The Wholenote Magazine

Trial by Mass Media
The Salome Dancer

by Phil Ehrensaft

Murder most foul has been an operatic staple since the 1600s.   The Salome Dancer, which premiers at the Open Ears Festival on April 27 and 28, has an entirely original take on the dire deed. The inspiration for composer Tim Brady is the first murder trial conducted as much in O.J Simpson-style mass media frenzy as in the courtroom: the 1895 conviction of William Henry Theodore “Theo” Durant for Jack-the-Ripper style murders of two women in San Francisco’s Emmanuel Baptist Church, where Durant was Assistant Sunday School Superintendent.

William Randolph Hearst’s new “yellow journalism” empire seized the case with speculative vengeance, and society lapped it up – both the courtroom drama and relations between the accused, Theo, and his beloved sister Maude, who later changed her name and profession, rising to fame as Maude Allen, “The Salome Dancer.”

Allen was born in Toronto in 1873. Her family moved to San Francisco six years later. Maude’s talents on the piano led her to Berlin, where she enrolled in the Hochschule für Musik in February 1895. Theo’s tragedy came two months’ later. At his request, Maude remained in Europe but corresponded steadily until Theo was hanged in January 1898. He maintained his innocence right to the end, as did Maude.

By 1902, Maude had become a painter.   Seeing Wilde’s Salome in 1906 inspired her to create a dance-theatre piece, The Vision of Salome.   Allen had no training in dance. Her technique arose from her own imagination, plus the encouragement of composer-critic Marcel Rémy. He wrote the music for Vision and spurred Allen’s dancing passions by associating the execution of John the Baptist with her brother’s hanging.

Vision gained Allen international fame and notoriety, including a brutal “Cult of the Clitoris” libel suit that commenced in 1918. Ultimately Allen’s fame waned, and she returned to San Francisco to die in obscurity and poverty in 1956. Talk about an operatic life.

It’s in character for Brady to seize the operatic opportunities in Allen’s sui generis story. His own musical biography is equally one of a kind. He started out as a rock guitarist, trained formally in jazz, and ultimately decided to become one of a handful of pioneering composers creating art music for the prototypical instrument of our time, the electric guitar.

More accurately, Brady composes and performs on two instruments simultaneously: the guitar and 24-track recording equipment. The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Contemporary Music devotes a chapter to Brady’s innovations.

He is also among the most thoughtful composers, concerning the interface between contemporary music and society.

Twelve years’ hard work by Brady and his librettist John Sobol separated the initial conception of Salome from the final production. Sobol interviewed Brady for Eye during the early 1990s, and they discovered much in common. Sobol is a poet, jazz saxophonist and digital multimedia artist.   Brady felt that these three talents would make him more attuned as a librettist to the way music drives operatic drama than would likely be the case with most playwrights. The creative duo became a trio five years ago when Ann-Marie Donovan signed on as the director.

Act 1 of Dancer has a classic structure: seven scenes and four arias over 43 minutes, featuring, in Brady’s words, “great tunes and great chords.” Act 2 is structured like a raga, though this does not involve South Asian sonorities. Pedal notes lead into a gradual buildup over thirty-five minutes. The composer’s BradyWorks Ensemble is in the pit. Four characters (reporter, cop, dancer and preacher) play out a straight narrative plot. Intelligibility of lyrics is emphasized (not the usual fare in new music operas).

I anticipate a very stimulating evening.

Richard Bradshaw
Doing What He Started
by Pamela Margles

Richard Bradshaw, General Director of the Canadian Opera Company, is in the midst of a ‘mini-crisis’, he calmly informs me at the beginning of our interview in his office. The soprano for the upcoming production of Il Trovatore, starting rehearsals in three days, is ill. He and his staff are scouting around for a Leonora available on such short notice. But it’s not an easy role to fill at best.

This is nothing compared to the series of crises, mainly dealing with government funding and building the new hall, Bradshaw has dealt with since he arrived here sixteen years ago as Chief Conductor. While funding issues persist, problems with the unwieldy Hummingbird Centre have, after extraordinary complications and delays, been resolved, and The Four Seasons Centre is finally going up at the corner of Queen and University.

If it is impressive that Bradshaw has managed all the while to produce increasingly exciting seasons of opera productions, it’s rather remarkable that he has stuck it out at all.

A tall, robust Englishman with a speaking voice so mellifluous that he does the voice-overs for COC advertisements, Bradshaw says, “Once I’d committed to the opera house, I had a lot of people behind me. Of course there’s all this nonsense about being promised government funding and not getting it. But after a certain point I did have to be here until I’d done what I started to do. I don’t think it could be anything I could live with otherwise.”

“A lot has to do with building something which is bigger than last night’s performance. Building a company that will go on after me – that’s satisfying. This is a terrific place to be, and I have an extraordinary team of people that would take a very long time to build elsewhere.
I happen to like Toronto. So it wasn’t very hard to stay. People always think that the grass is greener somewhere else – and that’s not necessarily true.”

