East Village Opera Review

I attended the East Village Opera Company’s Ottawa performance tonight at the Alumni Theatre at Carleton University. Although I am truly ignorant of opera, I felt like I just had to write a review of the performance.

This concert was a bit of an Ottawa homecoming for several members of this band, including the co-founders: Peter Kiesewalter and Tyley Ross. An eleven member ensemble (string quartet, two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and male and female vocalists), their mission is to blend rock with opera. At this point, says the band’s website, the only way to fuse these two forms is to embrace both “the pomposity of rock and the pomposity of opera.” The band sets out to deliver big showstoppers of opera, with a driving rock backing.

This is a fabulous (if not totally original) idea, and it should have been a fabulous performance.

Tyley’s vocal performance was outstanding, and the band’s arrangements were fresh, driving, invigorating, and pleasurably loud. The female vocalist, while not quite a soprano match to Tyley’s effortless high-tenor range, was enjoyably forceful, belting out classics from Carmen and other operas, and singing a couple of duets with Tylee that were rockin. I found that she had a bit of trouble toning things down for the quieter numbers, but hey - this show was not about the quieter numbers!

The string section seemed to have good arrangements, played with vivacity. The lead guitarist and bassist could have been from Spinal Tap - and that’s good in my books. Awesome twiddly screaming guitar solos complemented the driving rock drums and rhythm guitar.

And now it all starts to fall apart. This performance was totally marred by the inept technical staff. This is one band, ladies and gentlemen, that badly badly badly needs to tour with their own sound and lighting technicians.

You may have noticed that I haven’t commented on Kiesewalter’s playing. That’s because it was totally inaudible for the entire evening (except for one 10 second solo). The string section, except during their solos, might as well have been having drinks out back. The female vocalist had a few pitch problems, and in my books that translates to: lousy monitors.

And the lighting technican: damn it, we learned in high school tech club that flashing the lights to the beat of the music looks like… well… high school tech club. It’s the kind of thing you do once, then determine never to do again. This is because lamps are not instant-on instant-off devices; you can’t flash them multiple times a second. When you press the switch there is a delay before you see the light, which means that if you press the switches in time to the music the lights flash NOT in time with the music. This is very distracting to the audience during a rock-infused heavy beat concert. Plus, as you might guess from the phrase “Alumni Theatre at the university” the band was not blessed with thrilling lamps in this venue. Changing the color on the rear cyclorama 4 times a second for 10 minutes looks stupid.

The sound guy murdered the music all night. The biggest travesty, however, occurred during the encore… a brilliant disco arrangement of Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci. I heard this played on the radio in the lead up to the concert and it is unstoppable. (At least I thought it was unstoppable.) The annoying sound technician didn’t bother turning up the rhythm guitar, which has the characteristic disco off-beat. Thus, we heard a kind of lopsided shuffle. The result: an audience that gave an ovation to the first part of the performance stayed seated after their killer number. The fault was certainly not with the musicians folks, shitty sound guy spoils the day.

What I most want to do during these concerts is push the sound guy out of the way and take over. It’s not rocket science, folks, all you need to do is listen and watch. Do you see the piano player’s fingers moving? If so, and you do not hear the piano, something is very wrong. Does the singer sound like he is in a wooden box? If so, better use those tone controls!

Bands should insist on sound guys who are either musicians themselves, or have a demonstrated musical ear. After all, what use is brilliant writing if it’s lost in the wiring?

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› music     2005-11-06 23:41   ...0