James Strecker Reviews the Arts

A bride to be and five girlfriends gather to celebrate on the eve of her wedding ceremony. They wear knee length skirts of wine and black hues that flare out in puffs and folds over pattered or boldly reddish tights. They wear squeezed uppers, bodices that accentuate their breasts and  assert their womanhood. Their striking and surprising costumes, by designer Michael Gianfrancesco, seem to urge them revel in their sexuality.

So these ladies are hanging loose. They are playful, impish, assertively celebratory, and much fun to be with for the Opera’s fifty minute duration. In life off the stage, they are mezzos Andrea Ludwig and Krisztina Szabo and sopranos Laura Albino, Carla Huhtanen, Shannon Mercer, and Jacqueline Woodley, a gathering of vocal riches, to be sure.

The ladies sing texts of Serbian poetry that sometimes shows a desperate sense of existence in everyday life, as in the lyric: “Mother is giving me to Jovan the drunk”. The singer, however, wants Ilija the hero, and not Jovan. Such is a girl’s complaint that inhabits folk songs of every culture. Or, further “two roosters were fighting on the priest’s hearth”, a lyric which echoes a rural existence where all kinds of animal activity and consciousness prevails. In the country, people and animals both domestic and wild traditionally live as one coexistence, and humans sometimes take animal sounds, like those here on display, as their own. They make up stories played out by animals, ergo folklore and its buddy imagination. Thus, the surtitles overhead are a welcome good read.  

In the composer’s and her first culture’s tonally compressed vocal sounds, we hear piercing and elongated Balkan harmonies that carry a sense of inherent echo, of mystery. We have ebb and flow cadences and staccato sounds punched out on the breath. We hear squeezed and flattened or ripe and juicy tones, group conversation like collective barnyard clucking, voices of implicit defiance whatever the subject. We also hear gut-wrenching cries from the bride and dizzied, breathless laughter and affectionate teasing tones from her friends.

The sung dialogue might be “vuh……huh huh”  repeated over and over, meaningless sounds that, with pointed characterization, seem to speak whole texts. Or it might be confidential girl chatter bursting with urgent advice or premarital sexual innuendo or a wistful sharing of dreams. In terms of sound alone, even without director Michael Cavanagh’s inventive and very human sensitivity and his keenly theatrical smarts, this opera would be maddeningly delicious with its always surprising variety of sounds.

In the realm of body, since physicality is indeed a driving force of Sokolovic’s creation, we have playfully robotic or marionettish movements, or sauntering, swaggering and suggestive walks, or a sensual bride writhing in the light and stroking her hair. We have foot stomping in staccato rhythms, or mime with everyday gesture magnified, or physical movements that echo or accompany the words these voices sing. These bodies are often so rich and varied with movement and sound that they seem collectively as complex as an orchestra, yet always spontaneous , spur of the moment, easily silly. The voices make sound and such sound is worked over into meaning, a meaning that is not abstracted but rooted instead in physical existence that constantly encounters the world. Sound is a spirit here, one that permeates all, makes everything presented here exist again and again in a new dimension.

As well, a celebratory lust for existence drives the atmosphere created here by these assertively breasted women who play both their sexual and life-nurturing cards at one time.  They are crucial to life’s process, and this is what we sense.  The production becomes even more potently female with the bride-to-be’s undressing, removing her stockings, and the sense of isolation seeping into her being as the voices around her, though close as before, sound more distant. She sinks into her senses, it seems, and then into poetry as she is told that “the sky is full of stars” and then to “wash your hair in the stars”. Her friends circle about with yards and yards of silver fabric and over a simple frame create an ambiguous formation. Is it a bath, a bed, an ocean symbolic of her awaking sensuality, her primordial purpose? She is told to “wash your breasts in the stars” and we thus know that something very true of the human heart is going on.

In Svadba we experience women in groups where, through play and bonding, they have their own feminine existential search, their own feminine world, their own dimensions of reality. A continuum of sound develops as, for instance, each upends a hollow tube, one not quite three feet in length and filled with granular material, and creates the sound of water flowing. Or is in time that flows in their hands, like grains of sand?

The bride to be is being awakened to her part in the fundamental flow of propagation, one in which a species must participate in order to endure. Her friends slumber almost protectively around her and a flute sound is heard and we are told “the nightingale is starting to sing….. it must be dawn… wake up, Milica… the groom is arriving.” The bride to be, naked and wrapped in silver disappears for a moment and returns in a gown. She sings the opera’s only solo “Come to me, my beloved.”  A new lifetime is beginning and from it other lifetimes.

In the production’s program notes, Svadba is described as a newly commissioned opera by Serbian born, Montreal resident Ana Sokolovic. As you can tell, it is much, much more. Rooted, as it is, in traditional folklore, and composed and produced with a knack from all participants for subtle profundity, it carries the unforced resonance of a collectively shared ritual. It weaves multidimensional realities into a theatrical fibre that entertains and moves one deeply, it alters and embellishes everyday life and draws forth its archetypal underpinnings. Svadba is a creation that celebrates the immediacy of friendship, sensuality, fantasy, physical existence in the world, the sounds we make and amplify into meaning. It celebrates being.

With six instinctively dedicated and versatile singers, a minimum of multipurpose props, six lights that seem like small suns to roll on stands and be refocused at will, and tonal resources so broad and daring that they reconfigure what one defines as experience, Svadba succeeds in reaching beneath concept into a more fundamental experience of existence. It certainly offers many surprises, much delight, many nudges into ineffable understanding that we come to feel in our bones. Ultimately, it simply gives undeniable cause to celebrate being in the world. For this production of Svadba is most seductive as it demonstrates and indeed seems made of the very same life energy that it would have us, the ones who watch, also know and, yes, celebrate. I’ve waited a long time for theatre to do something like this.

My following reviews were published in an alternative paper over the past few years and I can’t help but recommend each splendid CD again. So here we go -unedited, from the originals, so please excuse the occasional bit of information that is no longer relevant. JS.

1)    In a year and change, Rodney Crowell will be sixty, and on his new CD, Sex & Gasoline, as before with Fate’s Right Hand of 2003 and The Outsider of 2005, the lyrically versatile and discerningly poetic songwriter again proves himself gutsy, and almost unrelenting in self-revelation, as he explores his worth. Here again he puts his will to truth in the witness box to give testimony against the destructive and wounding BS that sustains too many guys in our patriarchal culture. A male to female confession – “….We momma’s boys have got it in for you/Our faults are many, our virtues nil/We never loved you and we never will”- pulls no punches at showing romantic love as a façade and con job of both the other and oneself. Yet, ironically, what follows is the unforced and delicate shading of regret in Moving Work of Art. In Truth Decay, relationships, even with self-awareness, are tough-going in what seems the quicksand once described by R. D. Laing: “I can’t love you like I want to/If it comes down to what I don’t do….” Girls are taught to “bow your head, lift your skirt…” and, in time, men who think they care or maybe do care can only declare, almost like a character out of Beckett, that “there’s nothing I can do/I’ve done everything I can” and realize a futility in the way “they say true love conquers all/ but they don’t tell you who to call.”

