Soundstreams: The Garden of Vanished Pleasures. Tim Albery, director; Hyejin Kwon, music director & piano; Mireille Asselin, soprano; Danika Lorèn, soprano; Hillary Tufford, mezzo-soprano; Daniel Cabena, counter-tenor; Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh, viola; Amahl Arulanandam, cello. April 25, 2025, Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre, Canadian Stage, Toronto.
When a work of art is inspired or influenced by the work and life of another artist, a prospective spectator — unfamiliar with its history, its context — might hesitate to enter.
But this isn’t the case with Soundstreams’ Garden of Vanished Pleasures, an opera directed by Tim Albery, with music by Cecilia Livingston and Donna McKevitt and featuring texts from various artists, chief among them the late artist-activist Derek Jarman.
In 1986, at age 47, after being diagnosed with HIV, Jarman moved to Prospect Cottage, in Dungeness, where he ravenously tended to and created within its garden, about which he wrote a journal published as Modern Nature and made the 1990 film The Garden starring Tilda Swinton.
“I want to share this emptiness with you,” Jarman announces at the outset of the whacky film, “not fill the silence with false notes or put tracks through the void. I want to share this wilderness of failure. The others have build you a highway fast lanes in both directions. I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty and no sweet conclusion.”
I began to wonder if this opera might possibly re-create Jarman’s empty yet wild essence, to transform it, make it lush.
The Production
When you enter the theatre, the show is already under way: on the left sits music director and pianist Hyejin Kwon, and on the right: violist Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh and cellist Amahl Arulanandam warming up their strings. In the centre of the stage is a bed covered in white sheets, four white metal chairs, a cluster of stones and a metal basin with water in it. A screen is laid over the back of the stage, where, during the show’s 90 uninterrupted minutes and over 20 arias, projections of colours, images and title cards aid you through its various transitions.
It takes a moment of process all these elements before your gaze might find its way to the top corner of the stage, where Daniel Cabena — an enigmatic countertenor whose range contains a multitude of delights — has tucked himself into the shadows, quietly stirring. Then, one by one, soprano Danika Lorèn, mezzo-soprano Hillary Tufford, and soprano Mireille Asselin emerge onto stage wearing dark blue uniforms suitable for gardening but also, later, in a sequence set in a hospital, for nursing too, since both professions require the conditions of care and attention.
As they sang, each of their voices revealed their strengths. In ‘Kalypso’, Lorèn brought a welcome baroqueness. Whereas Tufford, in reciting the poem ‘Yellow’, and most notably in the song ‘Snow,’ radiated with a shrill strength reminiscent of the robin she sings of. But it was Asselin — who stepped to the fore in ‘Parting,’ shined bright in ‘Two Dreams,’ and affectingly sounded the final note in ‘I Walk This Garden’ — who elevated the pitch of the show: not only for her vocal performance, but for the ferocity of her physical performance, which embodied her personas from their diva demeanour to their tragic torment. “Speck of dust,” she empathically sang, her attention drifting away and returning to repeat itself again and again; but from her mouth the phrase resonated anew each time.
Like his voice, Cabena — tall, lanky and long-haired — sumptuously plays an androgynous figure at the centre of the show, “a ghost, a Mister-See-through,” who draws us to the smallest of gestures: wrapping a shawl; removing a hair tie; looking in a mirror; drinking red wine; smearing on red lipstick; or satirically emphasizing the diction of words like “cock” (‘What If?’) and “liquidated” (‘The System’) so the audience hears the implications, must bear the weight of his utterance.
In ‘Sebastiane,’ an ode to the martyred saint and queer icon, Cabena’s crystalline voice reached its height and, remarkably, sustained itself the entire duration, managing to conjure up a religious scene, the shadow his profile projected on the reddish-brown brick walls on either side of him. It was as if hearing an angel sing, as though we were delivered unto a state of divinity.
The Garden
The title of the opera derives from the end of Jarman’s The Garden, “We die so silently. My gillyflower, roses, violets blue. Sweet garden of vanished pleasures, please come back next year.”
I was interested to see how the show — which one might describe with adjectives like experimental, poetic, abstract, and I’d add: mystic, queer, biting — might illuminate the phrase. Near the end, when Asselin sings the line, the other three performers are lying on the ground. Sleeping, I thought; then, having seen the images of protests on screen a little bit earlier, I recalled the die-ins/sleep-ins that ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) performed in the late 80s, and the flowers that Jarman spoke could now be viewed as a metaphor for a lost generation.
The garden is a symbol — personal and political — where one can cultivate that which lives, dies and, by gravity and grace, re-generate itself; to make sense of the disorder that life can often put in our path, a form to bring back beauty into this wide wounded world.
For a show with so many elements — three musicians, four performers, the projection and a changing set — knowing where to look can, at times, be overwhelming; but I suspected that this was, like Jarman’s film, Albery’s intention, which was confirmed with ‘Two Dreams’ and ‘Mercy.’
Suddenly, in these sequences, on the left, Kwon’s glittering piano enlivens, but, on the right, so do Hardy-Kavanagh and Arulanandam’s descending, discordant then harmoniously plucked strings. In the centre are the performers, entering into the dialogue between the poles with their voices no longer so distinct but weaving themselves into and out of each other. There is no one place to focus our attention, so instead we are invited to oscillate between these three points, in addition to projections behind them, briefly turning the experience into an electric, satisfying activity that embeds us into its well-tended, fertile soil lined with large stones.
In the end, in refracting the life of an artist to operatic proportions, Garden of Vanished Pleasures layers an intricate audio-visual experience marked by absence, but wild at heart.
By Nirris Nagendrarajah for Ludwig-Van
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