Findings and leavings of Lev Bratishenko
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Confectioner in chief
Read the whole piece at The Montreal Gazette
Pygmalion
A ballet
Too weird
Opera McGill chose L’incoronazione di Poppea, I believe, because it requires a large cast. About twenty singers, depending on how much they double, which means a fair swath of current vocal class is happily adding it to their resumes rather than submitting FOA requests about administration salaries. More »
Would “please give, air” be better?
You pass by a man lying on the sidewalk in a sealed hemisphere. He’s barely moving and a little blue. There’s no way to get at him, only a sign nearby that says “I rely on your charity for my oxygen.” A bicycle pump is attached to his enclosure by a hose.
What do you do? And where would he have the best chance of survival?
Rob Ford, the opera
How to eat the rich
I’ve finished a little project I made as illustration and layout practice with some friends after being intrigued by the “eat the rich” signs at occupy. Yes, I thought, but how?
Well obviously the Internet knew, but the information was dispersed and badly arranged. Now it is available in a convenient and portable format.
You can download the PDF or I’ll swap you a printed copy if you can cover postage. More »
acted on them.
“CAPTCHA” for critics
A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. A CAPTCHA for critics…
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Oh Bother
The evening started with an explanation that the order of the pieces was changed so that the orchestra would only have to shuffle seats once. For Beethoven’s 1st Concerto, they were seated tightly around the piano, with its back to us, in the manner of an 18th century chamber concert, so that we might appreciate the authenticity. But why have a conductor, then? And modern instruments? And shouldn’t the 2,000 seat hall have been torn down and replaced with a ducal palace room? Even yelled as loudly as I could, these questions went unanswered.
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The suspicious cardboard box
Try to notice the performance
Some people talk about putting on a Czech opera like you wear a lead apron to do it, but that isn’t true. It’s perfectly legal. So don’t buy the argument that a production of Dvořák’s Rusalka (containing an aria you’ll find on every best-of opera disc) means the Opera de Montreal took any risks. Not with the programming, anyway. More »
Curatorial compliance device
Perfectly harmless if treated appropriately
Gergiev and the Mariinsky perform Tchaikovskii’s 1st and 6th
Critical stares of Russian matrons sweep the lobby like Distant Early Warning radar stations, but their targets are their neighbours’ outfits and so I pass unharmed and invisible. I am not wearing any gold or miniskirt. Arriving at my seat, I discover the under-chair heaters have been replaced by samovars. More »
I suspect Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Leftovers
Graeber on the agoraphobia of the state in “There Never Was a West”
Do I have an economic life?
Beyond speculative architecture
Beyond No.1: Scenarios and Speculations is a ‘bookzine’ edited by Pedro Gadanho and published by SUN. It is an unusual publication mostly full of stories written by architects, with a few photoshops and essays thrown in.
The idea seems to be that architecture’s tradition of speculation has been neglected recently in the face of ‘reality’ (too many commissions, no new Eisenman). The real-estate bubbles of the last ten years favoured physical architecture over the paper kind: theory and idealism were diluted by a money flood, and so on. Beyond is well-timed, it anticipates a return to paper as the utopias emerge from the waters of a global inundation of debt. More »
Soirée Russe
I went to a weird place recently. There were a couple of hundred others there, all with healthy annuity incomes, and we were inappropriately dressed in tailcoats and spats and things. The row ahead of me passed a pair of army field binoculars around. I heard the most serious-looking one, their leader I think, mutter after Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture that “the red bastards think they can wait us out?” Then he fell asleep and I took his wallet. More »
La Bohème
Stage design appears in the criminal code under “manslaughter – unusual,” which is a possible label for the season premiere of Opéra de Montréal’s La Bohème, a “lavish new production” that treats its talented cast with the thoughtfulness and dignity of a garden rake to the face, and succeeds largely in spite of itself. Only the singers and musicians deserve any applause. More »
Salomé
Goth teenagers loiter around the Grand Vizier’s shopping complex under the aqueduct, then a loopy teen wearing a dozen nighties dances in and gets them killing for her. They do it because she’s so hot. And she’s a princess. Good, right? Now get this, her father wants to get with her, she even strips for him, makes him kill a guy, and then makes out with his severed head!
