Edmonton’s Nuova Vocal Arts, once known as Opera NUOVA, has always presented operas both canonic and less well-known during its late spring / early summer festival. This year, it has gone outside its unconventional comfort zone with the production of its first full-length new opera, a commission several years in the making.
Silence is based on a 1999 play by Moira Buffini about a medieval misogynistic tyrant, King Ethelred, and his complicated domestic and political circumstances. As late as March, the company’s artistic director, Kim Mattice Wanat, was on the verge of cancelling the premiere as crucial government funding remained uncertain. The funding finally came through, and on June 21st, the first of five performances of Silence, by Leslie Uyeda and Darrin Hagen, was presented at the Orange Hub Theatre in Edmonton’s west end.
Although Silence is set in medieval England, its themes have a contemporary resonance. The story explores the ambiguous sexual identity of the title character, Silence, their gender confusion and their aspiration to know themselves in ways that their social conditioning and outright gender suppression have obstructed.
Silence, the character, is sung by Toronto-based soprano Teiya Kasahara, themselves a transgender artist with a history of investigating similar questions of gender identity. Silence has been raised male, but on his wedding night, his reluctant wife Ymma (Lara Ciekiewicz) discovers that the person she’s been forced to marry is, in fact, a young woman. The revelation is news to Silence, and the scene between the two women in bed is one of several comic moments in the opera.
Kasahara captures their character’s range of often unsettling interactions adeptly. Besides the awkward initial relationship with Ymma, Silence is treated with contempt by the King (baritone Phillip Addis), both when he is presented as Ymma’s betrothed and later when the kings goes on the rampage against Silence’s kinsmen and terrorizes her.
Photo Credit: Nanc Price
Teiya Kasahara as Silence
One of Kasahara’s specialties is singing Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and Uyeda has given them plenty of stratospheric tessitura to flash. Ciekiewicz, too, is comfortable in the extremes of the soprano range, and when the two of them were in musical dialogue, their penetrating sound delivered inevitably dramatic effect.
Ciekiewicz’s portrayal of an uncompromising princess, contemptuous of male brutality (her brother had raped her) but full of compassion for the odd person she has, in a sense, redeemed by essentially schooling them in the ways of the birds and the bees and tried to protect them from Ethelred’s wrath. The rage Ymma feels in her lot as a disrespected woman is palpable in Ciekiewicz’s performance, and in her pragmatic capacity to dispense violence in her own self-interest towards the end, Ciekiewicz’s devious machinations added another poignant dimension to what amounted to a battle of the sexes in several senses.
The other female role, Agnes, Ymma’s servant, was sung by mezzo soprano Rebecca Cuddy. Cuddy gave her character a food mix of spunk and frustration as an indentured woman, essentially doubly trapped as a beholden woman with few prospects of personal or societal recognition. There was something almost comically quirky about Cuddy’s portrayal of Agnes, which I found amusing and endearing.
It isn’t just the women who are frustrated in this new opera. Eadric (baritone Clarence Frazer), the king’s servant and a sexually frustrated man, sang his role as a man at loose ends. He agonized with a certain pointless machismo, and although he was entirely unsympathetic, he was no match for the incidental power of Ymma, his romantic target. Let’s just say, his fate was even worse than that of the much put-upon females.
The other character who undergoes a life-changing transformation is Roger (tenor Matthew Dalen), a sexually frustrated priest, who sings some fine moments about his inner turmoil. His expression of his Catholic anxieties was, at times, unnecessarily comically broad, but Dalen has a fine voice, and in his featured scenes, he held the spotlight with tenorly aplomb.
Budget constraints gave Uyeda just six musicians to write for, but somehow, the six – a violinist, cellist, clarinettist, flautist, percussionist and pianist – created a sound world that accentuated the singers’ parts, and told the story in musically interesting ways, sometimes in ensemble with the singers, sometimes in their own gloss on the opera’s narrative flow. Percussionist Brian Thurgood and flautist Petar Dundjerski made an especially strong impression, Thurgood with Uyeda’s variety of colours, including occasional mallet work, military snare drumming and even some subtle wood block tapping, and Dundjerski just had a lot of notes, which given the predominance of high female voices in the work, compounded the overall penetrating element.
Hagen’s first crack at writing a libretto avoided what could be clunky attempts at poetic panache. He stuck to a clear, largely prosaic approach to storytelling, and it made the episodes of Silence’s journey easy to follow and understand. There are poetic elements to Bufffini’s original satire, but Hagen’s distillation of the original served the opera well without straining to be archly operatic.
Mattice Wanat mustered a fine cast for her first new opera, and her direction was fluid. Scene changes were crisp, and the blocking was lively. The singers had plenty to do besides sing, and the result was a very theatrically satisfying addition to new Canadian opera repertoire.
Photo Credit: Nanc Price
The King (Phillip Addis) treats Silence (Teiya Kasahara) with contempt
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Bill Rankin has been a classical music and opera writer for two decades. His reviews and articles have appeared in the Edmonton Journal, the Globe and Mail, Gramophone, Opera Canada, La Scena, the American Record Guide and Classical Voice North America. He lives in Edmonton.
