- TSMF: A Shakespeare Serenade
Toronto Summer Music Festival
Patrick Hansen, Music and Stage Direction, Michael Shannon, Piano; July 28 at Walter Hall.
It can take a lifetime to complete certain cultural projects. Attaining a secure understanding of Shakespeare is one of them. By secure I mean a retrievable sense of the characters, plots and themes of the major plays, an appreciation of key speeches and poems, as well as a truly personal feeling about them. The personal feeling is the best part, the reason why you undertake the project. It results from genuine engagement, which may start with studying the play in school, performing a part, or memorising and reciting a sonnet, and seeing productions. And that’s just the beginning. Along with that, there are the adaptations and extensions of Shakespeare’s works, which span a remarkable range from opera and art song to chick flicks such as Ten Things I Hate About You as well as the wonderful Canadian television series Slings and Arrows about a struggling Shakespeare Festival. The goal is not to tick off every one of the plays as if it were a to-do list, but to achieve as much exposure as possible to the complete works. Given that certain works are performed more often than others, this is not so simple, even when you live near a Shakespeare Festival. I’ve seen more versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream than I would like but never had a chance to catch Cymbeline.
This year being the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare is a good one to make progress on your Shakespeare project, and right now the Toronto Summer Music Festival is in the midst of three days of programming on Shakespeare and Music as part of the overall theme of London Calling: Music in Great Britain. Tuesday introduced the massive subject of Shakespeare and Opera, (there are at least 270 operas based on Shakespeare) with a thoughtful conversation between Patrick Hansen, the Director of Opera Studies a the Schulich School of Music at McGill, and Shakespeare scholar Paul Yachnin, deftly moderated by Festival Artistic Director Douglas McNabney. This was followed Tuesday evening with A Shakespeare Serenade, a two-part presentation of musical “spin-offs” from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.
In the first half, an ensemble of leading young operatic performers staged scenes from the plays of Shakespeare followed by the same scene as it was adapted by a great opera composer. This combination of original text followed by the musical variation was a huge win-win-win, providing excerpts from heightened moments from five major plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Otello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, with the immediate rendition in the musical form, so the two reverberated, and the similarities and the differences were apparent, plus enhanced by this talented group of young performers of demonstrations of both skilled spoken words with brilliantly staged physical movements, as well as astounding singing. There were too many star turns by these sixteen young singers to mention them all, so I will limit myself to five: Kevin Myers transformed Caliban from a deformed miscreant to a creature of magical dignity in his aria, “Be Not Afeard” from Lee Hoiby and Mark Shulgasser’s The Tempest; The letter duet from Act 2, Scene 1 of The Merry Wives of Windsor from Otto Nicolai and S.H. Mosenthal’s “Die Lustigen Weiber”, sung by Ana Toumine and Simone McIntosh in coordinated outfits was an operetta-like moment that brought to mind the comic genius of Lucy and Ethel conspiring together; Russell Wustenberg teeters and stumbles with the resilient grace of Ray Bolger, and given his roots on a farm in the mid-west, he deserves to reprise If I Only Had a Brain for this generation; and baritone Keith Lam gave “Fear No More The Heat of the Sun”, from Cymbeline, the dignity and sorrowful consolation that is this speech’s due, using elegant posture and stillness in the midst of frivolity.
The second half of the program, a simulated gathering of friends singing and reciting poems, sonnets and songs from some of the plays, felt a bit contrived, as they were now enacting excerpts while also simulating relationships between each other, which rang hollow at times. Mounting the production in Walter Hall, which, lacks theatre lighting and a curtain, was mildly problematic. The cast entered from the back of the auditorium wearing street clothes, strolling down the aisles as if arriving at a party which then continued on the stage, but the lights had not dimmed, and the intermission was still transitioning, so it seemed at first, as if these were just latecomers who happened to be seated near the front. This was a minor limitation, however, and it was a welcome opportunity to hear several of the songs that are embedded in the plays so that they sometimes receive little attention, in a more focused setting. In particular, the performance of certain songs such as Come Away Death by different composers was a rare chance to make comparisons. This intense immersion in Shakespeare left me feeling as if I’d been steeped in a mellow elixir. My Shakespeare project will never be complete, but during these three days of the Festival, I’m making major strides forward.
#LUDWIGVAN
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