Fully cloth'd beauty

Despite the loveliness you see pictured, Renaud, the tenor-hero of Armide prettily sung by Colin Ainsworth, kept most of his clothes on. There was a scene where he kept running on and off stage each time a little less dressed wherein I thought he’d get naked, but no such luck. It was an extremely pleasing spectacle nonetheless. The title mezzo, Stephanie Novacek, was brilliant. The power and emotion of that voice in the context of a stylized Baroque opera was incredible. Bang fucking on. All the singers were good, particularly the baritones, (Curtis Sullivan made Hate look and sound like it was all you needed) and the Tafelmusik choir was lovely.

The Elgin Theatre is a perfect venue for Opera Atelier because of its Baroque splendour and intimacy, a point driven home by using the boxes for the chorus and the occasional goddess-pose of an acting soprano. And far be it from Opera Atelier to shy from Baroque splendour. It was lush – the sound, the set, and the ballet. Without being dumb. The only cringe-worthy lush moments were with the strap-on wings of the dancer playing Love (not securely fastened, so when he really got going they bounced around with an absurd life of their own) and with some dancers dressed up as tables doing their thing around Renaud. Otherwise, so well-put together and beautifully sung was it that despite the lushness, distractingly hot scantily clad (and apparently stuffed - or maybe just huge? a girl can dream) male dancers, and the super-stylized poses of the protagonists, by the time Armide brought the opera to its crashing conclusion my disbelief was suspended somewhere above the rooftops. And I wasn’t even on drugs.

Two complaints, neither to do with the performance itself, but the lead up. First was how it was advertised, and I don’t mean Naked Renaud. Here’s an excerpt from the flyer:

This opera has an extraordinary resonance for us today as it deals with the conflict between the Christian world (represented by the knight Renaud) and its perception of the Muslim world as the “axis of evil” (represented by the Muslim sorceress, Armide).

Except it doesn’t. This opera deals with love/hate relationships, sex, and emotional honesty. It HAPPENS to deals with these things in a plot wherein Armide is a very unlikely Muslim woman (I don’t think Muslims are big on sorcery, nor on parading their women in front of foreign troops) and Renaud is a very unlikely Christian man (his character is more like a Classical warrior than a chivalrous Crusader). We never hear the religious mentioned; it’s all sorcery and pagan addictions to Glory. The idea that this opera has any religious or ethnic ‘resonance’ is facile and irresponsible – especially considering how it ends.

Second complaint: Marshall Pynkoski. Staging Baroque operas beautifully for decades in Toronto must be the artistic equivalent of scaling Everest freestyle twice a year, and I don’t grudge him mad props for that. But dude, shut the fuck up before the shows. He goes on these spiels – he did when I saw Dido and Aeneas/Actéon last spring, and considering last night was the final performance of Armide I think he does it every night. He recites the synopsis – a piss-off because it’s already in our programs and we know how to read, fuck you very much, and because he was giving away theatrical twists that should have came as a surprise even to those of us who know the operas.

Also he explains his interpretation of the story, which I don’t want to hear, I want to experience! That’s why he’s an artistic director and not a professor; or more properly, that’s why I’m a spectator, not a music major. In the words of Monsieur F, he spoonfeeds us. But anybody who is already interested in Baroque opera doesn’t need to be spoonfed, he’s singing to the choir . . . we especially don’t need to be spoonfed crap about how Armide is allegorical of Christian/Muslim relations. Not to mention he’s got the Tafelmusik players waiting in the pit, for god’s sake, with all their Baroque instruments that go out of tune if you breathe on them. Merde, c’était schiant.