Flipside Opera’s intimate Saturday night program featuring works by Wagner and Strauss was the perfect hack for the mid-winter February blues.

Put on and performed by Flipside Opera’s artistic directors Judith Oatway and Dawn Bruch, the heavily weighted program, appropriately dubbed Heavyweights, indulged in the lush and chilling song cycles of two of the most intimidating vocal composers of late Romanticism. Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Strauss’s Last Four Songs are not for the faint-hearted sopranos, or anyone just starting their career as a vocalist. Thankfully Oatway and Bruch are neither of these things. The pair are dedicated to creating up close and personal recital experiences, as is the motto for Flipside Opera - a non-profit Manitoban opera company that aims to make opera accessible to modern audiences while still pushing creative boundaries.

Saturday night’s program worked around the theme of longing. In his opening comments, Flipside Opera director Paul Wiens prompted the audience to reflect on the question “What do you long for?” in an effort to set a contemplative tone for the evening. A focused theme combined with the intimate setting of the U of W’s Eckhardt-Gramatte Hall made it easy to keep oneself engaged in the performances, which ruminated on death and heartache, and conjured images of nature’s wildness.


Wagner’s inspiration for the Wesendonck Lieder, composed in 1857-58) came from the poetry of his lover, Mathilde Wesendonck, who was also the wife of one of his wealthy patrons. Judith Oatway, who holds a Bachelor of Music from Brandon University and a Masters in Literature and Performance from the University of Western Ontario, has a stunningly large mezzo voice. Oatway's mezzo impressively inhabited the demanding proportions of the Lieder would evolve into one of Wagner’s most beloved operas, Tristan und Isolde. The Wesendonck Lieder is a whirlwind of an emotional piece, demanding that the vocalist inhabit the characters of the emotions and not merely suggest them. But Oatway has an assured onstage presence, derived from her vocal power with requires little to no compensation by way of theatrical gestures. Her performance is all voice and big sparkly eyes filled with anticipation, but it is enough. I was most moved by her vocal performance in “Schmerzen” (or “Sorrows”) which, in the higher-lying notes, showed off her effortless vibrato, but also her sensitivity to the vocal technique, which has a tendency of being nauseatingly overused.


The impassioned program continued in the second half of the program with Strauss’s Last Four Songs (Vier Letzte Lieder), scored for soprano and orchestra and written in 1948, a year before the composer’s death. The Last Four Songs are benchmark repertory for a soprano. Strauss threw in all of his musical charisma, filling them with a broad spectrum of emotional colour. Soprano Dawn Bruch, who recieved her Bachelors of Music from McGill University and a Masters of Music from the University of Manitoba, played the character of the muse, courting both love and death. Her voice swelled through full-bodied melodies and submitted to intense pianissimos. “Im Abendrot” (or “At Dusk”) paints a particularly romantic portrait of an elderly couple taking an evening stroll at the end of their lives - “Through joy and need we have walked hand in hand”. “Im Abendrot” captures the most defining characteristic of Strauss’s Last Four Songs, which is its weightless depth or intensity, confronting the subject of our inevitable demise with a benign grace. Canadian conductor Michelle Mourre distinguished herself as a skilled piano accompanist in this final song of Strauss’s cycle. Her piano lines mirrored the colour and anticipation of Bruch’s confident vocals, both an equal and supporting voice in her collaboration.


Bookending the program was a pair of 19th century art-song duets, La chanson du vannier by Cesar Franck and La Nuit by Ernest Chausson. Bruch’s rich soprano voice combined with Oatway’s controlled mezzo was as lovely collaboration of two voices that understand one another. While both of the vocalists boast heavy voices well-suited for German Lieder, the power behind their vocals was proven in the lush, sensitive style required to sing the French duets. In fact, I could have listened to an entire program of the pair collaborating en Francais.

Flipside Opera's next show promises to be another must-see: Bathtubs, Bus Stops and Bridge is opera with a twist, times three! Performances are scheduled for April 30th and May 1st. For more info see http://www.flipsideopera.com/#!bathtubs/c21lm