 The desperation in Crowell’s wishing “for an hour…to be a woman and feel that phantom power” and in his need to find out “if I’m a decent man/Or if I’m just a joke” is deeply touching. One always senses that Crowell has humanity’s number, be it male or even female, but no matter how deeply he regrets his failings –and no matter how much he hopes a woman might handle and not cause pollution, the Iraqi war, the world’s hungry- the inner world of women remains unreachable, unknowable. So I’m relieved that Crowell doesn’t take an easy route, like some songwriters, and assume that human decency is contingent upon the absence of a penis. But in a world where too many puerile men pass stupidity for masculinity and destroy life and planet in the process, one can only hope there is a solution to be found to our madly competitive and shamefully destructive nature. One can be glad then that Crowell has spoken, as a male “out of touch with my gender,” from his need for truth.

 I admire Rodney Crowell on many levels. His instinctively poetic lyrics feel fresh and   evocative without his trying to make them so, his music in both melody and style shows variety and an insightful vitality, his production is sonically rich and nuanced even when it rocks, but also the man has a deep need to find out, through his art and his honesty, what the ingredients of his being a man and being a human being might and can turn out to be. At his self-critical best, which shows itself often, he doesn’t pass self-flagellation for honesty, nor does he take the facile way out by removing himself from responsibility in either personal relationships or a rotten social fabric, of which he is part, and simply point at the crimes of others. He tells us what we do, in our lunacy as males, and with courageous integrity reaches for answers one assumes he knows don’t exist. He doesn’t escape into his often consummate art but, instead, faces the blunt fact that, being alive, there is no escape from anything on the planet, especially “the man in the mirror” he described in Fate’s Right Hand who is in some way, in truth, each of us.

2)   My favorite CD this month is Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin’ which on first hearing I found rather low key and now I find addictive. Why? Lynne is one of the best up close singers around, one whose naturally intimate voice suggests that singer and listener are sharing one layer of skin between them. Her emotional shadings, sometimes ethereal and sometimes out and out aching, feel deeply rooted in the fibre of living through relationships, personal need, private joys, and wounds that won’t heal. Lynne’s nuanced voice feels so personal at times that one feels an intruder, but also emotionally bound within the singer’s voice to remain and hear more. For Shelby Lynne, a Grammy-winning singer adept at several genres of music, style ultimately emerges from her private truth and so we believe her.

3)  The best CD of the month, by a country (and western) mile, is Say Uncle from the Toronto-based C&W string quintet Lickin’ Good Fried. It’s a collection of top-notch music-making on all counts, especially the intuitive interplay in the band itself, the solidly creative musical chops in the backup, and the loving and witty vocals, of always inspired and clever lyrics, up front. The quintet consists of singer-guitarist (Colonel) Tom Parker, fiddler John Showman, Andrew Collins on mandolin, Sam Petite on bass, and singer-mandolinist Alex Pangman. Pangman, when backed by her very hot Alleycats, happens to be Canada’s premiere chanteuse of traditional jazz vocals.

 You’ll find yourself doing repeated listens of Say Uncle’s fifteen cuts. Colonel Tom’s enjoyably distinct lead voice seems a long-brewed hybrid blend of teen crooners like Tommy Sands and Hank Williams, while harmonies or duets with Alex feel true to any musical groove they pick, no pun intended. The musically-compelling and very catchy tunes lock easily into one’s brain and the lyrics cover a range of contemporary and traditional issues without forgoing the latter’s musical roots.

 For starters, try the relationship politics of Soap Opera: “You ought to be in the soap opera, each night you switch your act up, rewrite the plot and come up with some new and crazy drama, that’s guaranteed to keep us watching each and every minute of the soap opera.” Who hasn’t known or done that one? But equal pleasures and recognition await in “Your Side of the Bed,” or “Don’t Paint Me with the Same Brush,” or “Leave This Song” with its surreal suggestion, “Do me right and leave this song.” Don’t be surprised if you find this disc sharing listening time with Rose Maddox and her 1940s cohorts and Randy Newman and his witty and ironic post ‘60s singer-writers. Available from www.lickingoodfried.com and soon on itunes.

4)  Guitarist Margaret Stowe’s new CD, Mello Jello, is now released and it is a subtly enchanting gem of masterly technique infused with a complex and profoundly gentle humanity. Stowe’s light touch is made of a pinpoint delicacy that feels perfectly conceived and perfectly placed; it feels uncanny with other-worldly nuance; it is beautiful. And, no doubt, to some these thirteen tracks might seem as light as a strand of smoke on a sunny day in, say, 1969. In any case, this is guitar playing of such astonishing lightness and rich delicacy in sound that one pauses in one’s deeper emotions to listen. There is richness of imagination here that takes one through surprising rhythmic shifts, placement of notes, tonal variety that teases one’s imagination, and swing that really does swing. However, as ethereal as this music might be, there is an assertive sense of daring within that improvises with confident purpose. Available from margaretstowe.com or myspace.com/margaretstowe

5)  When is the Dalai Lama not the Dalai Lama? Let me explain. Last winter, as the healing person, who had been enthusiastically recommended to me by a friend, was allowing her energies to dance with mine, she played a recording of a deep-voiced individual chanting a mantra. “That sounds like a cross between a Bulgarian bass and a Tibetan monk” said I, remembering my CD of Boris Christoff singing Mussorgsky and an interview I once did with a group of maybe a dozen Tibetan monks. The healing person proceeded to explain that it was supposedly the Dalai Lama doing a mantra he had once chanted to a dying friend, although she had doubts this was true, and she proceeded to give me a copy. I played this recording endlessly, often hours at a time, for several months, and treasured the unique feeling of peace and serenity that ensued.

 Enter reality. One day, being an obsessive surfer, I decided to check the veracity of this tale, on the internet, and discovered that this deep resonance of a voice belonged not to the Dalai Lama but to one Hein Braat in The Netherlands. His recording of the Maha Mrityeonjaya Mantra was being recorded and passed around by the multitudes, without recompense to him, all because the Dalai Lama had allegedly said that he would record the mantra, but only if it were not sold but given away freely from one person to the next.

Anyway, the pairing of the Mrityeonjaya Mantra and the Gayatri Mantra are one of several imported CDs of Hein Braat chanting available from www.isabellacatalog.com.I can’t imagine life without mine.

6)  Diana Panton’s voice, on the CD If the Moon Turns Green, swings with ease and grace and puts out just enough to seductively draw the listener into her private world. It suggests both ambiguous secrets and understanding good will, and hangs gently like a finely woven gown on a body of partially concealed sensuality, whimsy, longing, vulnerability and purity of trust. Panton thoughtfully caresses each lyric with very slight traces of seductive breathiness, charming slight nasality, and delightful pixiness in a beguiling and very feminine brew. Diana Panton practices an art rarely found nowadays, the art of clean open-hearted delivery with no trace of affectation, mannerism or irony, and I know that somewhere the likes of June Christy, Peggy Lee, Lee Wiley and many others are looking on with approval that here, in our own city no less, we have a special vocalist who means what she sings. And when Diana Panton sings in her distinctive lights-are-low, whisper-in-your-ear voice, the world is a good, romantic place to be. Give her a listen and smell the roses. Available at www.dianapanton.com .

