Love Is Elsewhere

Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin

Metropolitan Opera

December 17, 2016

Love is elsewhere, until it isn't.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

From the very beginning, with its in medias res amorphous opening, the uncanny score of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin throws you into a dream-like universe. Lush and atmospheric, the Finnish composer’s music suspends the listener over an indistinct watery expanse. Eschewing an overture or prelude of any kind, the first bars conjure a brine-laden formless and foggy seascape that only slowly comes into focus the way distance lies out over the ocean.

Susanna Mälkki conducted an exceedingly smooth reading of this uncanny score with the utmost polish. Interestingly, in recordings with other conductors the same score seems more flush with jolting surprises from jarring horns and more pronounced cacophony from the percussion. The mood created by Ms. Mälkki was more suggestive, more oneiric. It came off to my ear more of a dreamy Debussy dream (à la Pelleas et Melisande), with some of the quirkier Messiaen eccentricities that punctuate its aural landscape toned down and mellowed out.

Bands of light imitate the sea.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Director Robert Lepage’s luminous production provided a fitting counterpoint to the mellifluous score. Lepage and his team focused on the ineluctable and seemingly insuperable obstacles that separate us from one another in any relationship; the daunting gulf that so often divides two people and impedes connection. The staging at the Met was dominated by some two-dozen bands of light that represented the central figure of the sea in the story over which he suspended a mobile crane that could become a stairway with a platform on either end. The effect of the bands of light was hypnotic, particularly when they were made to fluctuate, rise and fall, imitating at one point the movements of a gentle yet unsettling storm at sea. But like many of this visionary director’s productions this one was kind of a one trick pony, which in this case was not entirely off base. It matched the spectral, minimalist nature of the music, and it heightened the dreaminess of certain moments in the story, especially when Rudel dreams and the idealized object of his affections (played by a dancer) materializes over the bands of light, diving through the waves in a dolphin-like fashion.

Also effective was the way the chorus was deployed. Strategically placed beneath the “water” toward the back of the stage, where they could only just barely be seen allowed them to lend their voices to the majestic and almost mystical heightening of the singers’ voices throughout the opera. It created a haunting and often imperceptible embellishment of the sound of the individual singers and an almost spiritual elevation of the emotions. Less compelling was the peek-a-boo choreographies they were made to do, poking their heads up over the “surface” of the water in certain nightmarish moments.

The chorus makes its presence known.
Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich

Based on a very brief romanticized account of the life of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, the plot of L’Amour de Loin can be summarized as follows: a prince is bored with his womanizing life and decides to devote his energies to love more deeply; a pilgrim passing by tells him about this incredibly beautiful woman who lives across the sea in enemy territory; prince gets very excited about the idea and starts singing lovely poetry about the woman as the perfect idea of love; pilgrim tells the woman about all the fuss she’s created overseas and she’s not sure how to take it; prince decides to make the trip across the sea to finally meet the object of his desire but when he gets there he dies from the hardships of sea travel; woman finally sees the love and gets all combative about the whole ordeal.

A lyric lady of love breaks through to the other side.
Photo credit: Met Opera

This is an opera composed by a woman about a man looking at a woman who in turn finally gets her voice in the act of looking back at that man. Despite the seemingly traditional underpinnings of the romantic story itself, the triangulation of these various gazes, nevertheless, packs a radical punch.

Scores of lyric ladies have appeared over the millennia in the amorous and elegiac poetic tradition from Catullus, Propertius and Ovid to the troubadours, Dante and the centuries of Petrarchists who continue to write right down to our own time. In the history of this patriarchal literary trope, rarely are the female objects of these poets’ affections ever afforded the agency of speaking for themselves, seldom are they granted a voice of their own.

If you read the libretto divorced of the score and its staging, you come away with the impression that Clémence is quick to respond to her suitor’s advances in kind. But the way the end of both Act II and Act III were staged by LePage show that something slightly deeper may going on here.

