CD Review - Emma Matthews in Monte Carlo - ABC Classics/ Deutsche Grammophon

Emma Matthews in Monte Carlo

Leonard Bernstein

Candide - Glitter and Be Gay

Leo Delibes
Lakme - Ou va la jeune Indoue (Bell Song)
Friedrich von Flotow
Martha - The Last Rose of Summer
Gaetano Donizetti
Lucia di Lammermoor - Ancor non giunse...Regnava nel silenzio...Quando rapito In estasi
with Catherine Carby mezzo-soprano
Vincenzo Bellini
I Capuleti e i Montecchi - Eccomi in lieta vesta...Oh! quante volte
Charles Gounod
Roméo et Juliette - Air de la coupe: Dieu quel frisson … Amour, ranime mon courage
Ambroise Thomas
Hamlet - A vos jeux, mes amis… Partagez-vous mes fleurs... (scène de la folie d' Ophelie)
Jaques Offenbach
Les Contes d'Hoffmann - Les oiseaux dans la charmille
Heinrich Proch (arr. Richard Bonynge)
Deh! Torna, mio bene, Theme and Variations
Calvin Bowman
Now Touch the Air Softly
Richard Mills
The Love of the Nightingale - The Nightingale's Song
Emma Mathews, soprano
Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo
Brad Cohen, conductor
ABC Classics/ Deutsche Grammophon 476 3555

A co-production between ABC Classics and the owners of the fabled Deutsche Grammophon label, Universal Music, the well-known DGG logo featuring on the cover and presumably sharing a European release of the disc as the soloist, Emma Matthews, launches her international career. The project is a luxurious one, instead of an Australian orchestra the Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo is employed and even a second singer (mezzo Catherine Carby) has been brought over to sing the ‘pertichio’ role in the Lucia di Lammermoor scene.

In her work with Opera Australia Matthews projects a big, secure voice in lyric and coloratura roles but also in less likely assignments including the title role in one Opera Australia’s finest achievements, Alban Berg’s Lulu, using that light, lyrical voice to revelatory effect.

The disc opens with a restrained account of “Glitter and Be Gay” from Bernstein’s operetta-inspired Candide. Eschewing the histrionics that often negate the song’s effects Matthew’s equates the coloratura passages to the type of musical laughter familiar from Manon Lescauts' laughing song in Auber's opera or the best known example, Adele's laughing song in Die Fledermaus. The result is immensely satisfying and encourages multiple hearings.

The folksy “Last Rose of Summer” from Flotow’s Martha reveals Matthews’s beautiful legato but the bulk of the disc is a 60 minute ‘potted’ history of the Bel Canto era before ending with a return to simple serenity. Instead of the celebrated mad-scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor comes the equally dramatic fountain scene is chosen which introduces Lucia (and subtly indicates her mental breakdown is already beginning). The featured mad scene is Ophelia’s scene and ballade from Thomas’s Hamlet. Given in full it the best demonstration of Matthews’s impressive technique as she incorporates the higher and more florid passages introduced by the singer Marie Carvalho and incorporated into the original vocal scores. Matthews then gives an even more elaborate account of the ‘Doll Song” from Les Contes d’Hoffmann and then just enough of an arrangement (the entire thing overstays its welcome even for coloratura fanciers) by Richard Bonynge of Proch’s Theme and Variations (presumably with his wife Joan Sutherland in mind) and which Matthews sings with the same power and agility as Sutherland.

The recital closes with two Australian compositions, and orchestration of a song by Calvin Bowman that has a folksy simplicity and even a beguiling Scotch rhythm in places. The Nightingale’s song from Richard Mill’s opera The Love of The Nightingale is sadly too brief an excerpt from an opera Matthews is so closely associated with. Sounding like a classical vocalise and orchestrated in a lush Ravel-ian manner it brings some beautiful playing from the orchestra. The conductor, Brad Cohen, has a personal interest in this 19th French operatic repertoire and the orchestra, as expected, are a world class band who respond to the familiar items, bringing some very Gallic and incisive playing to the scene from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. The recording is demonstration class, Matthews’s voice given an immediate presence with the strings, in particular in the Bowman item, sounding luscious.

Review - Strangers in Between - The Store Room

Ghost Buster

Tommy Murphy’s Strangers in Between was written and produced prior to his adaptation of Tim Conigrave’s Holding the Man whilst he was resident the Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company. Like Holding the Man, Strangers in Between contains some of the adolescent magical realism of Griffin’s great Away by Michael Gow which (or at least I wish) had been a major influence on play writing. The turmoil of adolescence, trying to shape the love and hate felt towards family into the love (and hate) of adult relationships, the angst of youthful, burgeoning sexuality and its subsequent waning and merging into a greater whole is universally appealing subject matter.