7)  I met Ramblin’ Jack Elliot the first time in 1962 at a folk club in Hamilton called The Happy Medium. He was a disciple of the folk legend Woody Guthrie who once had said, “Jack sounds more like me than I do.” Another Guthrie disciple was Bob Dylan, who had recently dropped into the Medium, without playing, and whose first LP had featured a track called Song to Woody.  Dylan, it turned out, was borrowing some of Ramblin’ Jack’s Guthrie-derived stage act, although the latter’s brilliance as a raconteur, flat picker (Ian Tyson has said he long wanted to flat pick as well as Ramblin’ Jack), and genuine folkloric persona was and is beyond emulation; for the guy was and is unique. Anyway, when I asked Ramblin’ Jack to tell me about Woody Guthrie, he politely drawled, “Well, you see, my woman’s just in from Toronto……” and the case was closed, at least until we met again.

 Memories aside, the release of THE LIVE WIRE: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949 is a major event for so many reasons. Guthrie’s impact on both folk music and popular music -as a source of classic songs like This Land is Your Land, as an icon of the feisty everyman troubadour speaking eloquently for the working classes, as a major template-setting influence on Dylan, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Ramblin’ Jack, son Arlo, and countless others- has been enormous. But other than brief footage of Guthrie singing John Henry with Brownie and Sonny, who could tell further what this small-framed national treasure sounded like in front of an audience, what his irresistible magic might be. Thus, this CD, available exclusively from www.woodyguthrie.org is a recording of major historic importance because it documents the voice of unions, of migrant workers, of miners, of the downtrodden everywhere and of the American land –and that voice is Woody Guthrie just being himself.

 THE LIVE WIRE: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, the 2008 Grammy winner for best historical album and a fundraiser for the Woody Guthrie Foundation, took place at the YM-YWHA’s Fuld Hall in Newark, New Jersey and consists of “18 tracks of songs, stories and conversation.” The songs include Tom Joad, Guthrie’s condensation in song of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Pastures of Plenty with its spine-shivering line, “We come with the dust and we go with the wind,” and Jesus Christ, set to the folk tune Jesse James. For the latter song, wife Marjorie notes that Woody, after  being torpedoed , came home with a long beard and wearing a fez, which caused neighbourhood kids to yell “Jesus Christ has come!” Marjorie, acting as hostess of the gig, adds that Woody “lives the life of Jesus Christ very much in his travelling.”

 Along with Marjorie’s endearing giggle and attempts to control Woody’s rambling tales with warnings like “I’m gonna time you” and “very briefly this time please,” we have her explanation (quoting Woody) that “folksingers don’t have voices, it is the words that are so terribly important.” From the man himself, unbending individual that he is, we have elasticity of tempo, a false start too high for 1913 Massacre “about the scabs and thugs,” some biographical background (my mother was “an awful scared nervous kind of woman”), historical background about Woody’s home state Oklahoma where the Indians and poor Negroes were cheated out of their land and its oil, and insight into his creative process with Marjorie noting that Woody keeps clippings “stuck up on the wall” and writes up to ten songs a day. I especially love the folksy wisdom of “Oklahoma’s first in everything worst” and Guthrie’s famous ironic wordplay with “since I was there and the dust was there I thought I’d write a little song about it.” We are so damned lucky to have this priceless recording available.

8)  In the exquisitely designed booklet of her musically abundant and aesthetically seductive new CD, Kulak Misafiri: Events in Small Chambers, singer Brenna MacCrimmon offers seven definitions, of the title, that suggest we inhabit and are remade by a lifelong continuum of sound that works its magic upon us, through us. MacCrimmon’s magical contribution to the listener’s aural life is a collection of eleven (of thirteen) tracks that are subtly potent and undeniable with syncopation, juicy-ripe with musical textures, vocally haunting, mysterious in aura, and solid yet spontaneous in musical sophistication. Canadian MacCrimmon certainly conveys a love and reverence for this blend of mainly traditional and several modern songs, but so brewed is she in the complex idioms of Turkish music that one senses the roots of her spirit are planted in the blood of Turkish soil. Recorded in seven cities with small groupings from a pool of thirty-one ace musicians, the riches here are many and each track seems an event in its unique way. Gems include Dolama Dolamayi with its punctuated lilt and descending refrain, the jazzy underpinning of Oj Ti Mome Ohrigance, the heart-broken and blood-bleeding wail of Yildiz Dagi with George Chittenden doing eerie turns on the zurna, and the deeply blue Semsiyemin Ucu Kare for which MacCrimmon explains “There are days when the rain and the mud and the clouds get into your soul.” Tracks eleven to thirteen include birds singing, MacCrimmon singing the self-penned, loving and soothing Mussels in the Bay, in English, that suggests the kind of drifting smoke one imagines to find in Istanbul, and, finally, what sounds like the interior of a train station somewhere (a continuum of sound, remember?) MacCrimmon’s distinctly pure voice, one that is crystalline yet fleshy, timbred when needed with an edge of nasality that is de rigueur when one moves east from the music of western Europe, is, like this CD, one of a kind. Kulak Misafiri: Events in Small Chambers certainly has many qualities to make it a special classic of contemporary world music -and holding graphic designer Yesim Tosuner’s beautiful booklet in one’s hand is a bonus. A must have, to be sure. Available from www.greengoatmusic.ca or www.cdbaby.com/brennamaccrimmon

9)  On I Love (Heart) Jokes: Paula Tells Them in Maine, the quick and kind comedienne, Paula Poundstone, is brilliant at connection with her audience members. She points out and probes the absurdities of their lives and ways of speech, all with a benign aggressiveness that does not patronize or condescend or abuse, but lovingly celebrates the average guy or gal. She is a mirror that, without judgment, says “look at yourself, laugh and enjoy.” Poundstone makes the folks in her audience talk and, whatever each one says, she picks up on the potential of every sentence -or silence- and takes their words -or lack of words- at face value and riffs on them. She does so with a snow ranger, a woman who “runs a national park,” and a professor of statistics, and each exchange is hilarious. She also applies her modus operandi of wide-eyed amazement and awe to Maine and its people, parenting, aging with its wrinkles and poorer vision and jowls, cats (she has 12) for whom she sifts “all day long,” and tosses in that “Canadians are the nicest people in the world” -with a caveat about our reticence to speak up for ourselves also tossed in. Poundstone is special and already I’m playing her CD a third time, as you will too. But be careful while driving: this CD is pee your pants funny. Go to www.paulapoundstone.com to order.

10)  Here’s a take on Richard Thompson, using the five CD set RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson (on Free Reed Music) as reason and evidence. As a lyricist, he is unflinching yet compassionate, incisively aware of a world where people live impossible realities, always surprising in his turns with colloquial language, deliciously acidic in his irony, achingly poignant without even scratching sentiment, and funny as hell (a song on Janet Jackson, folks, and Madonna too). He is good because he rarely points at others in accusation, unless they are ridiculous, or at himself in congratulation for his versatile genius.