“I’ve done an awful lot of guest conducting. I’d be on the road for ten months a year. Of course I still go here and there – sometimes it’s for the particular company, but quite often it’s for the piece, particularly with orchestral repertoire. If it’s a Mahler symphony, I’ll probably take it.”

Bradshaw rebuilt the COC orchestra, recently described by the New York Times as ‘top-of-the-line’, then brought it out of the pit to showcase it in an ongoing series of concerts. Asked what he’s done to create such a vibrant, committed ensemble, Bradshaw says, “What they’ve done. A lot of the players stuck in there – with lousy pay - because they believed in the new opera house. There’s a considerable amount of shared responsibility,” especially with concertmaster Marie Bérard and first cellist Brian Epperson.

Bradshaw waves his arm as if conducting. “When I did that, you didn’t hear anything. Conducting is a very interesting process, far too mysterious to understand. I don’t know why the musicians work for one person and not another equally musical. Why do eighty people, highly trained musicians who went into this business thinking they were going to be soloists or chamber musicians, and who have lots of good ideas of how you play a particular passage –why do they want to work together?”

Although running the company and building the new hall demand so much energy, Bradshaw is primarily a conductor. In Toronto alone he conducts four of the seven opera productions this year, along with the COC orchestral concerts, and the student orchestra at The Royal Conservatory of Music Glenn Gould Professional School. And he is in demand as guest conductor throughout the world.

“I always wanted to be a conductor - for whatever reason, that was what I was passionate about.” His first paying job was as an organist when he was twelve. “I was quite good. But they didn’t give me the choir. I always longed for the conductor to be away so I could direct the choir. And at school I was always persuading them to let me conduct the school orchestra.” When he was fifteen he joined the National Youth Orchestra as a flute player. “I wasn’t much good but I played it because the head of music at my school said, ‘If you’re going to be a conductor, you should play an orchestral instrument.’”

After he took a conducting course with Adrian Boult, the revered British conductor gave Bradshaw a copy of his handbook on conducting. “He wrote in it, ‘If you would like to come and see me in London with your scores, I shan’t charge for an instrument that’s not there.’” And that’s what I did. I studied conducting, organ, and piano. But because my father – probably wisely - insisted I get a degree in something else, I read English at the University of London. I was glad I did something other than music, instead of competing with all those whiz kids concerned about winning competitions and being top in their class. By starting on the outside, it’s easier to achieve a perspective.”

“I was lucky that when I was just twelve or thirteen, a nearby company lost their pianist during rehearsal of The Barber of Seville, and someone said I could do it. I had to learn it in two days. That stood me in great stead because when I arrived in London, one of the smaller opera companies needed a pianist for Barber, and that started me off. So while I was a student I played a lot of rehearsals as a pianist and harpsichordist.”

“I’ve been fortunate in a lot of ways. Conductors need a break. At the end of a concert I conducted, featuring a young cello soloist, his father, principal cellist of the London Symphony, asked me whether I knew Colin Davis. At the time Davis was next to God. He gave me an introduction to Davis, who asked where I was conducting. I had one concert in London coming up. Davis was rehearsing Woz-zeck, so I didn’t even send him a ticket. But he came. At the intermission he left his number, because he had to get back to rehearsals at Covent Garden.”

When Bradshaw went to see Davis, Davis picked up the phone, rang the Liverpool Philharmonic, who was auditioning young conductors to work with the orchestra, and said, ‘I’ve got this conductor here I saw two nights ago. You must audition him.’

So Bradshaw was added to the audition list, even though he had previously been turned down - and won a position. “That was my big break. I did see Davis a bit ago and he said to me, ‘I hope you hear a lot of young conductors,’ which I do. I don’t think there’s a young conductor who’s applied here who I haven’t seen or talked to.”

Bradshaw has a knack for bringing in top conductors for the repetoire, like Rossini specialist Will Crutchfield for this month’s Tancredi, and early music specialist Harry Bicket for Rodelinda next year.

“I have done a lot of Handel opera in the past, but now I’d rather have specialists like Bickett do it –that’s their world. What I would like to do again are the big Handel oratorios, with the sort of exciting forces that Handel originally used. ...
The early music movement has made us rethink - it has taught us a lot. On the other hand, from my deeply old-fashioned standpoint about some things, we’ve lost in the performance of Bach and Handel a certain grandeur - not heaviness, but sonority. The first Messiahs that we know about used enormous forces. There is something about the grandeur of a big Messiah which we neglect at our peril. Sometime I’ll dare to go back to conducting that repertoire, but the sort of St. Matthew Passion I’d do would be deeply anachronistic.”

One of the most exciting impacts of the new house is on programming. Bradshaw promises lots of Mozart. “I gave up on Mozart in the Hummingbird – it needs intimacy and quicksilver, especially in the ensembles. If I wouldn’t conduct it myself in there, why should I ask somebody else to?”

