Preview
LAKMÉ
Calgary Opera-Edmonton Opera
Starring Amy Hansen, John Tessier and Dean Elzinga
Composed by Leo Delibes
Conducted by Robert Dean
Directed by Brian Deedrick
Runs October 21 and 23
Jack Singer Concert Hall (Epcor Centre)
Today, Lakmé is best known as the opera with the famous soprano duet "Bell Song," but maestro Robert Dean, making his sixth appearance with Calgary Opera, predicts the company’s new, semi-staged version will gain another distinction – at least among Alberta opera productions. This collaboration between the Calgary and Edmonton operas, both of which have been temporarily ousted from their cities’ Jubilee Auditoriums due to renovations, is a creative challenge in a season full of adjustments.
Audiences at the Jack Singer in Calgary will have a rare opportunity to hear the opera’s singers in a different acoustical setting and watch them in closer proximity. There will also be a different configuration for the staging from what Jubilee patrons have become accustomed to. The opera chorus will be in the loft above the stage, while the orchestra will be towards the back of the stage, behind a translucent scrim upon which images will be projected as part of the set. The arrangement means Dean will have his back to the audience and performers, and will have to use television cameras to follow the action and headphones to hear the singers.
"As a conductor, I am always alert to what singers require from me and that means being able to see and hear what they are doing," he says, adding he aims to harmonize his conducting to the breathing and phrasing of the performers.
Before the Edmonton opening last week, under a similar arrangement at the Winspear concert hall, Dean was confident that technology was on his side. And a preview before 600 kids had them totally enthralled, he adds. "The music is gorgeous but the dramatic thread is tenuous, not what you expect kids to respond to easily," he says.
French composer Leo Delibes’s 1883 opera is set in British-occupied India and concerns Gerald, a British officer, and the Indian girl Lakmé, who do the unforgivable and fall in love. Her father Nilakantha seeks out Gerald and stabs him – although not fatally. Lakmé takes her lover away to nurse him back to health. While she is gone for some magic water, one of Gerald’s fellow officers finds him and convinces him to return to his English fiancée and his regiment. When she discovers he has gone, Lakmé kills herself.
Edmonton Opera artistic director Brian Deedrick is directing the show and has his own exuberant definition of "semi-staged," according to others working on the production. Deedrick is presenting Delibes’s lush French take on India in full British and Indian costumes. Audiences will be able to appreciate this emphasis on detail, as the singers will be within mere feet of the audience rather than on the other side of an orchestra pit.
"Everyone will have a front row seat," says Dean, "and their involvement will be keener."
How close will the audience be? Close enough that bass-baritone Dean Elzinga, who plays the militant Brahmin priest Nilakantha, hit the tanning salon to hide his Dutch- and Danish-inherited fairness.
As well, Elzinga says he and his co-stars have to pay more than the customary amount of attention to their onstage presence.
"In this semi-staged performance situation, the set is lovely and evocative, and it focuses almost like a microscope on exactly what the performer is doing at every instance. When someone else is singing a vocal line, there is no room for inattention. Every movement you make on the stage must be thought out, shaped."
Or, as he puts it with a chuckle, "We don’t want any unseemly panty lines showing, so to speak." |
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