Clémence steps down from her pedestal.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

The most powerful of these moments occurs at the end of Act III. Throwing a mini-conniption fit, Clémence steps down off the pedestal, on which even the director has placed her, thus breaking the illusion of the show, and stands between two of the bands of light, in the middle of the “water,” as though the make-believe were over and it was no longer “water.” She is indeed brazenly standing up and making herself heard as a living woman and not an idealization. She defiantly no longer wants to play the game of representation and fantasy anymore. If she has a say in the matter, she isn’t going to allow herself to be loved in an idealistic way by someone who has never even met her. In this take, Clémence transcends her status as passive object of desire. For a fleeting moment in the story, she’s not going to humor a distant love like this. She is a human being just like he is and thus wants a love that is human.

In the role of the lover from afar, Jaufré Rudel, was bass-baritone, Eric Owens, from whose booming imperious voice I expected more. He left me feeling a little lukewarm. Other singers that I have heard in this role have imbued the character with a slightly more irascible, angrier reaching quality that makes the desire of the poor bereft troubadour soar a little more. Owens sounded more resigned in the chesty depths of his longing, coming across as a lover who is more languidly lethargic than energetic in his desire.

The messenger scene.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Beset not only by the obstacle of the sea, the two lovers in this opera, which is set in the eleventh century against the backdrop of a holy war, are positioned on opposite sides of enemy lines. The figure of the Pilgrim, here sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, is deployed as a conduit for the lyricism of the troubadour to pass from one character to the next. The flights of poetic inspiration with which the opera opens belong to Jaufré. He sends his lyrical spirit along via the Pilgrim who has been charged with the task of embodying those inspired verses for his beloved which then in turn inspire her to embark on flights of lyric fancy of her own.

Like Sancho Panza in an analogous messenger scene in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Pilgrim rather humorously forgets most of the content of the poetic missive from Jaufré to Clémence. He manages to transmit nothing more than the gist of the message after garbling the end of the song he was sent to sing on behalf of his master. It is a light-hearted moment in an otherwise rather stolid evening at the opera. Fortunately Mumford didn’t ham it up but rather she played the humor with subtlety and tact. She pushed the ethereal sound of her instrument throughout. And equally used her mezzo to soar on amorous pinions in ways that Eric Owens’ instrument simply did not, at least the evening that we heard him. Interestingly, the Pilgrim’s arias are the only portions of the opera that sound like they belong to the era the plot is set in, with a style reminiscent of medieval madrigals.

Don't shoot the messenger
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Soprano Susanna Phillips, in the role of Clémence, was simply stunning. She embodied the tricky tempos and other idiosyncrasies of the score beautifully and she nailed all the soaring high notes that gave angelic wings to her unattainable beauty. Phillips made the show, as both the empowered woman with a say in things and the impressionable young pushover that this character’s duality encompasses. Because, of course, by the end she does indeed eventually embody the cardinal virtue suggested by her symbolic name.

The poet sets out to cross the sea.
Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich

Once Jaufré musters the wherewithal to cross the sea, the journey takes its toll on him. He arrives only to collapse at the feet of his beloved and rather anticlimactically dies in her arms. There is nothing particularly moving about this sudden and almost mechanical turn of events. Instead, the climax is saved for Clémence’s response to what she is forced to endure. Seeing that God has struck down a man so good and so sincere in his love, she lashes out in frustration at the injustice underlying God’s moral universe.

The lovers briefly meet across the chasm.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

The outcome of this brief but profound long-distance romance leads her to take up another call to arms. This time Clémence turns to another “lover,” one who rather ambiguously is either God himself or the deified spirit of her lost lover. To remedy one distant love she turns to another even more impossibly distant love. Depending on how you take this spiritual turn in the story, the end of the opera either undermines or reinforces the notion that there is something about true love is always only ever elsewhere.

And this is where L’Amour de Loin, while it may be set in the middle ages, is the product of a more modern and intellectual, almost aseptic, sensibility. This is not an opera that unleashes emotions or visceral reactions of any sort. The dramatic tension is somehow there, yet it does not explode in any traditional way. There is a lot of exploration of ideas about love, but the story as told by the music never gets to your heart.