 As a guitarist, Thompson shapes each riff as if it’s conceived for this very moment alone, while sonically he incorporates a range of sounds from the nuances of Celtic music, especially the pipes, to rock of all styles from Chuck Berry to The Who, to pure sound of shifting tonal base into a unique experience that, for all its musical savvy, emanates whole from a creative centre and not as an amalgam. As a picker, he is versatile, imaginative, and no slave to any stylistic form as he creates his own distinctive sound. His sense of sonic space is gripping, his musical imagination unending, his technique masterful.

  As a singer, Thompson can do an everyday bloke or a wandering everyman in purgatorial solitude or a George Formby clone with a macabre edge or a human spirit surveying a bottomless personal chasm or a knife poking commentator full of phlegm. His individual cuts are memorable as complete creative entities where all his masteries meld. Just the unreleased recordings in this collection would make a distinguished career. Available at Records on Wheels in Dundas.

11)  In his Pensees of 1670, Pascal stressed the underpinning of human essence in the arts, saying, “When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.”

 Where the creative person matters most deeply, to be sure, is not in doing art for the sake of doing art, or for profit, or for, say, Canadian Idol status, although the latter is a nice gig for the perks, prestige and bucks. The creative person matters most in manifesting and sharing his or her genuine individuality and profound concerns through mastery of a given art form.

 Yes, it is hard to reveal, and sometimes to accept, one’s own uniqueness in our “more of the same” culture. Moreover, even offbeat artists can become cliched if all they seek is to achieve difference from the norm. But as film director Terry Gilliam once told me: “It’s our duty to do something, if we’ve got skills or talents, to help improve things.”  By being real, the genuine artist can initiate real change in the world itself or how we experience the world, and both changes are essential to our worth as humans.

 That’s why it is always encouraging to witness a major talent plugging away, in a given creation, for both truth and consummate artistry at the same time.

 In classical music, for example, Magdalena Kozena’s recent Mozart Arias on the Archive label, with offstage mate Simon Rattle conducting, reveals the Czech mezzo’s vulnerable, yet uncompromising, sincerity that consistently aches with the beauty of human risk and of universal truth. Or in country music, Rodney Crowell’s Fate’s Right Hand pulsates with unrelenting introspection and existential guts that compel the singer-songwriter to find and know himself. Or Mexican Chavela Vargas whom the singer Lhasa once made me promise to check out for her unflinching honesty. Vargas turned out to be intensely real and unforgettable. 

 But not all art, to be true, needs to be angst and pain. Joy is equally honest and real, although many performers in our age of perpetual smiles seem unable to realize their own profound inner buzz without resorting to façade or gimmickry of some kind. That’s why nowadays, when I find many new and “smooth” jazz singers as stimulating as Prozac, I turn to Alex Pangman for life and music as one inseparable high. Alex is a quintessential upper, an unaffectedly hip singer with style in her blood who lives and breathes the swing idiom.

The narrative line of Cirque du Soleil’s  Quidam is thus described: “Young Zoé is bored; her parents, distant and apathetic, ignore her. Her life has lost all meaning. Seeking to fill the void of her existence, she slides into an imaginary world—the world of Quidam — where she meets characters who encourage her to free her soul.”

 Inside the vast expanse of Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum, however, it is a series of dazzling, sometimes breathtaking, acrobatic or aerial or clown acts that rules one’s imagination and frees one’s spirit to the workings of wonder and awe. Especially in a distant seat, faces are difficult to read and facial expressions that tell a story don’t register. Moreover, and let’s get the negatives out of the way at the outset, the choreography connected to “plot” sometimes seems cursory and unexpansive, at least, again, from a distance. These briefly experienced figures don’t have time to intrude long enough in one’s psyche.

 But it isn’t the story we have come to see, after all, is it? We’re here to celebrate physical beauty and its defiance of gravity and other limitations, we’re here to celebrate the body as magical. And that’s what we get. Moments like the Aerial Contortion in Silk which, as well physically breathtaking, is sensual and erotic, a performance that makes time stop. 

   Aerial Contortion in Silk

 Likewise, the male-female Statue in Part Two stops both time and the show. Even the live band soundtrack forgoes its over-pumped Eurobeat, faux ethnic loudness for a softer mood-shaping mysterious blend of sounds that helps to transform the imagination. The two performers use surprising and very pointed fulcra of balance and to do so their strength, especially in horizontal positions, is hard to believe. Much of Quidam seems to float in air, but these two, ethereal as they are, seem made of that same air.

Statue

 Some of Quidam’s acts are simply pure physical fun, and they do things we can almost imagine ourselves enjoying, albeit with years of training under our belts. The German Wheel with a human spoke spins all about and thumbs its nose at gravity. Skipping Ropes shows a collective mastery of coordination and rhythm as twenty acrobats keep the beat going as solos or groupings of two or more negotiate  multiple ropes.

 The quite charming Diabolos act, with four performers, is a Chinese children’s yo-yo game that requires two sticks linked by a string on which a wooden spool is juggled, tossed and balanced. Cloud Swing is a delightful trapeze act full of fun and feminine pizazz and, like Skipping Ropes, a study in perpetual motion. The gutsy clown who masterfully uses audience members as part of his acts –a romantic date in a car and a film shoot in the pre-sound era- is magical in his own zany way, someone whose laughter and delight we can share, whatever our age.

 Quidam has some flaws as noted, partly because a large venue doesn’t accommodate a need for narrative or choreographic detail. But Quidam does offer moments of pure beauty, moments of ethereal magic, moments delight and fun, moments of freeing energy, and it’s always a good thing to have one’s jaw drop in surprise and wonder, n’est-ce pas?

 German Wheel

Backstage gets hectic in COC production.

On the Hamilton-Toronto bus, en route to see Canadian Opera Company’s Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss, there is time to re-dip into Wilhelm Furtwangler Notebooks 1924-54 and read what this truly legendary conductor has to say about tonight’s composer. Although these notes contain nothing on the opera due in three hours, Furtwangler does prove increasingly more condemning of the composer in entries made over the war years.

In 1939, for example, he writes: “The playful trait in Strauss: not the playing of a child, which is actually in deadly earnest, but the conscious play of the irresponsible person, of the person devoid of content, the redundant person. As he never means it quite truly, quite warmly, quite seriously, he is never heard or felt quite truly, quite warmly, quite seriously. He is, of all of them, the one who ‘can’ do the most and ‘who’ is the least.”

In 1940, he continues, “…art emerges which, following the dictates of the material, increasingly relinquishes the soul (Strauss)….” Then in 1943 he writes, “The more of a technician someone is –Hindemith, also R. Strauss-the more he is interested in style, the less in the work.”

Then, in 1944, we have, “In terms of structure and devotion, R. Strauss is equal to the greatest. In this he is as unobjectionable as Bach and Mozart. But what one must object to is what he has to say, the essence and content of his personality. Here he cannot be placed on a par with the great composers.”

In summation, Strauss stands accused of unengaged and contrived playfulness, of technique and style that prevail over substance of meaning. It’s an image that complies with the sometimes shallow Strauss of musical lore who prefers playing cards backstage to shaping music of metaphysical consequence from the podium. And didn’t his collaborator von Hofmannsthal regard Strauss as a bourgeois?

