Wednesday 9 August 2017

Festival of the Sound 2017 # 6: The Voices of the Past

The first concert of Week Three at the Festival was different -- so different that it didn't really resemble any concert I'd ever been to before in my life.  

And so this review is going to be different, too -- somewhere between a standard concert review and a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Canada has always had a reputation for developing extraordinary talent among classical singers.  Over a century ago, one of the great opera divas of the world, Emma Albani, was actually (in spite of her stage name) a Québecoise, Marie-Louise-Emma-Cécile Lajeunesse, from Chambly (outside Montréal).

Albani was the first Canadian singer to become widely known on the international stage, but hardly the last.  After World War Two, a whole crop of distinguished names appeared and prospered, both in Canada and internationally.  Among them were sopranos Pierrette Alarie and Teresa Stratas, contralto Maureen Forrester, tenors Jon Vickers and Léopold Simoneau, baritone Louis Quilico, and many more.  

These were the names I grew up on, the legendary singers who were discussed, described, and heard on recordings in our home.  As I grew older, I was fortunate enough to hear several of them in live performances.  These golden voices set a standard of musical excellence which has continued to shape and define my taste in singing throughout my life.

And these golden voices were the subject of Tuesday night's unusual programme.

Canadian baritone Gino Quilico, himself a distinguished international opera singer, has put together a fascinating evening of tribute to 10 great Canadian opera singers of the past.  He commented from the stage that he had trouble cutting it down to ten -- I can relate.  I can easily think of half a dozen more whose reputations were framed more in the concert repertoire than in the opera house.  But he chose his 10 wisely -- with respect to balance of voice types, and (as he said) he picked ten who had some degree of personal influence on him, even if only at a distance in time.

That comment certainly applied to his first great name, Edward Johnson, the tenor from Guelph who had a splendid quarter-century touring the great opera houses of the world, followed by an equally significant fifteen years as director of the Metropolitan Opera House.  Quilico became aware of the name every time he walked into the Faculty of Music's headquarters at the University of Toronto, the Edward Johnson Building!

The other nine singers were:

* tenor Raoul Jobin
* tenor Richard Verreau
* soprano Pierrette Alarie
* tenor Léopold Simoneau
* contralto Maureen Forrester
* baritone Louis Quilico
* tenor Jon Vickers
* soprano Teresa Stratas
* tenor Ben Heppner

I finally worked out that I had heard four of these great voices in live performances: Alarie, Simoneau, Forrester, and Heppner.

For each of these singers, Quilico shared a brief biographical outline, described some famous roles, and played an audio or video clip (or two) of each one in performance.  He also shared personal insights into the ones he had sung with, and (in justifiable family pride) showed on the screen the newspaper stories generated when he and his father became the first father-son team in history to appear in the same opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  He also took that moment to explain the importance of the coach in the opera world, a role which his mother filled for both of the Quilico baritones.

Quilico stated that his father became justly known for his great signature role, as "Mister Rigoletto."  He then added, simply, "That's one part I would never dare take on.  It was his role."

The videos in particular were fascinating.  Most of these great names were active during the Golden Age of televised music on CBC, and the video clips showed them in lavishly costumed and staged full productions which -- we had to remind ourselves -- were performed with full orchestra in a television studio.

One of the most touching was a love duet given by Pierrette Alarie and Léopold Simoneau (married in real life) in which their personal level of affection could clearly be seen, heard, and felt over and above the stage requirements of the piece.

The funniest, no question, was... but we'll get to that in a few moments.

After the speech and audio/video, either Quilico and/or soprano Leslie Fagan sang a solo or duet from the opera in question.  Sometimes it would be a different aria (as Quilico said more than once, he was glad not to be a tenor!).  These musical selections were skillfully accompanied by pianist Dominic Boulianne.


Of them all, Forrester was the one I heard live most often, and the only one I met in person.  So I was particularly intrigued to know what he would come up with for Maureen -- that rarest of singers, a true contralto.  If ever she had a signature role, it was the heartfelt four-minute song Urlicht which comes fourth of the five movements in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony (# 2).  Quilico played an audio recording of her singing Urlicht, accompanied simply on the screen by the publicity photo which I remember from the first time I heard her sing it at Massey Hall in the 1970s.

But then, he got onto the subject of her notorious sense of humour, and inserted a short video clip of one of her dialogue scenes in the riotous Stratford Festival 1984 production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe.  This was followed by Leslie Fagan, a high soprano always up for some comedic fun, doing her level best (and a damn good best it was, too) to imitate Forrester's much deeper voice in the ripely over-done subsequent rendition of O Foolish Fay.   This aria's text was completely rewritten into an ode to the CBC and Knowlton Nash, names certainly familiar to us old-timers!  It made a great comic send-off before the intermission.

Throughout the evening, Gino Quilico (let's keep our Quilicos straight here, folks!) spoke to the audience in a very approachable, conversational tone.  What could easily have become a lengthy lecture became instead a pleasant evening's visit with a person you soon felt was your friend.  If you want to present a show of this kind, that's the best way by far to lead it.  His singing was still powerful and clean in the bigger numbers, if perhaps a bit less so in some quieter passages.  One of the major highlights was heard in the power and drama of the Credo from Verdi's Otello.  

Fagan displayed two opposite extremes of her voice in the quiet Ave Maria from Otello, followed shortly by the more dramatic Sempre libera from La Traviata.  

Perhaps the greatest vocal delight of the evening came in the duet La ci darem la Mano from Don Giovanni, in which both Quilico and Fagan aptly characterized the roles so that one didn't need to know the opera in order to figure out what was happening.  Their vocal tones matched beautifully too, as they ought to in a duet.

The evening ended in a final tribute to the ten great voices, with Quilico and Fagan joining in the lovely duet Lippen schweigen, better known as the Merry Widow Waltz.

Overall, a wonderful evening of reminiscence, of fine music, great performances, and entertaining anecdotes.  Thanks to James Campbell for spotting the possibility of integrating this unique concert into the Festival's string of special Canada 150 events and tributes.

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