Category: music

Saturday with Pav

On April 4, 2009

My childhood was full of music. As well as taking lessons myself, I was surrounded by the holy trinity of Elvis, Abba and opera (with a good measure of Johnny Cash thrown in too). Classical music, and opera, was, and remains a huge passion of my mother’s; she was a childhood singer who, through circumstance, was forced to move away from singing. That “thwarted soprano” ethos informed and drove her passion for opera throughout her life, and deeply influenced not only her choice of husband (a musician, natch) but the way she chose to raise her only child.

My Saturday afternoon were filled with the sounds of the Metropolitan Opera blasting out of every radio in the house. When portable radio players became the rage, I remember walking around the supermarket, thoroughly embarrassed over her swooning along, past aisles of tinned beans and dried pasta, headphones wrapped around her head, the melifluous sounds of opera tinnily emanating from the tiny speakers. There were also innumerable nights spent watching the “Live From The Met” specials, and trying to figure out how to work the then-new VCRs in order to ensure repeated-viewing rhapsody. Every month or so we’d also go to the O’Keefe Centre to watch the latest German/Italian/English spectacle; I barely knew what was going on sometimes (these were the days before surtitles) but I knew the music, having heard it already all those Saturday afternoons.

One of my mother’s operatic dreams was realized when, in the 90s, we traveled to New York City and saw Luciano Pavarotti onstage. He was in L’elisir D’Amore, the opera that happens to be on my radio this afternoon. My memories around this opera are deeply tied to seeing the Pav perform it live many years ago. Though it’s a silly little piece of pseudo-buffa, it has some gorgeous music, and it takes a real presence to bring any kind of levity to the material. Pavarotti brought it (duh); there was a noticeable, and rather incredible hush that descended over the sold-out crowd the minute he stepped onstage. He wasn’t singing at the introduction – just standing there -but he was fully present, in every sense. And his smile lit up the room. I remember turning to my mother, and she had that same huge smile. Then he opened his mouth, and this… sound came out. I’ve never been able to quite describe it, but seeing him live (more than once) remains a treasured, beautiful memory on many levels.

This clip, with Pavarotti singing the gorgeous (and famous) aria from L’elisir with just a piano is incredible for the way he utterly inhabits the music -not just the words, but the music itself, encapsulating all of its passion and wisdom, making a merely silly little love song into a transcendent meditation for the ages. Grazie, Pav.

Surf. Practise. Audition.

By Catherine Kustanczy

On January 25, 2009

In music

Artistic Directors, marketers, musicians, artists, and artsy types, take note: this is the future of cultural connecting and opportunity. Totally inspiring.

Soulpepper Loves The Magyars

By Catherine Kustanczy

On November 20, 2008

In music

Miklos Laszlo, Ferenc Molnar, Laszlo Marton. What’s up with Soulpepper and the Hungarians? Is it the drama? The comedy? Perhaps the strange sense of isolation some (me) argue the country has from its European brethen?

Whatever the case, Albert Schultz & Co. seem quite enamoured with my kinsman’s theatre artists. Marton, a Soulpepper favourite, will be returning to Toronto to direct Molnar’s The Guardsmen, a play about deception, fidelity and the sometimes-complicated world of male-female relationships. It runs late August through the fall.

Parfumerie, by Miklos Laszlo, was used as the basis for both the musical She Loves Me and the film You’ve Got Mail. It will be performed November through late December, providing a fascinating contrast to much of the city’s annual December fare.

I don’t have a lineage of theatre artists I hail from –or at least none that I am aware of –but I vividly (and fondly) remember my first taste of theatre. It was at the Stratford Festival, where I sat, an enthralled grade-school kid, through the ramblingly surreal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one of Stoppard’s great works. Up until then, my life had mainly been coloured through the lens of music. My father’s position as a musician was the catalyst for my first forays into culture; operas and symphonies were just the norm for me growing up. I still love music, but theatre, more than any other art form, has been what’s inspired me, called me back, and seduced me time and time again over the years.

It will be interesting to note the musicality of translation in the Laszlo and Molnar works, as well as the ways in which director Marton will utilize actual music in the latter. His productions of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters were notable for the ways they used their scores to highlight the most tender, inexpressible moments. While markedly different, what each work shares is an interestingly harmony of high and low notes. The dark subtext of each provides a satisfyingly nasty edge. It’s like eating a rich goulash with a huge dollop of sour cream: all smooth and creamy on the top, with a rich, meaty interior. Comedy with drama, that leaves you full and nourished by the end.