– Lui & Lei

Mascagni's "Iris": Purity vs. Lust, Greed & Evil

Mascagni’s Iris

Bard Summerscape

Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

July 22, 2016

Purity lives in a garden of constant euphoria
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lui: The Bard College campus in the Hudson River Valley with its monumental Frank Gehry concert hall provided a bucolic yet sophisticated backdrop for a few of our favorite things: a picnic on the lawn, the opening night of a long forgotten Mascagni opera at Bard Summerscape, and some post-show raucous dancing in the Spiegeltent (with idiosyncratic art nouveau signs over the entryway: “Magic Crystal – The Ultimate Art of Entertainment”). Mascagni’s Iris is another one of those all but forgotten gems. And when gems like these fall into oblivion, it always begs the repertoire question. No matter the reason for its neglect, Iris proved to be an eye-opening, mind-altering discovery.

The Spiegeltent at Bard
Photo credit: Allegri con fuoco

Lei: The opera itself was enchanting, dreamy and powerful – a cross between Cavalleria Rusticana (several recognizable ideas between them), Pelléas et Mélisande (lots of symbolism) and a touch of Madama Butterfly (scattered orientalism), which it actually precedes. I personally liked it so much more than Butterfly though. Its dreamy sweeping score with outbursts of dramatic emotion and, more importantly, its symbolist narrative are so much more compelling than Butterfly’s (an opera I personally never cared much for).

Iris cares for her heartless father
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lui: After a grandiose choral hymn to the Sun, Light and Love, the translucent scrim raises on a peaceful country scene. The magnificent, huge chorus (I counted over 50 singers) appears on a bridge that crosses the entirety of the stage. They look on while Iris and her blind father, Il Cieco, seem to be waking up and begin to splash water from the spring on their faces. The chorus showers them with dreamy leaves and golden rose petals from above. Iris is an innocent young maiden who is rather provincial in her naïveté. A bit like Rigoletto’s Gilda, her father has kept her out of the fray. Despite her sheltered life, Iris complains of having had a bad dream about a series of dangers befalling her doll – portent of the evils to come.

Lei: James Darrah's direction perfectly rendered the dense but often banal symbolism of the piece through a series of well-executed stage ideas. The scenic design by Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mock was simple but highly effective. With broad minimalist brush strokes they were able to conjure a symbolic all white landscape that was flooded with the light of the sun and enlivened by a constant shower of leaves that fell from all of the onlookers in the chorus positioned on the bridge. Though there was little that was explicitly Japanese about the design, they went for a fantasyland that was more explicitly allegorical. Interestingly, the universe created for Iris by director Darrah is a highly polarized – sets and costumes are either black or white in a very a-temporal and abstract fashion.

The apple of every man's eye
Photo credit Bard Summerscape

Lui: Before we know it Osaka, the spoiled rich prince and physical embodiment of lust, and Kyoto, the brothel owner and symbol of greed, arrive. Osaka is immediately smitten with Iris’s beauty and innocence. He has to have her. Kyoto comes up with a scheme to kidnap and add her to his bevy of prostitutes. He sees profit. The plan includes a deceptive play within the play by which they brainwash and abscond with her. Next thing she knows she's in Kyoto’s brothel, that is so different than her idyllic grounds that she thinks she’s in Paradise. Must be all those half naked ladies strutting around amid glass see-thorough huts with red lights… Iris may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but ultimately she is really too innocent for her own good. When Osaka attempts to seduce her, she claims to only want to go home to her father, back to her little house and beautiful garden. Like a Japanese Dafne, daddy’s little girl is desperate for an escape route from this Apollo in pursuit.

Osaka barges in on the pimp and his new recruit
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lei: Tenor Gerard Schneider stole the show. In the role of Osaka, this young Australian artist was the most impressive singer on the stage. From the moment he opened his mouth I was truly transfixed and besotted with the sheer beauty, power and virile sweetness of his singing. His is a soaring heart-wrenching tenor, an Italianate tenore spinto of the true romantic hero type. Osaka’s character is controversial and complex. In a way he reminded me of Rigoletto’s Duca, as he sings so beautifully that even if he is a crass seducer trying to get into the panties of a naive young woman, one kind of cannot help falling for him. His music is so romantic and he sounds so genuine that there must be something true in his declarations of “love,” at least when the character is in Schneider’s able hands.