One case for the composer’s defense, however, is the audience for COC’s Ariadne auf Naxos, in a production that originated with the Welsh National Opera. Note the repeated laughter, from chuckle to roar, in the audience, note the many faces full of delighted anticipation, and one realizes that Richard Strauss is a theatrical magician –and composer- of his own kind. From concept to staging, this is a thoroughly entertaining show, a world onto itself.

At the outset, the Prologue reveals a decidedly unmagical world behind theatrical fantasy, one bubbling with sarcasm, irritation, ironies, hurt outrage, and shallow pragmatism. No wonder it is so. “The richest man in Vienna” has arbitrarily decided, first, that some comedians will follow the performance of the serious opera that night and then, because all performance must end at nine so the fireworks can begin, that the serious opera and comedic performance will be performed simultaneously.

The composer who at first wonders, “How can I make sure that Bacchus understands he is a god?” then witnesses this same Bacchus in an ungodlike tantrum of childish, foot-stomping variety. He then hears his magnum opus regarded as boring, as merely “all these sharps and flats,” and, being hypersensitive, as all creators must surely be, declares, wounded, “I’ll never compose again.” Meanwhile, the arrogant diva is indignant: “Don’t they know who I am?”

This is funny stuff, of course, because the wounded naivite, the deflatable pomposity, the unjustified pretentiousness, and the pettiness of theatrical folk all show the human species, by implication, as something silly. Yes, we note the set up of easy targets by a composer who seems emotionally unaffected by them, a composer who further inflates these already bloated individuals into further absurdity with musical exaggeration, but do his victims deserve any better? And don’t we sense, throughout, a knowing wink from Strauss, a patient which seems at the essence of his humour?

So much is spoofed in Ariadne auf Naxos, wherein grand opera and comedy of the street have to work out co-existence: the stereotypes in opera, metaphysical aspiration in opera, romance on or off the stage, pretension of all kinds, innocence of all kinds, even dogma in aesthetics. We laugh, however, because this is what we are, even in our sincerity and vulnerability. We are a silly species and Strauss is funny because he can’t be bothered too much with us, all while he wraps us in rapturous music all the same.

But this is a splendid production. Conductor Sir Andrew Davis negotiates, with easygoing yet acutely aware aplomb, the large variety of orchestral effects in the score. These include dramatic chordal punctuation, attitude-setting lead-ins for the singers, ironic and humorous commentary, full collective ecstasy or pomp, and much else. Davis seems at one with the method of Strauss and over Prologue and Opera guides seductive sounds to expand and recede, to dominate the theatre’s atmosphere and then float away like strands of smoke.

One savours these orchestral sounds, one pays attention to the combinations of instruments that create them and sometimes surprise us. But if Strauss indicates a deliberate manipulation of emotional response on his part, Davis in turn deftly achieves an unselfconscious counterpoint of absurd situations on stage and these painfully beautiful musical passages. He skillfully lures us into a musical world, and there moves us to laughter and to feeling.

This is almost sinfully rich music from the pit, but it is not by orchestra alone that such richness is achieved. It is especially in his writing for the female voice that Strauss has sublime effect and the cast of the Canadian Opera production offers a number of vocal gems, male as well as female, that give memorable results.

Adrianne Pieczonka as Prima Donna and Ariadne shows an inspiring self-assurance of voice. With substantial rounded tone, she is declarative yet subtle on a big scale, effortlessly present with beguiling clarity of sound, with feminine power even in her wounded gentleness. Whatever parody Strauss and von Hofmannstahl have in mind, there is radiant authority in Pieczonka’s performance of Ariadne, one that moves us deeply.

As the Composer, mezzo Alice Coote’s repeated nuanced shaping of Straussian elongations and her subtle manipulation of both volume and resonance create a compelling range of emotion in a character who might otherwise seem artsy, self-indulgent and precious. Coote is consistently sensitive in creamy soft shadings of voice that drift off into aching silences and we in turn find beauty, not cause for mockery, in the Composer’s sincerity.

Soprano Jane Archibald sings the delightful Zerbinetta with bounce and exciting pliability of voice, plus an incisive edge that, urgently at times, delineates inner shifts of feeling. All this in a role that in some quarters is considered the most difficult coloratura role in the canon. As an actress, Archibald is adept at coquettish innuendo and a delightfully suggestive physicality. She is sexy with each gesture as she embodies the score.

Richard Margison’s open throated and masculine tenor, ringing loud at full throttle, brings a welcome heroic dimension to these prevailing feminine sensibilities. Unless the original German speaks more true to life, both librettist (who was a poet) and composer have several chuckles at the cliched lines that Bacchus, as a satiric tool, must mouth. Try these gems: “Now suffering changes to joy in your heart and mine.” Or “I’ve become a god through love.” Or ”Great was my need of you. Now I am transformed.” And my favourite: “I needed you more than anything.”

Director Neil Armfield’s knack for physical and vocal humour provides many a delight throughout the evening and even includes stylized copulation behind a curtain. His almost static arrangement of singers during the Opera creates at times the effect of a concert performance. One senses his mockery of opera in the wrong hands and reduced to a series of showpiece arias with little regard for narrative continuity. Meanwhile, Dale Ferguson’s ripped and punctured flats, with a decidedly dirty look to them, appropriately echo visually a high art being sullied.

Composer and librettist and all elements in the COC’s deliciously theatrical production achieve, as desired, a very fine balance of emotional intensity and comic effect. They put quotation marks around their own high art, even as they make satiric points at the expense of that same art whose emotional impact, ironically, they also hone so well.

One feels oneself made emotionally obese by musical beauty, one feels emotionally both self-indulgent and drained, even as one laughs lovingly at one’s submission to operatic effect. By his own rules, on his own turf, Strauss proves he knows both his craft and humanity insightfully well. Who can doubt that he is very serious indeed about the art he creates, especially when he plays both ends against a paradoxical middle where seriousness and laughter can intertwine?

Gluck’s down-to-basics reformist opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, is a very human and sublimely musical rite that explores humanity’s most fundamental and blunt existential condition: we die. Or, more painfully for us, those we love deeply die before we do, and we must then live our lonely grief, sometimes craving our own death to ease unbearable pain. Life with death as an unpredictable and inevitable end is impossible to live and somehow we must finally address our fear and pain.

No wonder this myth of a man, Orfeo, who would go even to hell to once again have the recently dead wife he loves is a cornerstone narrative of our culture. And for eight performances, the Canadian Opera Company provides potent means for us to consider such immediate human matters through their current production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, one which is deeply haunting and exquisitely produced on all counts.

At the outset, the paired down orchestra allows individual instrumental voices to suggest isolation and almost immediately we sense solitary existence. The first image we encounter, as the curtain rises slowly, is an isolated male figure, back to us, and an upstage procession right to left silhouette, against brilliant sunset lighting on the horizon, and across the wide expanse of a stage. The setting is an actual burial, we realize, into this wide expanse of gravel-like surface. These seemingly infinite dimensions wherever we look suggest –dare I say subconsciously?- the crushing of the delicate human heart into insignificance. Director Robert Carsen’s brilliant production compactly speaks fears we do not want to know we feel.

