Xin Wang and Krisztina Szabo shifted easily through the different styles.John Lauener
Beauty Dissolves in a Brief Hour
- Queen of Puddings Music Theatre
- At the Young Centre
- In Toronto on Thursday
Opera is expensive; touring opera, more so. Travelling light helps, as Queen of Puddings has proved over the past few years through a series of ultra-portable productions of original operas that have given this tiny Toronto company a robust international profile.
Last month, the company took Love Songs, a piece for solo soprano by Montreal composer Ana Sokolovic, to the Holland Festival, a year after it played theatres in Paris, Zagreb and Ljubljana. The Midnight Court, an earlier Sokolovic chamber opera, got Queen of Puddings a berth at London's Royal Opera House in 2006.
On Thursday, the company showed off its latest pocket-sized show, a triptych of short dramatic settings by Pierre Klanac, Fuhong Shi and John Rea, for soprano (Xin Wang), mezzo-soprano (Krisztina Szabó) and accordion (John Lettieri). The texts of Beauty Dissolves in a Brief Hour were all vintage poems about love and beauty.
Klanac's Jeux à Vendre cleverly internalized the street-hawker conceit of Christine de Pisan's medieval poems, spinning a sparsely beautiful composition from a three-note motif that recalled the short repetitive cries still heard from street vendors in many parts of the world. The motif's many variants initially bounced between the voices in a close midrange, later thickening and accelerating into a busy three-part counterpoint with accordion. The piece overall was a smart and sensual deployment of pattern, shadow and melody, and a reminder that love eternally repeats the same themes in infinite variations.
Fuhong developed some Tang Dynasty poems by Zhang Ruoxu into an allusive drama about a man and woman for whom stock images of Chinese poetry (the moon, flowers, the river) become vital shared references, especially when the lovers are separated. The piece (sung in Mandarin) was both intimate and strikingly operatic in scale, with a wide variety of melodic styles, densities and textural flavours. The keening, speculative setting of the line "who is missing her lover?" was especially evocative. Ruth Madoc-Jones's staging also came into its own in this piece, using elements of Michael Gianfrancesco's set and costume designs to visualize the themes and imagery of the poems. A bowl of water stood for the river, the moon appeared via a round hand-mirror, and the singers' ample cloak-like veils were bundled off at the point at which Zhang refers to a "scarf of white cloud." Gianfrancesco's full, closely-bodiced gowns conveyed both voluptuousness and containment.
Rea set his own English translation of Renaissance Italian poems by Giulio Strozzi and Giovanni Francesco Loredan as a symphonic-style series of four contrasting movements. The piece (from which the triptych takes its title) contained many lovely moments, including a brief adept parody of Renaissance counterpoint, but something prevented those moments from coalescing into a powerful whole. To my ear, Rea's settings tended to dampen the poetic verve of his texts. Too much of his writing for the accordion felt like treading water, and the coital bellows effect at the end only emphasized the extent to which Eros had not been served in the vocal settings.
All these works were beautifully performed by the singers, who shifted easily through the varied tessituras and styles of writing, and gave the pieces dramatic presence even when the texts offered mere situations for narratives we could imagine as we wished. Lettieri deftly bloomed into the mix or faded into the background as needed.
I'm not sure I would call any of these pieces an opera, but the word has a long history and many meanings. For Queen of Puddings, it's most practically a thing you can tote in a few suitcases, as theatres far from Toronto will discover when this show takes to the road.
Beauty Dissolves in a Brief Hour concludes Saturday at the Young Centre's Tank House Theatre.