Upon hearing the pitch for an adaptation of Salome, the Viennese composer Richard Strauss threw a bag of gold coins on the table. Work began immediately. More »
Werther
In the golden days of opera, critics wore two pistols and audiences ritually burned the weakest cast member and ate them. Or forced the director to eat them, depending on whether they were delicious. It was around this time that an important critical methodology was discovered: Drink a tincture of ships’ caulking in ether and go watch a performance. Did you feel anything?
The bartender only had a bottle of asbestos solvent, but what the hell, art is a damned fine mistress even if she cuts you sometimes. (My Standard Opera Companion never, ever does.) So three hours later, I am swimming in a lovely blue-green tidal pool I’d found in my mind and considering the Werther that we had just seen. More »
“Brings together questionably digitized materials with undoubtedly material digital systems to explore the translation of objects into online representations. It uses objects from the CCA Collection to examine the shift, and to explore some differences between seemingly limitless cyberspace and the museum where presence and real space are the rule.”
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15th Gala
Leopard print and gold stilettos welcomed us to Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, or as it is known in family jargon, daddy’s angry place. The hall looked the same but the opera crowd was thick for a Sunday matinee and more pomaded than usual. Offstage and on, ambition was in the air.
Three hours later we stumbled out drenched in champagne, flicked the opera groupies off, and assessed: fourteen singers had performed twenty-three arias in three hours, with a long introspective pause for the audience. A convincing case was made for the depth of local talent, and two of the evening’s three stars (Julie Boulianne, Lara Cieckiewicz, and Etienne Dupius) were members of the Atelier lyrique, strong evidence for its future importance. More »
Bach Festival 2010
Christ Church Cathedral glows with competence as the choir enters; the pews gleam with it, and I happily come out of the rain to receive a healthful serving of Our Cultural Solids. The concert is part of the 2010 Montreal Bach Festival, a healthy-sounding machine for the production of lovely evenings, which each year fills some churches with the music they were intended for.
As churchgoers race towards statistical irrelevancy, the majority experience these spaces mostly in historical or artistic contexts, and not as chambers of mysterious power (except over hats). When seasoned with liturgical music, however, even a dingy wooden chapel can smell Roman. More »
Liveblogging Devereux
My continued hassling of the Montreal opera establishment has lead to bizarre countermeasures: I have been invited into the belly of the beast, its tenderest backstage bits where motors and maidens meet, and where I am liveblogging a performance of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux.
19:40 I have made it inside. It is dark and well-organized. The orchestra is warming up More »
“Although immigration is a dominant topic in contemporary culture, its discussion is often limited to the human experience, such as the crossing of borders and issues about national identity. This exhibition looks at how movements impact on the environment. Examples range from the coconut that can drift freely on the ocean current and re-seed wherever it finds land, to government-enforced relocation, the uprooting and rearranging of communities in a way that changes landscape and society forever.”
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Rigoletto
My double-tall opera companion mortified me by texting during the overture of Opéra de Montréal’s season opener, Rigoletto. But then I looked at what she had written and it was okay. She had ordered rye delivery.
She understood, barely into the first act, the character of the night to come: a talented cast was to be sacrificed. A general loosening would be required to enjoy the lions’ work. More »
Opera at Jean-Talon Market
The young lady (Emma Parkinson) handed me my change and began to sing the “Habanera” from Carmen awfully well for a produce retailer. Then a fellow in a cape (Etienne Dupuis) across the aisle gave an unnervingly professional rendition of “Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre”, completing the lyrical geometry begun by a La Traviata duet (Pascale Beaudin and Riccardo Iannello) a few minutes earlier. And then it was over, the singers folding back into the scenery, and I haggled for carrots. More »
Cendrillon
I asked for it. I spent two seasons nipping Opera de Montreal for its turgid sets and it seems somebody was listening. Somebody powerful, with deep pockets, and an insatiable hunger for the colour pink.