The existential continuum that here gives presence to the human condition is the plaintive and heartbreaking countertenor of Lawrence Zazzo. It’s a voice that in essence seems eternally wounded in the presence a darkness that gives no answers and only begrudging light. It’s a voice of inner resonance, inner echo, and accumulating effect. To hear this voice as Orfeo is to witness deep human sorrow. Meanwhile, the deeply resonant and full-bodied chorus of black silhouettes makes, in Peter Van Praet’s intensely unforgiving lighting, elongated shadows across the stage upon which Orfeo walks in despair.

Gluck wanted human emotion and not theatrical artifice to prevail in his masterwork and, under Harry Bicket’s baton, passages that pinpoint and echo the turmoil of human feeling are negotiated with impressively light agility. Again the production’s emphasis on iconographic image-making is superbly unsettling as the dark stone-like shapes across the stage gradually reveal themselves as human forms condemned inescapably, one feels, to the lowest place, the lowest existence. In this Hades, figures creep and crawl but move not very far; they seem at one with the dark and dead horizontal surface on which they almost exist.

When the chorus rises to stand, it’s again into a choreography of motion that is visual poetry, the kind of which Carsen is a master. The robes they discarded lie about like human remains, among which Zazzo’s hunched and desperately jerking figure of Orfeo weaves. When Orfeo and Euridice rise through the grave, it is the fresh and beautiful clarity of Isabel Bayrakdarian’s soprano that brings assertive human passion to the tale. The shining ring to her voice, one that suggests the vitality of life, provides dramatic tension in sound with Zazzo’s lush, velvety and more introspective tone, as did the piercing delicacy in the voice of Ambur Braid as Amore. We hear dramatic tension through the tonal quality of voices in this production.

It is not only love, but magical theatrical beauty, that conquers all in this gem of an offering, one which originated with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. We have here an always wished for consummate blend of orchestra, voices, direction, setting, and lighting that revitalizes and makes boldly new the turf of familiar material. One thus feels indeed privileged to experience the Canadian Opera Company’s intensely beautiful Orfeo.

This thrillingly mounted ritual we have encountered as opera has entered our lives, entered the part of us where we cannot escape the fundamental issues of our lives. Through imaginatively conceived and brilliantly realized theatrical means, we have been given a dimension of beauty that, at very least, speaks back somehow to the death that awaits each of us. Without doubt, this is a production one will never forget.

Alex Pangman’s new CD, titled 33, begins at speeding ticket tempo with I Found a New Baby and it sits comfortably in memories of the instrumental 1937 Teddy Wilson Orchestra recording. After all, Pangman’s band, the Alleycats, are an ace jazz unit whose irresistible swing, catchy idiosyncratic solos, and rhythmic daring are all effortless, musically fresh, and cause for celebration no matter where you hang your hat musically.
These guys constantly play rhythms against the prevailing rhythm, solo with an unsettling knack for aptness, and on repeated listens sound absolutely new each time.

Yet, albeit the musical riches from her instrumental friends, this is without question Pangman’s recording, a splendid collection of eleven vocals, ten songs of which were popular in 1933, and, in her idiom of choice, Canada’s Sweetheart of Swing is as good as this music gets. The stylists who inspired her would be pleased since, if she is definitely one of them, she is also a stylist who is distinctly her own person. She doesn’t simply sing a style of long ago; she lives the style and, just like her band, is repeatedly a first time experience of songs very familiar or unknown. As you might guess, without fail, she sings with the smarts of an instrumentalist.

Pangman’s musical personality is one of a delicious ambiguity, one that incorporates both womanly sophistication and a sexually delighted girlishness, both spiked with hints of unspoken intimacy that, teasingly, she won’t quite reveal. A caressed memory here, a sassy suggestion of womanly savvy there, then a brief peek at sensuality, then a dose of naughty innocence, then a burst of good-natured ecstasy -these all suggest past and present pleasures she has known. Nothing blatant here, however, just personal magic that is comfortable in subtlety.

Also, the singer’s heart acts as a guiding influence in her voice, with its longing and resolution and wistful sighs, but who is she, this singer whose every word implies a story? We almost know, almost, and that is part of Pangman’s persona’s magic. We have joy, we have life’s bruises, but the singer maintains an air of modest mystery that engages us without fail. But the key to the singer’s heart is, above all, the prevailing air of gratitude for love in her voice. For Pangman, love is the place to be, perhaps the only place in the world, and she can’t help telling us so.

It’s hard to nail tonal values in overdrive tempo, but Pangman does so in her snappy account of I Found a New Baby. Her diction in overdrive seems crazy with joy. In Ain’t Cha Glad, the slightly nasal echo in her voice, used discreetly, is full of friendly charm that welcomes the listener. In A Hundred Years From Now, her solidly declarative stance is romantically packaged in reassuring vocal caresses as she displays, as always, an astonishing vocal palette. To sing of love with such grateful enthusiasm and gentle savvy, one must know the turf well and Pangman certainly suggests she does in Thanks. Here her elongated, and experience-revealing phrases give touching results.

In Honeysuckle Rose, Pangman takes an imaginative instrumentalist’s liberties with phrasing and certainly sounds like there’s no place on earth she’d rather be than in this Waller classic. It’s Calypso country with the cozy, peppy sexiness of Happy as the Day is Long and then Shine, another classic. Here we have a fast toe-tapping beat that Pangman inhabits with ease, since an enthusiastic joie de vivre is in her bones –and I dare you not to get up and dance. I Surrender Dear shows Pangman at her narrative best, infusing each phrase with deeply felt memory, as does duet partner Ron Sexsmith whose crooning feels very human, very natural, and deeply rooted. We have a very evocative duo in this one.

As Lovely Lovers Do opens with a suggestive reedy tenor sax and in turn shows Pangman in voice that, as always, speaks directly with undeniable sincerity to the listener, this time through a romantic partner implied in the lyrics. This approach puts the singer up close, which makes sense since she penned the song. Hummin’ to Myself shows Pangman again making the music a second nature as she hits the beat assertively or stretches out over it, chat-singing or scat-singing as the music tells her to do.

A breathy urgency informs You Brought a New Kind of Love which creates a musical process of realization of love’s joys. Denzal Sinclaire, with his happily satisfied voice that almost smiles, makes an ideal duet partner, and we as listeners feel good about the world where love like this has a chance. Indeed, the two duets on this disc make one wish for more Pangman and partner recordings, since the lady in question does interesting relationships when vocally mated.

The reasons Alex Pangman belongs among her musical mentors -on record, of course, since she’s only thirty-three- are manifold. She has thoroughly internalized an encyclopedia of idiomatic resources that allow her to take whatever chances she wants musically and to do so in service of the character singing and her romantic reality. Her performances, detailed as they are in musical and psychological touches that constantly pop out and delight, always suggest a depth of musicality in reserve.

Among so much else, Pangman offers a solid and subtly shaped tone and refreshingly playful phrasing. Her knack for delicately concealed innuendo might one day get her arrested or be great stuff for a bio, but here it suggests, over and over, a shared experience to be treasured in quiet moments together. She is a discriminating singer with an inherent sense of style that leads her to say just enough. Her enthusiasm is most infectious and puts her three steps ahead of the listener who, in turn, is always just keeping up, always glad to be along for the ride.