Murphy is a prodigious young writer (he is only 30) and his script has an urgency in the way it deals with its central adolescent passion. Shane (Aljin Abella) has run away from Goulburn to Sydney after being beaten up by his brother who caught him kissing a schoolmate. That turmoil of burgeoning sexuality, and now sexual ostracism, is compounded with the turmoil of finding his feet alone for the first time. The early scenes are characterised by delicious humour underlining Shane’s social skills are as naive as his sexual skills. We see his him nervously blathering with his first sexual partner Will (Cameron Moore) so much that Will kisses him just to stop his endless chatter. Shane's domestic skills are even worse; washing his clothes for the first time is as baffling as sex. Badly in need of friendship as much as mentorship he initiates a conversation with a middle-aged man, Peter (Bruce Kerr) in a bar. But no sooner are they talking than he innocently asks him where to buy coat hangers and, almost in the same breath, about the mechanics of anal sex.

Murphy’s writing is very well crafted with a sophisticated feeling for comedy. As his friendship with Peter develops, for instance, Shane is treated to dinners at the epicurean Peter’s house and samples brie cheese and terrine. Back in Shane’s home town Bree and Tarrine are the names of his brother’s successive girlfriends. The script abounds with this "easing comedy", as David Berthold notes in his introduction to the Currency Press edition of the play, to negotiate around the mounting drama and the director Ben Packer and his actors respond to them unforcedly.

The more dramatic second act is more complex. Shane’s despised brother Ben (Cameron Moore) appears, seemingly responding to a letter from Shane. Ben’s appearance is doubly surprising as the same actor playing Will plays Ben. After a fleeting introduction as the play opens Will’s establishing scene - firstly as an object of Shane’s love and then hate - is also the scene that sets him up to re-appear minutes later as Shane’s brother. Shane is constantly distressed by the violence of Sydney’s King’s Cross and fearful of being attacked. In his room, he also feels a ghostly presence. When Ben initially appears his reality is assumed. When he next appears his doppelganger similarity to Will better understood. The same actor plays Will and Ben, as Berthold explains, “for an important reason: Will is the form of Shane’s yearning for Ben”. Far from unconscious incestuous desire, Shane yearns, rather, to resolve his love/hate relationship with Ben as much as he is trying to resolve his love/hate relationship with Will. Both have hurt him and then rejected him and both appear in the second act their Gestalt presence is, in Ben’s case, a powerful climactic moment while Will’s is a gentle resolution.

In the first act Shane’s relationships with Will and Peter break down when, as Berthold says, “sex is confused with intimacy”. In a chapter entitled 'Staging A Culture That Insn't Just Sexual"A in his 1992 study Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama John Clum discusses how a gay character forges "relationships that meaningfully and honestly connect him to other people - lovers, friends, family. Like the self, relationships and the language of relationships must be forged anew out of words that have limited or negative meanings for gay men". At the conclusion of Strangers in Between the erotic thrall between the trio has been replaced by the more rewarding intimacy and language of trust and friendship. Naked and vulnerable, Shane is there for the taking but instead Will and Peter are surrogate brother and father.

As Shane Abella balances the comedy and pathos of the character, never letting you forget the desperation of his situation.
In the dual roles of Shane’s lover Will and brother Ben, Moore delineates both characters exceptionally well. As Ben his gaunt, stiff-limed and spectral appearance suggests both the troubled stoner that is Shane’s brother and the memory-stirring ghost of Shane’s unconscious. In staging Ben’s second scene Packer even has Moore walking backwards, retreating into the darkness after its purpose has been served like a proper stage ghost would. Perhaps the casting of actors of different ethnicity for Shane and his brother was a means of delineating the real presence of Will and the imagined presence of Ben.

Bruce Kerr is an unlikely choice as Peter, more grandfatherly than the intended 50-ish and fatherly character penned by Murphy but uses his terrifically long theatrical experience to mine the script for new depths, creating a kind of Quentin Crisp-ian character. Even more than Abella and Moore Kerr wrings every possible drop of humour out of Murphy’s text.

Packer’s production is valuable in these aspects. Apart from being a further production of a play (which is a luxury in this environment where plays have no life after a first production), being able to further explore the ways of signalling the important shifts of reality in the play. As originally written Shane’s brother first appears at the end of the first act. In the current staging director Ben Packer runs the play without a break and drawing tension out of Moore's sudden appearance as Ben. The text is meticulously supervised on its many levels in this production. The play’s sense of humour comes through subtly and the dialogue and scenes flowing effortlessly. Lighting, simple array of suspended, coloured fluorescent lights suggesting the cheap, nocturnal glamour of King’s Cross while scenes are punctuated with a sound scape of trains in motion. Back in business after a few years’ hiatus, The Store Room provides an intimate venue for this imaginative play about intimacy.

Strangers In Between (2006) by Tommy Murphy
Shane – Aljin Abella
Will/Ben – Cameron Moore
Peter – Bruce Kerr
Director – Ben Packer
Set & Costume Design – Micka Agosta
Lighting Design – Govin Ruben
Little Death Productions
The Store Room, 1st floor rear, Parkview Hotel,
131 Scotchmer St, North Fitzroy
23 July – 16 August 2009
95 minutes (no interval)