>>PREVIEW
FROBISHER
Runs January 27, 31 and February 2
By John Estacio and John Murrell
Calgary Opera and The Banff Centre
Jubilee Auditorium
John Estacio and John Murrell are successful co-creators in one of the toughest art genres – the larger-than-life, over-the-top world of opera. They have been commissioned to write three operas in less than six years. Their second opera Frobisher will make its debut on January 27 at the Jubilee Auditorium. Most operas don’t survive beyond the excitement of a debut. This partnership is crumbling that tradition while keeping a crack creative team intact.
Their first opera Filumena had audiences and the co-commissioners Calgary Opera and The Banff Centre begging for more. Composer Estacio and librettist Murrell were ahead of them. They had begun work on Frobisher before Filumena opened.
Once the libretto and music are written – orchestration comes later – music and stage directors, designers and production folks get busy. The tone, place, time and characters set in the music and words are their guides, but the designers and production crew are limited by what is possible to build and move – preferably easily and silently –within budget.
All opera is demanding, but Frobisher multiplies the challenges. Two time periods and two continents provide background to a story that engages the imagination to be as vast and complex as the Arctic. Lavish indoor courts, a chic film festival in the Rockies, a wilderness cabin and expansive outdoor wildness with nature at her most dramatic are required to tell the story. Murrell was inspired by historical facts but then totally fabricated a married couple of Alberta filmmakers making a docudrama about the privateer and warrior.
Martin Frobisher, after whom one of Canada’s Arctic Bays is named, wheedled his way through the queen’s court and courtiers to finance his adventures. Though he touted his explorations as leading to the riches of the orient by way of the Northwest Passage, he obsessed about a tropical utopia rumoured to be at the North Pole. His dreams are gigantic and he will not relinquish them even after death. And Michael, the filmmaker obsessed with bringing Frobisher’s story to film, is swallowed up by the Arctic.
Anna, Michael’s widow is haunted by both her husband and the subject of their film and plagued to finish Michael’s work.
Murrell admits it is a complicated story but says the theme is simple. Dreams must be realized and not hampered as he says in the opera "by the bonds of life." Murrell’s imagination is unhampered and so the story calls for Northern Lights, life-size ghosts and ancient sailing ships. Modern technology will bring it all to audiences.
Using "particle systems," the same computer program developed for the battles in the Lord of the Rings movies, Bob Bonniol of Mode Studios in Oregon says, "Particle systems are immensely powerful tools for visual artists. You can define what particles should look like, and then assign behaviours to them that allow them to behave semi-autonomously."
"All of those combatants (in Lord of the Rings) were in fact generated by a particle system called Massive," explains Bonniol. "Each particle had a set of rules by which it operated. In that case, it was to defend, or attack, or run, etc. In our case, we are creating rules for colour- and light-based particles that will make them responsive to volume, pitch and tempo of music.
"We're also using particle systems to create convincing snowstorms for the opera," he adds. "This technology is something that we've used quite a bit in our work, and it is so flexible and extensible that it has shown up in many different ways. On Nickelback's latest concert tour, we used reactive particle systems to create psychedelic imagery that moved in time with their music. In another opera, Parsifal, we used particles to create specifically controlled colour shifting in backgrounds that appeared painted." |
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