Let this be a lesson: be careful what you wish for.* Massenet’s Cendrillon filled the house on Saturday, a week after its opening, and credit goes entirely to a hallucinogenic production for making the 111-year-old libretto accessible. The singing was something else. More »
Simon Boccanegra
In opera as in the grocery store there are the strange fruit (ugli, figli, migli). Usually they will sit in your fruit bowl and look comfortably exotic. Sometimes visiting children will play with them. And occasionally they will get eaten, almost always with surprising pleasure. Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra is such a fruit, and Opera de Montréal / San Diego Opera production, particularly its excellent international cast, makes for refreshing eating.
The plot makes my head ache and I won’t repeat it; you can read it in the programme. There was an anxious, pencil-sharpening stillness in the air when the audience opened their exam books, perforated only by the occasional doubtful exhalation. Later, my neighbour turned to me in exasperation and mutely prodded his booklet with his index finger, but I refused to help him cheat. More »
Nelligan
André Gagnon’s opera Nelligan premiered in 1990 at the Grand Theatre de Québec with a pop cast. On Saturday, the Atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal reprised it, twenty years on, at the Monument National. A more ambitious production than anything the Opéra de Montréal has dared at Place des Arts, it is full of talented young singers and features local tenor stalwart Marc Hervieux as insurance. More »
Tosca
Tosca! The name has teeth for good reason. Puccini’s opera averages a death every 37 minutes. It includes 19th century Italian politics, the homicidal lusting of a Roman police chief, a jealous girlfriend, and a superfluity of hypocrites. This is distilled opera of few peers in the repertoire, and is often a final examination for companies on their way up. Opera de Montréal chose it for their first performance ever and reprised it for this past weekend’s 30th anniversary. More »
Illustrations and an article on gypsy mansions in Romani, for Triple Canopy #6, “Model Cities”.
“Intermission surveys the evolving relationship between speed and space, from early reactions to new technology to nostalgic ideas of an unmechanised past. It bridges the themes of the preceding exhibition Speed Limits and the subsequent exhibition Other Space Odysseys: Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, and Alessandro Poli”
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The Magic Flute
You can’t have opera without ridiculous plot devices, and the older the opera the worse they get. But modern audiences are used to comprehensible plots and characters that aren’t allegories, so we turn our attention to the singing or fall asleep (Mister Parterre W38). Opéra de Montréal presents The Magic Flute, and the singing is very fine.
Mozart’s penultimate operatic work, The Magic Flute combined elements of serious and comic forms while this was still relatively rare. Its serious aspect, an allusion to Freemasonry, has not aged well. Prince Tamino and birdcatcher Papageno find their true loves (conveniently named Pamina and Papagena and selected by higher, paternal powers) through gravely intoned but fuzzy tests, mostly by stumbling on from the wings singing, “Where am I now?” More »
Pagliacci & Gianni Schicchi
The opening night of an opera season is an anxious bit of business. Chandeliers can fall, stage directors can quit, and it takes a few concerts to forget such things (well, not the stage directors.) So we sit in the darkened hall and cross our fingers, for their sakes. More »
Lucia di Lammermoor
For the next two weeks Montréal sits atop international opera like Humpty Dumpty on his wall. Opera de Montréal’s Lucia di Lammermoor is the best show of the season, a triumph whose success will bring attention to the company. Unfortunately, the production does not match the strength of the cast, and I doubt I’m the only one wondering if the OdM can handle world-class talent. More »
Macbeth
Verdi’s Macbeth is a difficult early work. The premiere last week of Opéra de Montreal’s new production, a collaboration with Opera Australia, was an undignified birth. Tired and disoriented, the performance rarely glimmered with promise and never rose to the ambition of director René Richard Cyr, who proved a distracted helmsman. More »
Till Fellner
Kent Nagano has been Musical Director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra for over a year—time enough to ask, where has he taken us? In terms of programming, last week’s concert could stand for many of that year: super-standards mixed with shorter works, and the occasional grenade. Nagano certainly understands the necessity of throwing pineapples; with this lob, he succeeded spectacularly. More »
“Their actions push against accepted norms of behaviour in cities, at times even challenging legal limitations. The individuals and groups employ a range of approaches but share a conviction that the traditional processes of top-down civic planning are insufficient, and new approaches and tools must be developed from the ground level upwards.”
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“1973: Sorry, Out of Gas captures the architectural innovation spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world.”
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