Philippe Boesmans POPPEA E NERONE - Oper Wuppertal
Premiere 30. April 2023
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DAS OPERNMAGAZIN
SIBYLLE EICHHORN /
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannThe Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, under the admirably judicious direction of Matthew Toogood, presents Philippe Boesmans' reconstruction of the opera impeccably, cleanly and precisely.
Das Wuppertaler Sinfonieorchester unter der trefflich umsichtigen Leitung von Matthew Toogood präsentiert die von Philippe Boesmans geschaffene Rekonstruktion der Oper untadelig, sauber und präzise. -
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O-TON KULTURMAGAZIN
HARTMUT SASSENHAUSEN
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannThe singers can always feel at ease under the baton of Matthew Toogood. Breathing with them and paying fine attention to the dynamic of the voices, he carefully guides them through the score. The Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra plays in a nuanced manner, creating the varied soundscapes in an atmospheric and balanced way that matches the stage action.
Jederzeit können sich die Sänger unter dem Dirigat von Matthew Toogood aufgehoben fühlen. Mitatmend und dynamisch fein auf die Stimmen achtend, lotst er umsichtig durch die Partitur. Nuanciert spielt das Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal auf, das passend zum Bühnengeschehen die abwechslungsreichen Klangbilder stimmungsreich und ausgewogen gestaltet. -
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DEIANIRA - DAS KULTURPORTAL
FRITZ GERWINN
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannThe orchestra was in the best hands with Matthew Toogood, Monteverdi specialist.
Das Orchester war in besten Händen bei Matthew Toogood, Monteverdi-Spezialist -
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WESTDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
LILO INGENLATH-GEGIC
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannOn the podium stands guest conductor Matthew Toogood of the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra. He is considered a baroque expert and sensitively brings out all the subtleties of the music.
Als Gast steht Matthew Toogood am Pult des Sinfonieorchesters Wuppertal. Er gilt als Barockexperte und arbeitet sensibel alle Feinheiten der Musik heraus. -
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DER OPERNFREUND
RUDOLF HERMES
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannConductor Matthew Toogood makes this version sparkle and shimmer with lots of percussion and synthesizer.
Dirigent Matthew Toogood lässt diese Version mit viel Schlagwerk und Synthesizer funkeln und schillern. -
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ONLINE MUSIK MAGAZIN
THOMAS MOLKE
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannMatthew Toogood works out these subtleties with great sensitivity with the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra and places the music entirely in the service of what is happening on stage at the moment.
Matthew Toogood arbeitet mit dem Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal mit viel Fingerspitzengefühl diese Feinheiten heraus und stellt die Musik ganz in den Dienst dessen, was auf der Bühne gerade geschieht. -
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IOCO KRITIK
ULI REHWALD
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannMatthew Toogood has the difficult task of leading the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra through this modern baroque version. He succeeds quite well, often chamber music-like but also with impressive new sounds.
Matthew Toogood hat die schwierige Aufgabe, das Symphonieorchester Wuppertal durch diese moderne Barockversion zu führen. Das gelingt im durchaus gut, oft kammermusikartig aber auch mit eindrucksvollen Neuklängen. -
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NEUE MUSIKZEITUNG
CHRISTOPH BECHER
Photo credit: Jens GrossmannConductor Matthew Toogood reinforces the transparent sound through careful dynamics.
Dirigent Matthew Toogood verstärkt durch sorgsame Dynamik das transparente Klangbild.
Forget the footy: Yarra Park plays host to a new weekend wonderland
Matthew Toogood conducting Australian premiere of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Will Todd | Cruden Farm, February 20th 2022. Image credit: Sarah Clarke
By Nick Miller
March 2, 2022 — 2.03pm
Opera has a reputation as a hidebound, conservative artform. But in the recent experience of ex-pat Australian conductor Matthew Toogood, it’s been flexible and revolutionary.
In 2020, when the first coronavirus wave swept through Europe, closing opera houses across Toogood’s stomping grounds in Berlin and at the Konzert Theatre Bern in Switzerland, he and his colleagues made infectivity the mother of invention.
Conductor Matthew Toogood (left) rehearses Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Angelique Tot, Daniel Szesiong Todd and and Jessica Mills.
Bern dug into the repertoire of “chamber opera” (Toogood’s time at Shoestring Opera in Melbourne came in useful), they rehearsed with a social-distancing grid painted on the floor, they programmed avant garde pieces with small casts and redirected scenes to give performers reasons to avoid singing in each other’s faces.
“It’s a creative industry — if we can’t be creative, who can be?” Toogood said at the time. There were advantages over pre-pandemic years: “even when the theatre is full, you don’t hear anyone cough”.
A year and a half later, he’s back in Melbourne to direct another innovation: the Australian Contemporary Opera Company’s outdoor production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, originally commissioned for London’s Opera Holland Park, coming this weekend to the park outside the MCG.
It fits perfectly between Toogood’s gigs in Europe – he’s left Bern and gone back to freelancing, based out of Berlin. Fellow Aussie expat Barrie Kosky is artistic director of the Komische Oper there. In April, Toogood will conduct Kosky’s staging of Orpheus, with an orchestration of the 400-year-old Offenbach score by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin.
Opera is heavily subsidised in Germany and a lively, central feature of the cultural calendar. But, says Toogood, it has faced a major challenge.
“The German system has relied, for a very long time, on [the fact that] if someone gets sick, then with three hours’ notice, you could call up eight singers from two hours away who have the part ... there is this pool of singers,” he says. “But once the travel restrictions come into place, and sickness, it has made that pool much drier.”
