View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (June 1999, week 4) | Back to main OPERA-L page Join or leave OPERA-L Reply | Post a new message Search Options: Chronologically | Most recent first Proportional font | Non-proportional font ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 01:52:21 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Concierto Barroco, Three Mills Island, 22Jun99 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Variations on a Concierto Barrocco Created by Edwin Erminy from the novel by Alejo Carpentier Jennie Rodriguez Cook 1/servant/concierge nun/opera singer Alain Damas Cook 2/Scarlatti Antonio Delli Fransisquillo/Vivaldi Edrich Wildpret Amo Giovanna Sportelli Night visitor/bird/Sevillana/Venice/Anna Giraud Jose Vaisman Sandino Handel/pianist/opera singer Ivan Garcia Filomeno Speciality act Stayfree Chef Maria Fernandez di Giacobe Director Vicente Albarracin Opera Transatlantica Part of London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT99) Three Mills Island is the mysterious-looking place across the canal just east of Bromley-by-Bow tube station on the District line. As well as the (grain) mills, there are a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century administratve buildings and warehouses. The island was semi-derelict for many years, and is now a media production centre in the middle of an outer inner-city industrial and residential area. You could say that Concierto Barroca is about the way high art appropriates and misrepresents the experience of the oppressed. Based on a novel by a former Cuban ambassador to France, it tells the story of Amo, a rich young man whose journey from Mexico via Cuba to Venice in 1707 culminates in the performance of Vivaldi's Montezuma. But it also tells a hilarious but satisfying story of how Filomeno, Amo's black Cuban servant and the grandson of a Cuban hero, invents jazz after hearing Vivaldi's Gloria and Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, and goes off to Paris while Amo returns to his past in the new world. The themes of the work come together in a debate between Vivaldi and Handel about how to write an opera. They reject the idea of writing one based on Filomeno's grandfather (because you can't have an opera with a black central character) in favour of a totally ahistorical (but real) opera about Montezuma. There are operatic allusions thoughout. At the beginning, Fransisquillo goes through a list of stuff to pack for Amo's trip to Europe, mainly silverware and fancy clothes -- Amo is a Don Giovanni in whose story sex is completely unproblematic, but wealth and culture are a worry. There is a carnival in Venice, with a fashion display and speciality act, which is one of a number of echoes of Candide. As in The magic flute, and Filomeno's discovery of jazz, the material and conventions of high art are reworked into something that might be genuinely popular. The story is narrated by two cooks who are trying not to fall out over the best way to prepare Moros y Cristianos (beans and rice), and a real cook prepares the dish during the performance so that there is a delicious smell of fried onions throughout. The whole thing is really about the way enjoying the basic things in life -- food, melody, rhythm, language -- is the basis of all cultures. There is a kind of Marxist subtext, but it's all done with enormous humour and style, and is thoroughly enjoyable. Also, you get to taste the food at the end. The performance is staged partly in the round in a studio space. A planted audience member is thrown out for suggesting using a stock cube. Real audience members are invited to dance as they enter, and to join in in other ways. Everybody is supposed to join a conga out of the studio and back again while the seating is moved around. The music consists of (very good) live performances of mainly Spanish songs accompanied on the piano, some cracking live percussion playing, and recorded excerpts from Vivaldi's Montezuma and Louis Armstrong's Tiger Rag. Three of the performers, I think Alain Damas, Ivan Garcia and Giovanna Sportelli, are opera singers. Sportelli was particularly striking, singing a spooky unaccompanied Dies irae during the plague in Cuba, and a very creditable fragment of the Queen of the night's top notes while being pulled around on a wobbly storage container during a scrap with Vivaldi. All of the performances are first rate. Alain Damas was camply funny as the temperamental fancy cook and amusing as a zoned-out Scarlatti in shades. (I'm not sure what Scarlatti was there for, except her could have been in Venice in 1707.) Jennie Rodriguez was hilarious as the excitable Latin home cook, and she also sang an attractive lullaby. Sportelli has an arch theatrical presence as well as a fine voice, though she was upstaged by Stayfree, a delicate-featured transvestite who was the focus of the Venetian carnival. Jose Vaisman Sandino, who arranged the music, was an almost spherical Handel, looking far too old for 1707 but very funny. Antonio Delli was a jolly comic servant and a bumptious Vivald. Ivan Garcia has a good baritone voice and amiable personality. And Erich Wildpret was similarly good-humoured as the carefree ingenu who comes to resent the liberties old-world types take with his heritage. The director Edwin Erminy said in an interview in Time Out a couple of weeks ago that he was able to get such a good cast because no-one in Venezuela is working in the theatre or opera. It's ironic that we are getting the benefit in London, where everything seems to be booming. On until 4 July. Regards, Helen - H.E. Elsom he@helsom.demon.co.uk http://www.helsom.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main OPERA-L page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.