Kind of reminds me of Soulpepper’s production of The Odd Couple this past season, actually. You think it’s a comedy, but… think again. That, to me, is the magic of doing works like The Guardsman and Parfumerie. Forget the Hungarian Suicide Song; this is the real thing.

Yes.

By Catherine Kustanczy

On November 5, 2008

In music

Bipsy, Balls, Weill & Northrop

By Catherine Kustanczy

On October 8, 2008

In music

I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed puppet theatre until I saw Famous Puppet Death Scenes, put on by Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop, last year. It was bizarre, it was gross, it was moving. It had moments of extreme insight, and others that wallowed in the most deliciously macabre humour. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and some of the powerful images it presented. Puppets may just be “blocks of wood”, as Old Trout puppeteer Judd Palmer told me last week, but what they convey in the hands of such skilled masters is something far past the corporeal. To quote my first PlayAnon interviewee, they’re “show(ing) us who we really are.” Quite an achivement for mere blocks of wood. Run, don’t walk, to see one of the best pieces of … well, whatever you want call it. The pseudo-kiddie skit “Das Bipsy and Mumu Puppenspiel” is worth the price of admission alone.

The Young Centre, where you’ll find the Old Trouts’ puppet show, just came off a successful run of shows in their first-ever cabaret series, sponsored by Canwest. With roughly 150 artists ranging from gospel (Jackie Richardson) to world sounds (Waleed Abdulhamid) to classy jazz (Patricia O’Callaghan) and much more, the Canwest Cabaret Series, was, by all accounts, a smashing success. I was able to take in the Cabaret’s Kurt Weill Songbook Saturday night, pre-Nuit Blanche-ing, and I must say, it had some of the best performances of Weill I’ve ever seen. Peppered with a range of interpretations and styles (including beautifully lyrical readings by Mike Ross and Sarah Slean, sexy, classic renditions by O’Callaghan, and decidedly scatty, quirky performances by Mary Margaret O’Hara), the Kurt Weill Songbook was a great example of an important idea: bringing supposedly “high” and/or “obscure” art to the masses -as in, to the ordinary grubs (us, that is) who happen to love it. Just days before, German songstress Ute Lemper had captivated a sold-out crowd at Roy Thomson Hall with her Dietrich-esque readings of Weill, and while the dressy crowd surely ate it up, the audiences assembled Saturday at the Young Centre were definitely more casual -in jeans, sipping beers, chatting with others at the numerous little tables set up in the Bailie Theatre so as to give a club-like feel. It was intimate, casual, and smart.

Monday night I attended the evening of skits and sketches put on by national political theatre group The Wrecking Ball. Made up entirely of pieces written only in the past week, and having had only one rehearsal, the show was part of a national effort to bring attention to the arts cuts that have so coloured the lives of Canadian artists these past few months. Along with clever work by Rick Roberts and Pierre Brault, the evening also featured work by Canadian playwright Judith Thompson, whom Kelly Nestruck, the Globe’s Theatre Critic, rightly says is “swiftly turning into Canada’s David Hare.” Dead on. My favourite, however, was Teresa Pavlinek’s tale of two ordinary people who share a bus ride, along with stationery, and eventually, their dreams and ambitions. Called “The Road to Ordinary”, it was perhaps the least partisan piece of the evening, but for me, it was also the most moving, notable for the subtle ways in which Pavlinek showed how culture has the power to change lives. Great acting too, from Ieva Lucs and Hardee T. Lineham. Best Speech of the Evening Award went to Michael Healey, who reminded the packed Tarragon that, despite what we may think of him, Prime Minister Harper is a patriot too. It was brave, good, and ballsy. Kudos, Michael.

The last word goes to Northrop Frye, again, taken from The Educated Imagination. I like this one, because, based on the artists I’ve spoken with, including my next PlayAnon interviewee, artists of various disciplines in this country didn’t really speak to one another until the arts cuts were made public. What a way to foster discussion. Still, there’s a long way to go in terms of cultivating those connections. So, without further adue, Mr. Frye’s thoughts…

… just as it’s easy to confuse thinking with the habitual associations of language, so it’s easy to confuse thinking with thinking in words. I’ve even heard it said that thought is inner speech, though how you’d apply that statement to what Beethoven was doing when he was thinking about his ninth symphony, I don’t know. But the study of other arts, such as painting and music, has many values for literary training apart from their value as subjects in themselves. Everything man does that’s worth doing is some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake. The units don’t have to be words; they can be numbers or tones or colours or bricks or pieces of marble. It’s hardly possible to understand what the imagination is doing with words without seeing how it operates with some of these other units.