Toronto period-instrument orchestra Tafelmusik has released a DVD-plus-CD package of House of Dreams, its most recent multimedia project masterminded by bassist Alison Mackay. Unfortunately, what worked so well on stage loses its appeal on a big home video screen.
- 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
House of Dreams whisks the onlooker through the sounds, stories and vistas of five places in baroque Europe: the Georgian Handel House Museum in London, a Venetian palazzo, a Delft restaurant, a Parisian royal palace and the Bach Museum in Leipzig.
The text, expertly narrated by Blair Williams, and the music glows, played with colourful verve from memory by the members of Tafelmusik led by violinist Jeanne Lamon. The two interweave intelligently and engagingly, providing not just a sampler of musical masterpieces by Handel, Vivaldi, Sweelinck, Purcell, Marais, J.S. Bach and Telemann, but also a social history of the day.
Providing the visual dimension are paintings by Watteau, Canaletto, Vermeer and other contemporaries.
In live performance, the paintings and site photographs were projected onto a large screen set in an ornate, gilded frame behind the musicians. They, in turn moved about the stage sedately under the direction of Opera Atelier’s Marshall Pynkoski.
The visual warmth of the Trinity-St Paul’s sanctuary (even more welcoming since its renovation and renaming as Jeanne Lamon Hall) provided a complementary vessel for this rich and enriching mix of music, words and images.
House of Dreams was and remains a brilliant piece of enlightened programming (which had the help of a residency at the Banff Center to bring Mackay’s ideas to life in a workshop-like setting).
Rather than trying to deal with the logistical hurdles of capturing the show on stage for the DVD, the orchestra headed to a studio to record in a blank box. And here’s the rub.
At times everything behind Tafelmusik turns into a supersized painting. At other times during Williams’ narration, we get video shot on location in England and Europe (including Williams, who starts the journey wearing am awkwardly wrapped Hudson’s Bay scarf, just in case we didn’t know this was a Canadian project).
Fair enough. But far too often during the meatiest of the musical sequences, we have to watch a more-or-less static orchestra playing in front of visibly wrinkled fabric lit an unappetizingly stale salmon colour.
I often have a problem with seeing opera and concert music through the eyes of the video director, whose camera lens decides where and for how long I will look at specific details on stage. In this film, I felt especially trapped by this video director’s editing decisions rather than being given the freedom to take in my own view of this multimedia show.
Intercutting between unappetizingly-lit studio and highly detailed, brightly lit close-ups of paintings meant to be viewed in the distance and light of a baroque-era drawing room finally annoyed me so much that I closed my eyes, because at least the music and texts remain in their glowing prime.
I don’t think that was the point of creating a DVD. Also strange in the context of Tafelmusik’s carefully polished performances are the occasional little editing glitches and subtle variations in the audio quality from track to track.
So we can thank the people at Tafelmusik Media for including a fine audio CD in the package so we can skip the DVD experience altogether.
Said DVD also includes a 2-minute, badly edited background monologue by Sarah Bardwell, director of Handel House Museum. The booklet features detailed background notes by the Alison Mackay (who, in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, gets an unexpected pedestrian cameo in the film).
You’ll find all the album details here.
This is the trailer video:
John Terauds
- 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