Iris holds strong
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape 

Lui: The only catch is that here – unlike Gilda, Butterfly or Santuzza – the girl does not fall for her seducer, no matter how lovely and ardent he sounds, no matter how many jewels nor how much luxury he throws at her. Which makes Iris so much more interesting and powerful, despite her undeniable status as victim. From a narrative perspective, Iris’ innocence and naïveté are even more enhanced by her resisting Osaka’s attempts at seduction. Aside from being enchanted and lured by the play within a play in Act I, the heroine here does not falter and does not really fall for the evil, lusty, decadent and greedy men who surround her. Her purity remains unblemished. For what it's worth, Iris remains intransigently true to herself – a character study in integrity. As a result, the symbolism of feminine innocence spoiled by a corrupt male world comes across in an utterly powerful way.

Osaka continues to pine for his Iris
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lei: The slimy Osaka very quickly gets bored of Iris’ prudery. He lets her go and encourages Kyoto to send her home, but the world is a big, scary, self-interested place and she's not going to get off that easy. If she will not cooperate with brothel house rules, Kyoto threatens to punish her by throwing her into the sewer. Bass-baritone Douglas Williams in the role of the brothel’s pimp sported a very un-Japanese long platinum blonde wig over a plunging low-cut dark tunic that abundantly exposed his chest and embodied the hideous villain with steely yet thundering disdain and outbursts of violence. The other villain in the story is Il Cieco (The Blind One), Iris’ father here played by bass Matthew Boehler with an almost repulsive yet magnetic force. When he arrives to the brothel and finds his daughter in it with any angry mob that is fighting for deflowering rights, he throws a fit of rage and disowns her. Her father’s scorn is what really pushes poor Iris over the edge and, unable to bear it all, she throws herself into the sewer.

The red light district in "Tokyo"
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lui: In one of the most visually stunning moments of the production, during the musical interlude that introduces Act III, Iris can be seen behind the translucent scrim falling imperceptibly slow through the fog from the ceiling of the stage to the floor. It was incredibly dreamy and surreal. She falls in slow motion for five solid minutes through the mists of the sewer air. This is where she officially ends up in her deepest darkest cave. Act III then opens with the sewer urchins, who represent the quasi-disembodied vices of her prior pursuers, complaining of their lot in life though they somehow carry on in their lives still in the apparent pursuit of hope. Like their brothel frequenting counterparts above ground, these low-lifes are constantly on the lookout for treasure amidst the gloom and the grime. Iris regains consciousness after her fall and now thinks she is in Hell (finally she starts to figure it all out), where she grovels for a while until at the very moment she is about to give up the ghost she has a sun-filled epiphany and is suddenly and gloriously apotheosized in a blaze of solar splendor. Cue the hymn to the Sun from the opening of Act I and you have an incredibly powerful finale that somehow manages to lift you up in just the moment when you thought you had reached rock bottom.  

Iris on the verge of dropping into the sewers of the city
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lei: The last sequence truly had the stature of grand opera: the orchestra explodes in an outburst of powerful, inspiring music, matched by the chorus in full cry, with a ray of sun making its way through the dark cave and embracing Iris, who dies in ecstasy and almost ascends to heaven in a saintly or martyr-like fashion. In a way, it reminded me of Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco’s finale.

Lui: Iris is truly one of those demanding tour de force characters requiring the singer to really expressively ride a massive orchestration. Soprano Talise Trevigne rose to the challenge and embodied beautifully the naïveté, purity and strength of the title role. True, the character is highly symbolic and at times almost coo-koo and always very clueless, but, if one gets into the whole symbolism and allegory of it all, Iris is truly the sweetest and more compelling of heroines. Ms. Trevigne played Iris with childlike enchanting grace and was particularly memorable in her doomsday dream arias and the final apotheosis.

The apotheosis of Iris
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Lei: A resounding thank you to maestro Leon Botstein for unearthing this Mascagni gem and leading with force and nuance the solid cast and American Symphony Orchestra. Hopefully this brilliant rediscovery of Iris will inspire other opera houses to produce it too. Looks like it was also just revived in Montpellier with Sonya Yoncheva in the title role, so, who knows, there may be more Irises on their way in the future!