When I mention the Magic Flute from years back at the Elgin, Bradshaw gasps. “That was the worst thing we ever did, just because it was so incompetent for all sorts of reasons. Our Queen of the Night just made it worse. That Queen had won an international Mozart competition in Toronto. But she turned up from day one totally unable to sing the part - it was a catastrophe. We did try to replace her but the replacement wasn’t very good either...So that one got away.”

Asked about his favourite opera of all, he says, “If I had to say one I would say Pelléas et Mélisande.” In fact, Bradshaw was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France for his commitment to French music. Yet major works of the French operatic repertoire have been long missing from the COC seasons. Faust is planned, but Manon, which is one of his favourite French pieces, is prohibitively expensive. His next dream project is Les Troyens. “When you’ve done the Ring, that’s the next Everest.”

Canadian opera remains a priority. “I desperately think we need to produce more Canadian operas. Randolph Peters, who is working on Innana’s Dream, based on Sumerian legends, is enormously talented, and I’m very interested in what he’s going to do for us.”

Bradshaw has done a remarkable job of bringing internationally successful Canadian singers back to the COC. But he’s still trying to work things out with Ben Heppner, who hasn’t sung with the COC since 1996. “We regularly ask him. I think he’s a very great singer and I wish he were doing more here. I would almost say that if we did Die Meistersinger, which is probably our favourite Wagner opera, I can’t imagine doing it with anyone else - I think it would be a tragedy.”

If things aren’t working in a production, can he step in? “I think I should have stepped in with the recent Lucia, but I was so concerned with The Handmaid’s Tale. I would be more involved next time.”

“But once you’ve hired someone you have a responsibility to help them realize their vision, especially if you’re working with someone like François Girard, who has the most extraordinary ability to see with his ears. Oedipus Rex was such a crazy piece to stage. Once I made my commitment to François, and we got through the design stage, he needed my support.”

While Bradshaw eagerly offers productions with non-traditional sets and adventurous stagings – the imaginatively beautiful Rigoletto from 1992 comes to my mind – he avoids the controversial excesses of European directors like Peter Konwitschny. He even cheerfully admits to booing “very loudly” at a recent performance of Don Carlos in Vienna, where part of the action took place in the washrooms and foyers of the Staatsoper.

“I’m skeptical of concept-driven opera. If it works, that’s great. But the trend of directors reinterpreting an opera by saying, ‘What is my concept?’ and then come hell or high water making it work, is regrettable. We had a production here once which was so illogical that the stage director was trying to change the supertitles so that they did not say what was being sung.”

“I think the important thing for a director is to listen to the music, and then work from that. I remember an image in Erwartung, for example, when the dead body very slowly rolled, rolled, rolled into the pool of blood which had been created by the previous opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. The director, Robert Lepage, had come into rehearsal not knowing what he was going to do in that section, and he asked me to play the music again. We played it three times - there is no singing and no text, and almost nothing happens but a reiterated phrase. The idea of that body rolling came right out of the music.”

“I’m thinking, as we go into Il Trovatore, that in any operatic production, although you are dealing with big myths and passions, you’re also bringing the unconscious to consciousness. You have to allow the music to point the way rather than imposing on it a structure.”

Also upcoming this month is Tancredi. Over the years Bradshaw has treated Toronto audiences to a number of Rossini comedies. “It was important to do a serious Rossini,” he says. So, although Rossini wrote two alternative endings for Tancredi, they are doing the tragic ending. “Tancredi is such a very strong piece dramatically, and for me the tragic ending works.”

“With Rossini, you are unashamedly doing it for the voices. In the end, we’re doing this as a vehicle for Ewa Podles. I think she’s one of the great artists in the world today, a singer of fantastic vocal temerity. She takes all those risks, and she has remarkable charisma when she’s on stage.”

The COC is in the remarkable position of operating with a basically sold-out house. But future planning remains difficult.

“We’re at last a stable company financially and that’s taken a long time. But if we are going to make commitments down the road we have to have an idea we can pay for them. We never know if the money’s there, sometimes until too late. I hope the government keeps all its promises for us in the new house. But who knows?”

“To fund the arts properly is nothing. We have an opera company which works at an international level - we’re the only company that’s been invited three times to the Edinburgh Festival, and we’re being invited everywhere else. I know what I’m doing elsewhere in 2008 but I’m only partially sure what I’m doing here. We have plans, but I need some indication of what the federal government is really going to be giving us before we make final commitments. That’s our greatest problem.”

From my conversation with Bradshaw, it’s clear why the COC ranks with the most vibrant and interesting opera companies today. He is involved everywhere in the company, and willing to take ultimate responsibility for what happens, even on stage. His vision, patience and determination have already paid off with the new house, and he could even succeed where no-one ever has, and wrangle ongoing government support. He makes you feel that if anyone can pull it off, he can.

Soon after we talked, Bradshaw e-mailed me, thrilled that they had snagged Eszter Sümegi, who sang Tosca here two seasons ago, as their Leonora. Another crisis solved.