History lesson hangs on the landmark performance of star
Canadian Opera Company: Louis Riel
(out of 4) Composed by Harry Somers, libretto by Mavor Moore with the collaboration of Jacques Languirand. Conducted by Johannes Debus. Directed by Peter Hinton. Until May 13 at the Four Seasons Centre, 145 Queen St. W.; coc.ca or 416-363-8231
Russell Braun’s powerful and deeply moving portrayal of the troubled, tortured title character in Harry Somers’ Louis Riel is reason enough to head to the Four Seasons Centre to witness the Canadian Opera Company’s re-engineered revival of a flawed yet iconic work of Canadian music theatre.
Braun’s performance tests all the superlatives, but there are other compelling reasons, too.
The COC’s new production of the Somers-scored, Mavor Moore-penned opera about the 19th-century Métis leader who stood up to Ottawa as the young Canadian dominion expanded westward is the company’s most anticipated of the season. It bravely revisits a 50-year-old opera that viewed a highly contentious episode in Canadian history, with repercussions that still echo today, through a distorting lens of Eurocentric incomprehension.
This is not to blame Somers and Moore. They were men of their times. The opera was commissioned for Canada’s Centennial.
Indeed, choosing Riel as their subject and presenting him in a more or less sympathetic light was a brave thing to do.
The production bravely revisits a 50-year-old opera that viewed a highly contentious episode in Canadian history through a distorting lens of Eurocentric incomprehension
Still, they cast Riel’s story as an emblem of the struggle for dominance — religious, economic and thus political — between the colonizing French and English.
Peter Hinton, the new production’s director, views the 1967 original through a contemporary lens. He reminds us that the national dream of Sir John A. Mac- donald rode roughshod over the legitimate rights of indigenous peoples, that Riel’s story is much more than another chapter in the continuing history of English-French rivalry.
Much has already been written about Hinton’s laudable quest to inform his approach through deep consultation and collaboration with indigenous artists. Much is made of the fact that some now perform in the opera, that the representation of their culture and musical traditions is respected and former misappropriations corrected.
The new production adds Michif, the Métis language, to the original’s mix of English, French and Cree. Jani Lauzon, an actor and singer of Métis ancestry, performs very effectively in the interpolated role of Folksinger, along with other roles in this multiply-cast opera.
A key element in Hinton’s reworking is the introduction of a silent chorus of indigenous performers he has referred to as the “Land Assembly.” It serves as a constant visual reminder of a gaping absence in the original, yet the flaws of that original are still unavoidable.
The cartoonish depiction of a cynical, booze-swilling Macdonald who, according to costume designer Gillian Gallow, wore the same garish suit at the time of the North-West Rebellion of 1885 that he’d sported during the Red River Rebellion 15 years before, is if anything amplified. The original’s longueurs still make it at times painfully inactive. There remains the sense that you’re being given a sit-up-and-pay-attention history lesson, albeit as we now understand, a lopsided one.
Those who will snap up tickets for the COC’s revival of Puccini’s melodramatic Tosca, opening a 12-performance run on April 30, may chafe at Somers’ modernistic atonality, although it’s really not that abrasive once you settle into it. Musically more troubling is Somers’ love for percussion and brass.
It may work well as an aural reminder of brewing violence, but it also sometimes does unfair battle with the singers’ voices; which brings us to what lovers of this very European art form are mostly concerned with.
The lines of Somers’ score are oddly drawn, making the singers’ delivery seem needlessly choppy. All the more credit, then, to a cast that makes it all sound better than it probably deserves.
For Russell Braun this is surely a landmark performance. Riel is not an easy role, dramatically or musically. Riel was clearly delusional. He likely did hear voices. But Riel was also a charismatic idealist.
Riel was only 25 when he had Irish Protestant rabble-rouser Thomas Scott executed. Riel himself was just 41 when, after he was convicted of treason, the politically calculating Macdonald let him hang. Braun, at the height of his baritone vocal powers, is 51. It never matters. He embodies youthful impetuosity, the disillusionment of Riel’s American exile and his tragically headlong, headstrong response to the call of fresh rebellion in what is now Saskatchewan.
Somers gives the distraught, self- pitying Riel long, orchestrally unsupported and technically difficult passages. Braun transforms them into expressions of the soul that make your spine tingle.
It is not Braun’s fault that, counter to traditional operatic expectation, Somers’ Louis Riel is devoid of romance. Riel’s relationship with his devoted mother (Allyson McHardy) and the undeveloped, almost incidental one with his wife (Simone Osborne) — both wonderfully sung — hardly count. But see it anyway. Who knows when you’ll get another chance?