ON STAGE
What: Fear No Opera: An Interior Life — The complete songs of Henri Duparc.
When/where: Saturday, 7 p.m., Lutheran Church of the Cross (3787 Cedar Hill Rd.).
Tickets: $20.
Fear No Opera made its debut in November 2012 as a company for “emerging artists,” and over the next three years, it mounted seven chamber-scaled shows on modest budgets, including miscellanies of arias and scenes and one-act and full-evening operas. The company has since been on hiatus, but it will return on Saturday with a mandate now expanded to include art song.
Saturday’s program is devoted to Henri Duparc (1848-1933), and comprises his complete works for solo voices with piano: 16 songs and one duet, a little over an hour’s worth of music.
And besides one choral motet and a few piano and orchestral pieces, that’s all he wrote. Duparc, alas, though one of the supreme talents of 19th-century French music, was the victim of sad flukes of fate that undermined his career and reputation.
For one thing, he was pathologically self-critical: He left many works incomplete, revised others constantly. He left some finished works unpublished, published but then withdrew others and some works he destroyed.
Moreover, illness forced him to largely abandon composition in 1885, at age 37. He suffered from what was then known as “neurasthenia,” something resembling chronic fatigue syndrome, and in his case it manifested as hyperesthesia (excessive sensitivity to sensory stimulation).
At first, he was not incapacitated — he had a normal life for a time, could read and write, draw and paint — but he later, he went blind, and was eventually paralyzed, though he lived to 85.
Duparc’s 17 solo-vocal works all date from between 1868 and 1884, and three editions of his songs appeared in his lifetime. Some songs appeared in more than one version, and some were orchestrated, though some he later disowned, too.
On Saturday, the songs will be sung in chronological order, with the duet at the end, and English surtitles will be provided.
The concert will feature soprano Amy Steggles, one of FNO’s co-founders; mezzo-soprano Bree Horton, who appeared in Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief for FNO in 2015; and baritone Nathan McDonald, who is new to the company but familiar to local concert and opera audiences. Braden Young will preside at the piano.
Duparc’s songs are inspired and substantial, his musical idiom original and often advanced, his text-setting exquisitely sensitive (he had discriminating taste in French poets). The songs are admired for their craftsmanship and polish but also their intensity, sweep, ardent expressiveness and atmosphere.
“The best of his songs,” according to a typical assessment, “rival any in either the French or German repertory, so that he must be regarded as a major composer of his time.” Saturday’s concert offers an excellent opportunity to make his acquaintance.
On Monday evening, in the first concert of its 2017-18 season, the Victoria Symphony offered the première of a new work by its former composer-in-residence, Jared Miller, and featured a prominent Canadian pianist, Stewart Goodyear, in a major concerto.
But inevitably, most of the attention was focused on the conductor, Christian Kluxen, who was launching his first season as the orchestra’s music director. It was an ambitious and showy debut, culminating in a work that gave ample evidence of Kluxen’s gifts: Mahler’s First Symphony, the Titan, an hour-long, kaleidoscopic masterpiece for which the orchestra expanded to almost twice its usual size.
Kluxen led a bold, vividly colourful, emotionally uninhibited performance, one full of character and passion, warmth as well as bite. He was keen to italicize nuances at both ends of the expressive spectrum, and the climaxes were thrillingly exciting. At the same time, his reading was considered and full of insight, and carefully prepared, evincing no less technical polish and long-range control that did the performances of his predecessor, Tania Miller.
All told, Monday’s performances bode well for Kluxen’s tenure here, and it helps that both orchestra and audience seem to respond enthusiastically to his big, dynamic personality.
Moreover, there was a refreshing departure to note: At the beginning of the program, Kluxen took up a microphone, said a few words to the audience, then added that he planned to say very few words in the future and would instead let the music speak for itself.
Perfect.