinks that opera needs to be saved or that Vivaldi needs visuals. But if you’re like me, and like to tap your feet to a sweet shuffle, or even enjoy hearing the Goldberg Variations transcribed for modern piano, you might like Purcell with a hihat
and brushes swap a Fender for theorbo, banjo for lute, throw in a raga and have a little fun.
BRIEF LIVES
- Tank House, Thurs. & Fri. @ 8:15 p.m., Sat. & Sun. @ 3:15 & 8:15 p.m.
Brief Lives is a 1969 play by the late Patrick Garland — and premiered by British actor Roy Dotrice — based on a late 17th century collection of biographical sketches of famous figures — like William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Walter Raleigh — with the same title, written by John Aubrey (1626-1697).
Beckwith says Dotrice brought the play to the Royal Alexandra Theatre for a three-week run in the late ’70s or early ’80s, and that Soulpepper company member William Webster has had his eye on performing Brief Lives for many years, and tried a read-through with Toronto Masque Theatre at Heliconian Hall three years ago.
“He read the play and we surrounded it with music,” recalls Beckwith.
Everyone welcomed the opportunity to do a properly staged version for this year’s cabaret festival. Beckwith says the show now integrates the text and music more closely, and that the staging includes projections.
“The stars aligned perfectly and we thought it would be a perfect fit with the festival,” he says. “We’ve edited and adapted it down to about an hour.”
The music is meant to match and augment the characters being portrayed in the play. “I’m lucky to be working with Terry McKenna,” says Beckwith of one of Toronto’s great lute and guitar performers — and notorious packrat. “He has such an amazing library.”
Multi-talented singer and instrumentalist Katherine Hill also helped out with musical selections, and will be singing in the show.
Beckwith says the music includes songs by John Dowland and William Lawes and John Playford. “The arrangements have a current, almost poppy feel to them,” he adds.
Despite the fact that the play is set at the end of the 17th century, it still resonates in our time.
“It all about this man who is looking back and says this is not the way it was in Queen Elizabeth’s time. He can remember that from before the Civil War,” Beckwith relates. “People knew how to dress well, how to wear a sword, appreciate literature. From his point of view, everything has gone to pot.”
Some things don’t change.
THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS
Garland Cabaret space, Sun. @ 2 p.m.; Baillie Theatre, Sun. @ 7 p.m.
Tom Allen on truth in storytelling:
The Judgment of Paris is a new cabaret on the lives of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, featuring music by those two composers along with original songs written and performed by the cast: Patricia O’Callaghan, Bryce Kulak, Kevin Fox, Lori Gemmell and your guest blogger, Tom Allen.
There are true stories and there are stories that contain truths. The former is something that really happened, the latter something that, by telling and retelling, teaches us something true about ourselves.
The lives of the great composers tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Like Hercules or Daedalus or Samson, they seem to have had supernatural powers — using nothing but ideas to build art that has survived where entire empires have failed. But, like the most enduring mythological heroes, they were also flawed. They were drunks or Lotharios or control freaks or syphilitics, driven from genius to avarice to madness and on, to penniless miserable death.
You’d be hard pressed to find two composers who fit more closely to mythical roles than Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. That they lived in the same city, at the same time is miraculous enough. They were also polar opposites and represented, on one hand, the apex of the fading Romantic era, and on the other, the emerging core of a new and radically different time. It’s a tale that would make the ancient Greeks proud.
Debussy was the ultimate romantic. His father was a former sailor who married his mistress. They had no money and moved from one squalid flat to another. Mrs. Debussy neglected her five children absolutely. Papa Debussy finally found work as a soldier for the Paris Commune in 1870, but his men deserted him and he was jailed for 18 months. Claude was 9 at the time, and completely on his own, but he was taken in by a student of Chopin (Paul Verlaine’s harried mother-in-law) and by the time his father got out of jail Claude was accepted into the Paris Conservatory.
Soon he was teaching the children of an industrial heiress who lived in a former De Medici palace that spanned the Cher River and had more rooms than all his family’s serial flophouses put together.
Debussy tore through relationships: society ladies, bohemian models… He cleaved to friends while they paid his bills, then abandoned them. He had three fiancées and kept a mistress who outlasted them all, and despite creating an opera (Pelléas et Mélisande) that gave France the national voice it had craved for a half-century, he lived most of his life in poverty, debt, or both.
Maurice Ravel was a 20th century composer born just a little too early. He was practical, reserved, driven by craft rather than emotion, and by hearing industry and mechanics as music, captured the impulse of his time with what would later be called minimalism.
Ravel’s family was loving and protective. His father was a playful engineer who, for a time, travelled with Barnum and Bailey’s circus. Ravel’s little brother never stopped calling him by his childhood nickname, Rara, and his mother was a barely literate Gaul who kept such a savage grip on him that he lived with her until he was 42, when she died. Ravel may have been gay, or straight, or asexual. There is no way to know. Even now, 76 years after his death, no trace of any intimate relationship has ever been unearthed.
Ravel managed his money scrupulously and in the six decades that followed, his life his music earned more than any French musician in history.
The Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris tells of a shepherd who becomes judge in a beauty contest between Love (Aphrodite) and Wealth (Athena). Our show simply changes Paris the shepherd into Paris the city at the dawn of the century, and the rest of the casting — Love and Wealth — takes care of itself.
The story is funny, tragic, at times horrifying and, like any good story or myth, it’s true, in every sense.
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For all the details on all the Global Cabaret Festival shows, click here.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
