Opera Mcgill should find a more suitable tale than Rinaldo
The Crusade story is a total flop as theatre today
Icing my head and staring at the empty bottle, I wonder whether opera does this to other people. This time, it was Opera McGill’s production of Handel’s Rinaldo.
The tale of a crusade on Jerusalem, Rinaldo is McGill’s mandatory early opera this season. Written in 1711, it is opera on the cusp of drama, which is not an abstract problem.
It is a total flop as theatre today.
A brilliant director, the best baroque orchestra and a world-class professional cast would have the odds against them.
So is it recklessness or carelessness to produce it at a university with a recent string of well performed and dismally unoriginal productions?
Why won’t they acknowledge this — perfectly ordinary — imbalance between music and direction, and program to it?
Even if the directing chops were there, I have never heard a full-length student opera that sustained the acrobatics of early vocal music. Coloratura — the gymnastic ornamentation that milks 10 minutes from every phrase — has to seem effortless, and while there are always strong leads, in this case a promising Rebecca Robinson as Rinaldo and the wonderful Gordon Bintner as Argante, the rest can only skilfully make do. There are alternatives. Want to encourage early music? How about a selection of a dozen scenes from early opera? Put on the really weird composers and get the dust off your lutes.
Or revise a piece, but don’t just update the staging, have at the music and the libretto, too — the Saracen could be ex-mayor Tremblay scrambling to delay his inevitable defeat by the forces of anticorruption, the Crusaders.
So what if it’s silly? Rinaldo was embarrassingly silly — pointlessly silly.Tissue-paper “furies” on 10-foot poles? I’ve seen better in a kindergarten — where nobody is supposed to be overly concerned with their real abilities.
McGill has fantastic students, composers, musicians, architects, even Italian professors. What opera company can claim such a range of talent, or so many missed opportunities?
A music school is independent of the market and capable of taking risks to push the art in new directions. The University of Toronto did this in January when they put on Rob Ford, a new opera by a group of student composers, no less.
That should be low hanging fruit for McGill, arguably the best music program in the country, but this season we get Rinaldo, The Magic Flute and Volpone — new music for an almost 400-yearold play?
Is that the best we can do?