Pangman, through declaration and implication, is also a natural storyteller. In fact, one listener told me that each song Pangman sings on this disc is like an invitation to a journey of some kind. She shapes each word into its most affecting emotional value and always implies that human narrative guides her phrasing. Her ability to inhabit lyrics as their emotional vehicle makes her use of old lyrics decidedly present tense.

Pangman can move with uncanny ease from conversational whisper to elegant vibrato to girlish enthusiasm with a barely suppressed squeal of happiness, and we always sense some new level of personality in her. She achieves character through spontaneous use of idiomatic devices that seem not at all contrived but as natural as breathing, for this is a recording that is genuinely alive to the max. It’s a recording that invites us to come along and celebrate, with our hearts, the moon and stars and that very special love we are so lucky to have for as long as time will allow.

At the outset, under conductor Leonardo Vordoni’s baton, the overture to Canadian Opera Company’s current La Cenerentola seems more a reticent sigh than a twinkle of fun one expects in Rossini. What hint of playfulness there is seems outside the music reaching in and at times the conductor appears content to acknowledge the score and give it a respectful reading rather than shape it to delight the listener.

This somewhat leisurely account also lacks the decisive linear propulsion that usually brings comic urgency to Rossini’s buffo operas. One enjoys Vordoni’s reading but one doesn’t smile too much, at least not until the Act I quintet, the Act II sextet, and those many times throughout that the composer punctuates the score with the audacious big chords we all love.

On the other hand, mezzo Elizabeth DeShong, from her first appearance, creates an Angelina, La Cenerentola, whose every note seems an eventful resonance of solid richness, be it in her stunning lower register or in her full-bodied glissandi. DeShong is a singer of engaging assertive musicality who delivers staccato lines with thoughtful tonal variation and thus consistently suggests commitment to her character.

In fact, so rooted is she in inner conflict as well as outer, so connected is she to the push and pull of each situation, that, physically, hers is a beguiling presence one can’t help but watch. She is feisty yet warm, full of frustration yet resourceful, inwardly hurt yet compassionate. Still, it is DeShong’s singing that makes one hold one’s breath as each aria becomes a sculpture in sound. Her runs sound each like a string of resonant pearls, each one a centre for the rest. Hers is the kind of Rossini singing that gives one gladness.

Likewise the Prince, Don Ramiro, of tenor Lawrence Brownlee whose agile and ardent tenor shifts from vocal caress to heroic ring without any effort and leaves something of a velvety aftertaste in one’s ears. His solid lyricism unfolds with an underpinning of unforced authority that can also suggest, as needed, a sense lingering ardor or dignified bravado, the latter quite appropriate for a young prince on the lookout for the right lady.

Moreover, the bel canto scales he negotiates with impressively casual ease come hand in hand with a pleasingly forward vocal presence that nicely balances that of DeShong’s assertive mezzo. Add to this blend the Alidoro of bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, a voice of rich depth and compelling tonal variation, a voice that rings with inner vibrations and intelligently conceived characterization, and on vocal grounds alone this production shines memorably. With these three, did anyone suggest lieder? Each aria seems a mini-drama, an occasion of narrative and characterization.

Although Rossini at the time of composition was in process of moving toward opera seria, the buffo elements of his earlier successes prevailed in La Cenerentola and are here served delightfully by Donato DiStefano’s Don Magnifico, Brett Polegato’s valet Dandini, and of course the spiteful and decidedly “loser” sisters Clorinda and Tisbe, each blatantly inane in the hands of Ileana Montalbetti and Rihab Chaieb respectively.

DiStefano’s humour certainly has a human centre and his words emerge from character as well as comic stereotype as he takes time to shape each line with dramatic purpose. As a father of some authority, he asserts his position through careful attention to the intention of his words, and he succeeds equally on the farcical side by using vocal and physical exaggeration to give his comic villainy substance. His Magnifico is realized with a rewarding theatrical intelligence.

As a counterbalance in human foolishness to Don Magnifico, Polegato’s Dandini acquits himself quite well as a smart-ass servant. His tone of self-mockery, with its subtle nudges that underline many of his moves, makes him funny indeed. In a production that sometimes tries too hard to be hilarious, his duet with Magnifico, with its rapid fire enunciation in stereo, delivers unforced comic goods that, somewhat underplayed, stand out.

As for the sisters, the first impression they make is of a nightmarish cartoon, which makes sense since set and costume designer Joan J. Guillen is also a cartoonist. Broadly conceived, the sisters are bombastically awkward types who, filled with vanity and meanness, push about the stage in every direction. Whether they distract from the music and the more rounded characterization that Rossini was now exploring in his leads is a matter of taste and an issue open to debate.

Yet, although mad with colour and exaggerated shapes like those of the sisters, Joan Font’s production, strangely, seems conceptual and rooted in idea. Yes, it is a bold and busy and boisterous show, but adding absurdity to the already absurd, again with the sisters, merely distracts from the human centre of absurdity that Rossini so needs. He is a witty composer after all, one of frenzied lightness. So quick is his humour that one finds oneself catching on just after the fact time after time and the ultimate effect is one of end to end levity that hardly touches the ground.

Font, however, is blatantly up front with the ridiculousness of the sisters and we are being almost told to laugh. When the sisters look and act so silly, who cares if they sway their hips or bow awkwardly with their rear ends projected into the audience? We are not surprised when absurdity upon absurdity tends to cancel out any comic effect. We wait for production and music to find a common ground, a common attitude.

On the other hand, taken as visual spectacle and solely as a production of broad humour based in tongue-in-cheek stereotypes, Font has created something of a hallucinatory trip for his audience, one that offers stunning set pieces like the distribution of individual characters against a grid pattern brightly lit in the second half. Font, after all, is offering theatre as theatre, an event for which all resources combine to blow the mind of anyone watching. And so, he does offer scenes that give great pleasure in their richness.

The sextet of Part II, with its hilariously rolled Rs and marionette choreography is a riot of fun. The deliberately self-conscious storm scene –with thunder via a sheet of tin, a carriage rushing in dramatic silhouette, a wind machine, the carriage accident in miniature- is theatrically magical, as is the transition from hearth to ball in Part I. Even the movement of the chorus is ambiguously funny since we don’t know if its plodding awkwardness is deliberate or just pedestrian direction.

As for the ever-present six rats who provide an athletic, sometimes balletic, counterpoint to the action, they are both theatrically enchanting and extraneous. Once again, some will find Joan Font’s take on Rossini overwhelming and thus delightful, while others will find it too overwhelming and listen for Rossini’s witty musical coloring that is perhaps lost once too often in the bold colours of set and costume.

A composer friend and occasional collaborator, Barend Schipper in The Netherlands, once explained to me how the modern ear, with its reverential and oh-so-serious attitude toward Mozart, often missed the humour in his essence. Tragedy and humour are not separate entities, he maintained, but crucial elements of a whole. His remarks reminded me of Shakespeaean scholar G. Wilson Knight who, in The Wheel of Fire, I believe, maintained that King Lear illustrates a kind of cosmic humour that plays out through human lives.