Also, German opera tends towards more unusual, conceptual direction, “it’s not as easy as ‘the score says you move over there and shake their hand’; it’s like, ‘no, you should be dancing with a monkey’.
“The most shocking thing in a German house would be to have a traditional, as-it-was-written production. I think they would flip, it would be so strange. There is this idea of pushing what art can be. And a bit of attitude that directors have to put their stamp on it – ‘well, Mozart may have meant this but I know better’.”
As a result of these factors, says Toogood, “this idea of a salaried ensemble, which has gradually shrunk over the last decade, I feel there may be some importance of rejuvenating that”.
He wonders if Australia is the same: “why risk flying someone over from America who might get sick?”
“There has always been talent in Australia, that has often been overlooked. An unknown coming from Estonia that no-one has heard of before who is marketed to be the next big thing and what a privilege ... there are people that go [to see an opera] because of local singers, and you see that too in Germany.”
He says Alice appealed to him because it’s an outdoor picnic opera, which seemed both fresh and practical given the unpredictability of the pandemic. He loved the eclectic musical styles, and the show’s absurd, fairytale quality.
“I immediately realised why it was so popular in Holland Park,” he says.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is in Yarra Park March 6 and 13, and Mount Macedon March 12. See acoco.org.au for details.
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Daniel Szesiong Todd as Queen of Heart in Australian premiere of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Will Todd. Image credit: Sarah Clarke
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Australian Contemporary Opera Co.)
By Paul Selar
Reviewed on 20 February, 2022
Grace Gallur as Alice and Jerzy Kozlowski as Caterpillar in Australian premiere of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Image credit: Sarah Clarke
Artistic Director Linda Thompson has dreamed of presenting this 75-minute work – and you can see why. Opening on Sunday at the divinely picturesque Cruden Farm in Langwarrin, the large audience picnicking on one of its sloping lawns adjacent to a lake were swept well away from a world of lingering insecurity and into one not without grave troubles of its own but where things work out joyfully in the end.
Opening with a short overture, Todd’s music is a churning pastiche of jazz and blues sounds with a touch of Latin beat and light Sondheim-esque flourishes. The results are warmly cohesive, cleverly strung together by a quintet of expressive Victorian commentators who drive the pace forward and keep the young ones attentive.
Music Director Matthew Toogood works a treat with his six musicians in keeping the tempi alive and the soundscape supportive of the sung text. Importantly, it feels perfectly in tandem with Gottlieb’s employment of Carroll’s charming wit and thematically bristling plot.
The story places Alice and her family outside a pet shop in the bland northern English town of Grimethorpe on a cold and rainy day. While her family is distracted, Alice meets the talking White Rabbit, sets him free and follows him down a hole where, having time-travelled back to a Victorian era wonderland, “the point of the whole affair is that everyone is mad”, as the Cheshire Cat extols.
Amongst all the nonsense, Alice learns much along the way as she is introduced to many familiar characters, including the authoritarian Queen of Hearts who has subsequently enslaved the strangers Alice had met to work at her factory. Gathering the determination to free them and unseat the Queen’s harsh rule, Alice brings rationality and the struggle to survive in an adult world to the table as she restores order to Wonderland.
ACOCo. is accustomed to working with little and punching above its weight. Here, the experience shows, Thompson juggling the unique demands of open-air performance to deliver an expertly focused theatrical panorama, and filling the roles with well-matched seasoned and developing talent.
Soprano Grace Gallur is a delightfully inquisitive, cheerful and sweetly sung Alice, leading a strong ensemble of identity-large and colourfully animated characters no child could doze off in front of.
Resonant, hollowed oak baritone Christopher Tonkin hops into the story adorably as White Rabbit. Soprano Caitlin Toohey supplies dizzying operatic oomph as both the human billboarded Bottle and the Duchess pining for her Mad Hatter, who Heather Fletcher makes a comically bossy host at the memorably wacky tea party scene (wine tasting, really) and who also doubles as Alice’s stern-looking Mum. Jerzy Kozlowski sinks entertainingly low down the bass scales channelling the likes of Ol’ Man River as the hookah-smoking Caterpillar and Daniel Szesiong Todd is a tornado of tempestuous tenor splendour and energy as the threatening Queen of Hearts, after first presenting as Alice’s befuddled looking Dad.
Unforgettable too are Alexandra Amerides’ glowing and sneering Cheshire Cat, Leah Phillips’ cute and sleepy Dormouse and Michael Lampard’s March Hare and White Knight. Sandra Liu waves the teacher’s pointer demonstrably as Humpty Dumpty giving Jessica Mills and Angelique Tot’s ardently voiced and unruly Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum a preposterous lesson. And Ellen Leather, Genevieve Droppert, Callum Andreas, Mitchell Sanders and Bailey Montgomerie ham it up superbly and sing with great gusto as the five guiding Victorians.
Leslie Travers’ original designs (adapted by Madeline Nibali) are simple and effective. Relying mainly on bold imagery mounted on two by three metre frames to convey the context, the set is easily manoeuvred and provides enough hidden areas for the cast to disappear behind when not performing.
Some of the cast weave through and interact with the audience as they make their entrances or exits from beyond, a format that will suit the practicalities of performing in various beautiful settings to come, including the Alowyn Gardens, Yarra Valley, Yarra Park MCG precinct and the heritage listed rural property of Bolobek, Mount Macedon.
It is true, “The world is bursting with a wonderland”, as the ensemble sings to the audience, soaring high with a celebratory finale. And, like Alice, they seemingly invite us never to give up on the intrigue that comes from exploring, learning and making sense of it.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland runs at various venues until 13 March. Information on the Australian Contemporary Opera Co. website.