Opera in Review
CANADA
CALGARY
About 1,700 Calgarians braved -30°C temperatures on Feb. 2nd for the Canadian premiere of Joby Talbot’s 75-minute opera Everest, about the ill-fated 1996 Mount Everest expedition that killed eight climbers, memorialized in journalist and mountaineer Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air and several film versions of the tragic events.
This remount of the Dallas Opera commission that premiered in Jan. 2015, featured the original set designed by Robert Brill, the same director, Leonard Foglia, and original cast member, American tenor, Andrew Bidlack as mountaineer, Rob Hall. The rest of the singers, except for American mezzosoprano Sarah Larsen playing Hall’s anxious wife, were Canadians, including a couple of emerging artists from Calgary Opera’s Emerging Artist Development Program.
Everest found its way into this Calgary Opera season because former Dallas Opera CEO Keith Cerny, who commissioned the opera, came to lead Calgary Opera in Jan. 2018. He abruptly left after less than a year in the job to lead the Fort Worth Symphony. His Calgary tenure was short-lived, too little time to establish a legacy, but enough to introduce a Canadian audience to this remarkable work.
Everest is a visually amazing project in which Brill’s vertical, asymmetric arrangement of large white cubes evocatively represent the steep, jagged mountain, full of crannies. There, the principals, together with a chorus of fatally unsuccessful climbers, perched as they sang their story of largely foolhardy ambition and heart-wrenching human loss in a hostile world of vicious wind and cold, hard, unforgiving rock. Five actual mountaineers were enlisted as supernumeraries, one of whom has actually summited Everest.
The spaces between the cubes served as stations for the drama, and the blocks themselves provided surfaces for an assortment of Elaine J. McCarthy’s splendid projections. The cube faces became the textured limestone, a digital clock warning of an overshot critical deadline for a safe descent, or hallucinations in a stricken climber’s mind.
Talbot’s score was atmospheric when the plot evoked the brutally oppressive natural world itself: tense-sounding piccolos screeched ever-present and ever-growing threat, a rumbling thunder sheet bluntly punched the air, aggressive gusts of brass and threatening percussion, with other orchestral displays of sheer power, conjured the climbers’ precarious situation.
And where the emotional core of the story was central—the pathos-laden conversation between Hall, lying doomed, high on a snowy ledge, and his wife Jan, at home, pregnant with their first child, willing him to survive—Talbot’s vocal lines and orchestration avoided emotionally manipulative sentimentality. The music had an austere lyricism that underscored the couple’s love without breaking into overwrought musical cliché. The Calgary Philharmonic, led by David Briskin, was an excellent partner in its role as both sonic titans and the singers’ collaborators.
Librettist Gene Scheer found a poetic simplicity for his text. Some of the storyline is in the characters’ minds, in flashbacks and in moments of mental disorientation. Sheer wed the material reality of the crisis to these more amorphous strands, with a fine mixture of mundane detail and elevated reflection.
A handful of Calgary Opera Chorus members, emerging and retreating from view, were dressed in white parkas, their faces whitened to capture the projections that fell on them. Interspersed among the cubes in the dark spaces, they represented fallen climbers commenting on the struggles of the doomed adventurers, memories they brought to Everest, and the metaphysical implications of such intrepid human choices. Foglia’s chorus blocking was eerie and theatrically powerful with the help of the imaginative set.
Bidlack and Larsen are the leads. Bidlack, playing the dutiful guide who succumbs to the sudden storm, has a bright tenor sound. Singing from the top of the set into the void and down to his distant, waiting wife at stage level, he conveyed the emotional range both as dutiful leader coaxing his exhausted, expiring client Doug Hansen down the mountain, and as an almost wistful, expiring husband. Larsen portrayed the desperate wife with a subtle mix of reassuring calm and tragic hopelessness.
Baritone Andrew Love solidly delivered Hansen’s monosyllabic moans and grunts of frustration and exhaustion—“Ah” was his recurring line—but in his one woeful aria, he pours out his heart to his guide Rob, before succumbing.
Bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch sang Beck Weathers, a Texas pathologist who somehow survived the ordeal, with appropriately firm resolve as he moved back and forth between lucidity and confusion.
The other singer worth noting was 13-year-old Avary Nielsen as Beck’s daughter, Meg. She wanders around in her father’s mind as he inches his way back to safety. Nielsen sang with poise, and was wisely miked to ensure she could be heard at the back of the 2,100-seat Jubilee Auditorium.
The Calgary audience gave the cast a warm reception at the end of this distilled version of a story that has uniquely operatic dimensions. —Bill Rankin
TORONTO
If something was rotten in Hamlet’s state of Denmark, an all-consuming fire was set to blaze through Canadian Opera Com pany’s revival of Elektra on Jan. 26th from thunderous start to bloody finish.
The one-act revenge tragedy by composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal is short in running time but rich in intense fury. COC Music Director Johannes Debus led a huge, enhanced COC Orchestra which immediately made its presence known with the shocking, full-force Agamemnon motif, rigorously marked by blaring horns. Filled with fortissimo outbursts and jarring staccatti that interspersed looming dread with frantic excitement, the Orchestra was magnetic in its delivery of the almost-atonal and cacophonous score.
The curtain rose to reveal a burnt red backdrop and a raised, raked stage—physically aslant, descending from left to right and literally putting the familial house of Elektra off-kilter. Crude building walls resembling unfinished concrete slabs and bold lighting illuminate the space in colours ranging from blood red to sickly greens and yellows. A front staircase extends the