– Lui & Lei

For Iris life is but a dream
Photo credit: Bard Summerscape

Dream a Little Debussy Dream

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande

Against the Grain Theatre, Toronto, Canada

June 25, 2014

Water and loss are the themes of the night.
Image Credit: Against the Grain Theatre 

Lui: It was a cool and rainy early summer night in Toronto. Against the Grain Theatre was to stage a plein air production of Claude Debussy’s impressionistic symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande in the courtyard garden of their home base near the Distillery District. But due to a torrential downpour, they moved us inside to a space that was potentially even more dramatic: a vast refurbished old brick warehouse that loomed over the singers and the intimate audience. They were obviously ready for this eventuality as the stage was set up in a large square in the center of the space down toward one end. The audience was configured in three long rows along two sides of the square and the piano accompaniment down off one corner. The supertitles were projected onto one of the walls. On the floor were the minimalist intimations of a sort of garden/spring scene with large flat stones creating a series of paths that zigzagged across the stage. 

Dream a little Debussy dream.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

The whole thing was very low lit so that the characters when they finally appeared seemed to emerge from the darkness like oneiric phantasms, in much the same way that the composer treats all of the action in his score. This is one of the things that is striking about the opera. It is truly a story told through music. Debussy forgoes much of the traditional operatic fare like arias and duets. The whole three-hour feast of musical impressionism plays like a piece of theatrical drama set to music, which is largely what it is. Debussy adapts to remarkable effects the French symbolist play, Pelléas et Mélisande, by Maurice Maeterlinck, who also wrote the incredibly poetic libretto. The music is breathtakingly beautiful. High romantic style, yet modernist with Debussy’s signature flights of impressionistic fancy. Stylistically, the closest thing to it that I have experienced is Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, though Debussy achieves greater subtlety in his score, deeper dreaminess.

Lei: Against the Grain’s production featured a stripped down piano accompaniment rather than Debussy’s sweep-me-away-with-the-wind full orchestral orchestration. The orchestra, however, was not missed as this configuration worked wonders in the intimacy of this setting. Music director and pianist Julien LeBlanc was outstanding and utterly impressive for bearing alone the task of keeping the Debussy flow effortlessly through the three hour-long show, and very beautifully so. The singing melded seamlessly with the piano and really came to the fore, and thank goodness because all singers were truly exceptional. There wasn’t a weak link in the cast. Even all of the secondary roles were sung with grace, poise and force.

Prince Golaud dares to love out of his league.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

Lui: Baritone Gregory Dahl, singing the role of the poor spurned lover Prince Golaud, was consistently phenomemal throughout the opera. His voice and stage presence exuded pure masculine energy from the moment he wandered onto the stage in the opening scene. As the opera begins we are introduced to Golaud who has strayed off the path at the mid-point of his life. He has just lost the trace of the boar he is hunting. He’s still trying to get his bearings when he stumbles upon the dark beauty of the mysterious Mélisande, who has a knack for dropping objects of great importance into the water where they end up for one reason or another irretrievable and put her in trouble. First is a mysterious crown some other man gave her, then the ring from her wedding to Golaud (causing him to throw his first jealous fit). 

The enigmatic Mélisande, a lost soul.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

She too is a lost and seemingly broken soul. We never get much in the way of any kind of deep psychologizing insight into what really makes this character tick. Perhaps this is because Mélisande may not even be human, but rather a fairy, siren-like creature, with supernaturally long hair that has a life of its own. Her locks play several key plot points: they make Pelléas fall in love with Mélisande in a creepy-feticistic way, Golaud grabs Mélisande by them when he brutalizes her, and they have a general tendency of falling from towers, onto trees and of course into the water. Mélisande is largely placed on a pedestal by the men who make what they want of her. Soprano Miriam Khalil played her beautifully with a wistful gaze that was always distant and almost statuesque, which completely suited the music and made the whole thing seem even dreamier. Khalil’s voice has a piercing yet sweet lyricism that rendered Mélisande the frail and tragic focal point of the opera, as it intertwined with the rest of the male voices surrounding her.