At the outset of Tafelmusik’s recent performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony under conductor Bruno Weil I certainly expected cosmos and metaphysics to permeate this esteemed orchestra’s take on the most influential symphony ever. I expected some sense of daring innovation that defied tradition, as the composer’s personal turmoil shaped itself into a breathtaking masterpiece that one still discusses in hushed tones. I did not, however, expect so much earthy humour, so much surprising detail, such variety of audacious individual sounds and, in turn, a striking revelation about both Beethoven’s creative mind and his humanity. It was a performance I’ll never forget.

The program notes suggested that we “listen with ears more comfortable with the symphonies of Mozart and early Beethoven and the operas of Salieri and Rossini” and awareness of this late 18th/early 19th century musical context made good sense of Weil’s unforced and perhaps mischievous interpretation. Beethoven, born in 1770, was creatively a creature of his musical past but also driven to new musical form and language, and here one could experience idioms of past and present working out a new relationship. One could hear each note, each passage, the individuality of each instrument’s sound, all in distinct contribution to the musical whole. One could sense the daring of Beethoven’s writing because one was made repeatedly aware of each part of it.

A composer writes notes, not necessarily meaning, and Weil gave us a thoroughly involving musical experience as we felt Beethoven pushing at boundaries of music and, thus, social decorum. One could wonder, in the second movement for instance, how an impish piccolo could fit in with its lithe audacity as the strings amassed their collective sound to the reassuring yet ominous punctuation of the tympani. Though deaf, Beethoven certainly knew the sounds that instruments, individually and collectively, could make and if there was compositional tension here, there was also humour and boldness through flippancy. What’s this? A collective clucking like gossping chickens in farmyard hyperactivity? In the holiest of holies, the 9th Symphony? No doubt, Beethoven could chuckle to himself even as he explored his despair.

It made sense that the Adagio didn’t seem a sublime ethereal stratum beyond our planet and human reach, but more the song of a body worn down by life on earth yet singing its connection to the universe. Again, Weil challenged us to hear the variety and richness of Beethoven’s method, to resolve the myriad sounds not meant to soothe but to be heard and felt in whole experience. If, in the Finale, one might smile at flippant pizzicati, the most touching moment came with the celli taking up the main theme as one vulnerable and gently assertive voice, as if hope could emerge from human chaos that, say, Brueghel would paint. When all strings joined in, we could sense brotherhood not as an abstraction but something born of flesh. And if we didn’t get the humanness of humanity, and got too scrubbed clean and abstract with idealism, Beethoven provided a flatulent bassoon to bring us back to reality.

Weil’s achievement was to bring the 9th Symphony down to earth and make it, with its variety of occasionally rude sounds, a very complex and human place to be. Appropriately, the soloists each brought an ease to their individual exuberance and each sang with assertive poise and clarity, with inherent and unforced dignity, with warm and positive vibration. The marvelous Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, in the Beethoven and in the selections from Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Part that opened the program, consistently offered an almost rugged finesse and a meaty blend of longing and spiritual achievement that is always the human condition. The always compelling interaction of distinct solo voices and small groupings within the choir created pulsations of vocal texture throughout each composition. There were riches everywhere indeed!

In 1939, when William Saroyan won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Time of Your Life, a civilization pummeled by the Great Depression now had the unimaginable carnage of World War Two around the corner. If Saroyan’s play seems rather leisurely for the urgency of the day and somewhat arm’s length from the world’s unrelenting brutality, one can certainly understand why. The time needed hope, the time needed reminding of life’s inherent worth, reminding that some good exists in humanity. Part of this work’s appeal is that it promises compassionate reprieve, though not escape, from an unforgiving world.

The setting, according to the lovably blunt bartender Nick, is “the lousiest dive in San Francisco.” Yet although wood surfaces are worn down by the decades of human lives that have passed through the swinging doors, a surprisingly unembittered lightness of goodwill prevails here. The eager paperboy bubbles, “Good morning everybody….paper mister?” Several of the men are stylish and wear fedoras indoors and out. While reed-slanted bands on the jukebox mellow out the atmosphere with waltzes, five cents a play, dresses hang on the hookers, gentle as moonlight, from derriere to knee. The banter, though sometimes pushy, never means any harm.

One life drifts into another in this place and it’s repeatedly obvious that many of the habitués need to be heard or held or given some respect. The Prospero of the joint is Joseph Ziegler’s philanthropic Joe, a man who seeks “a life that can’t hurt any other life.” He asserts, “I believe dreams sooner than statistics.” and dream after dream is given the go-ahead though his doing. Most notably, he nurtures the romance of Tom and Kitty Duval along, giving Tom personal direction and bankrolling Kitty’s escape from whoredom.

Kindness is all in Saroyan’s world and, like a beneficent echo to Joe, Nick gives casual work and free lunches to the destitute. At the same time, understandably, he despises Blick, quite despicable in the hands of Michael Simpson, who “hurts little people” and at one point deeply humiliates Kitty. Happily, two bullets eventually end Blick’s existence, for even Saroyan allows that kindness can go only so far. Otherwise, human spirit continues to celebrate itself in many small but meaningful ways in this dive.

The play and production offer an endless supply of memorable characters and many a usually starring actor, in this superb cast of twenty-five, goes right for the heart in a poignant vignette performance and then disappears. Jane Spidell as Mary, for one, is haunting in her brief exchange with Joe, one that seems almost like Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence on the seedier side of life. Another is Krystan Pellerin who as Elsie speaks volumes in a few lines as she imagines her Dudley being “sent to be killed in uniform.” As Lorene, Tatjana Cornij departs after only a few poignant lines and our hearts go with her.

Others have extended, decisively etched and thoroughly engaging roles, some of these being Stuart Hughes as the flamboyantly wild and yarn-spinning Kit Carson, Kevin Bundy as the limited but endearing Tom, Karen Rae as a Kitty of lingering sorrows, and Jeff Lillico as the never-say-die Harry, all very human with subtle complexity, no matter how dynamic their individual stage presences. These people stay with us after final curtain and in truth this list of ace performances, thanks to the direction of a concisely imaginative Albert Schultz, needs to be a roll call of all the roles.

Saroyan’s text is lightly wry, spiced with poetically human insights and paradoxes. Says Joe, “We were in love, at least I was, you never can tell about anyone else.” Later, “Everything’s right, right and wrong.” And since he made his fortune by hurting other people, Joe well knows that “money is the cruelest thing in the world.” The local cop, Krupp, warmly shaped by Oliver Dennis, wonders, “Why are we all so lousy? This is a good world….it’s wonderful to move around….. (but) nobody takes things easy.” As you might note, the frequent philosophizing has an everyday, wistful quality. Thus, the audience becomes almost a character in this joint as we relax and nod in agreement each time.

This remounted and widely-praised production won Dora awards several years ago for Ziegler, understandably since his performance implies a lifetime beneath, and for Stuart Hughes. If there’s a Dora for dialogue with each actor’s mouth quite packed with chewing gum, it would take that one hands down. One bonus, in this production bursting with quality goods, is the presence of jazz singer Denzal Sinclaire, a man of stylish chops who evokes an era of not that long ago with each piano riff and each vocal shading. That, as black musician Wesley, he takes an unprovoked beating from racist Blick certainly reminds us how whites gave -and still give- repayment for the musical heart of our culture born in black ghettos.