Opera promised substance, delivered empty slogans
The brave (or perhaps reckless) company did its best with Hadrian, hiring a fine cast and paying for a gorgeous staging. But the result was show without substance. Sculpted, nearly naked male bodies can only do so much for the Roman Empire.
Hadrian’s music and libretto were full of portent, yet lacking in meaning and resolution. The opera kept promising substance but could only come through with empty slogans about love, Christianity and tyranny.
Anna Bolena, a decade shy of its 200th birthday, is a sturdy psychological drama rooted in English history. The COC’s spare production put all the focus on its star. And Radvanovsky, at the peak of her career, gave us a lesson in how something as seemingly insignificant as a series of vocal inflections can tear a person’s heart apart.
Is it possible that the scale of 19th-century grand opera is too big to translate into our strange and stressed times? Maybe. But psychological drama is alive and well. New operas are being created around the world every year. The good ones continue to grab people’s hearts in the opening scene and don’t let go until the curtain call. The COC announced two new commissions earlier this month. Both are likely to be smaller in scale than Hadrian. Both feature composers and librettists with promising track records. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, as the results won’t be visible for a year or two, but at least the company is trying to support new opera creation in Canada.
Among the other heart-grabbing Toronto musical events of 2018, veteran German tenor Christoph Prégardien gave a remarkable recital of art song for the Toronto Summer Music Festival in July. Art song is the most intimate of forms, meant for a living room not a concert hall, but Prégardien and his ac- companist Julius Drake worked subtle magic that made us forget that there were 300 other people in the room listening to Schubert and Mahler.
We are so used to grand gestures — whether from pompous politicians or blow-’em-up Hollywood movies — that it becomes all the more valuable to be reminded that true, enduring contact with the soul happens in much more subtle ways. Tafelmusik proved this in January with Safe Haven, a multimedia show about how persecution and exile can stimulate all sorts of artistic creativity. And violinist Daniel Hope did it with instruments only, thanks to the company of a few well- chosen friends on the Koerner Hall stage in November.
I can’t close the year without mentioning Toronto pianist Peter Longworth, who died in July, aged 53. He was one of those musical friends who helped make every concert he was part of better. Longworth was a longtime teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Music, a prized collaborator and coach, and a generous soul. Classical music writer John Terauds is a freelance contributor for the Star, based in Toronto. He is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @JohnTerauds.