The forbidden courtship begins.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

Lei: Baritone Etienne Dupuis’ Pelléas displayed solid singing and acting throughout, with some moments of extraordinary ardent passion in his outbursts of love for Mélisande and his confrontations with Golaud. Dupuis’ articulation was always clear and his sound expressive.  Bass Alain Coulombe as the old king Arkel had a commanding and almost haunting vocal presence notwithstanding his slim frame, his instrument filled the space thunderously while he slowly paced around the stage with his cane. Arkel emerges as a wise survivor of the tragedy that dooms the younger characters, holding Mélisande’s daughter in the final scene as a promise for a better future. Mezzo Andrea Núñez played Yniold, Golaud’s son from a previous marriage with convincing child-like freshness. Her duet with Gregory Dahl was to me one of the most tragically powerful moments of the opera, when Golaud receives what he subjectively perceives to be a confirmation of his wife’s affair with Pelléas from his child who peeks through a window. While the role of Geneviève (the mother of the rival brothers) is a minor one, mezzo Megan Latham portrayed her with solemn grace, particularly in her reading of the key letter from Golaud to Pelléas in the second scene of Act One. Last but not least, four-month old Salim Ivany (the son of director Joel Ivany and soprano Miriam Khalil), was impressive as Mélisande’s daughter. It was amazing to see this baby remain perfectly and blissfully peaceful while being carried around the stage by the singers in full cry in the final scene, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Truly a natural on the stage!

Yniold tells all.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

Lui: Young woman meets and marries middle-aged man, young woman subsequently falls in love with another man, young woman dies. It’s a classic love triangle. Though the story is really not nearly as straightforward as it is commonly thought. And that is exactly what I want to take a closer look at: the mysteries of this extremely rich symbolist text. For example, Mélisande has a special relationship to the water and woodland springs. Is she a woman? Or is she some kind of water nymph, like the fey Melusine, whom some claim inspired the source character in the 1883 play of the same name? Her otherworldliness, at least in this production, would certainly suggest the latter. In any case, she is a strange bird. So much so that I wasn’t sure what to make of the whole story. When in that opening scene she first meets her future husband and tells him that he’s a bit old for her taste but goes along with his advances anyway, a series of red flags went up for me. She has escaped the last man she was with, the one who gave her the crown.

Fatal love takes its toll.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

When we first meet her she seems like a victim of domestic abuse of one kind or another. I wasn’t sure if we were dealing with a proto-feminist story in which the tragic plight a woman living in a man’s world was meant to push us to sympathy over the fate of such a helpless creature, or if all this slightly offensive chauvinistic effrontery that she is forced to endure from all sides – whether from her husband, her father-in-law or her brother-in-law – was just supposed to be taken for granted as the mere texture of the world in which the story unfolds. Even the romance with Pelléas, her purported lover, is only ever convincing at the last moment in their relationship, after he has forced himself on her like all the other men she encounters. In this production, Mélisande was played with such detachment throughout even the kindling of romance with Pelléas that a reading that highlights her victimhood in this male dominated world seems to come to the fore. I tend to think that this is all key thematic material that is central to our understanding of the story. After all, from the very first moment we encounter her, right up the end, when she is laid out on her deathbed, she only ever adorns the pose of the victim, a victim of the world and the men in it.

Prince Golaud and his rival and brother, Pelléas, duke it out.
Photo credit: Darryl Block

Lei: I didn’t get that much of a proto-feminist vibe, though that can be a possible read, particularly with the rendering of this production and Khalil’s detached acting. To me the opera came off more as a timeless tragedy, where the mysterious plot points contributed to its charm of a dream-like impressionistic tale. There is something to the cathartic release of Golaud’s character at the end, with his need to accept the fact that his fatal flaw was desiring a woman who was too young for him. Marrying for love was not the fate that awaited him and everybody pays the consequences. Most of all, I was extremely impressed by the quality of this three year old opera company’s efforts. Against the Grain is a model indie enterprise, and with this production it showed how great operatic experiences can effectively be delivered in unconventional spaces – they did not over-think it and kept the basics strong. At the end all you need are amazing singers, a piano and a vision. We only experienced Against the Grain's contingency plan and loved every minute of it, but I can only imagine what it would have been like to catch this production in the courtyard where it was originally conceived (with the grass and climbing ivy representing water, the production notes tell us). Definitely worth the trip to Toronto, even under the pouring rain.  

– Lui & Lei

The courtyard garden setting we missed out on.
Photo credit: Against the Grain Theatre