Going the Distance for Lillian Alling

Photo by Tim Matheson

Continuing the John Estacio/John Murrell props and excitement on VO's upcoming new opera, Lillian Alling, the Globe and Mail's Marsha Lederman reports on the Lillian Alling run-through that took place right before the holiday break.

Lillian Alling , the first full-length piece Vancouver Opera has ever commissioned for its main stage, will have its world premiere next fall, but about 50 VO donors, staff and colleagues got a preview earlier this month. The first run-through of the opera, by a dozen singers, followed an intensive two-year workshopping process.

The opera, written by Estacio and Murrell, is based on the real-life story of Lillian Alling, a Russian immigrant who arrived in New York in the 1920s and proceeded to walk across the continent to British Columbia. While some details are known about Alling, who has become a part of B.C. lore (and who was the subject of Amy Bloom's 2007 best-selling novel Away ), what isn't known is why she embarked on this journey. So Murrell, the librettist, and Estacio, the composer, had a lot of holes to fill. They built what they felt was an opera-worthy story around the character, with elements of passion, tragedy and surprise.

To read more on VO's brand new opera in the works, click here.

John and John: Artists At Work

Photo by Tim Matheson

Librettist John Murrell and composer John Estacio were featured in last Thursday's Vancouver Sun's Artists at Work, a series of special features examining the creative processes of artists, artisans and creative technicians!

Murrell and Estacio has been hard at work to bring the magic with last week's 10 day workshop of their brand new opera, Lillian Alling. The Canadian opera was commissioned by Vancouver Opera three years ago.

Expectations at the workshop were exceeded as the strong, well prepared singers ran through the material, allowing the creative team to explore and refine the music and direction. Curently, 97% of the opera's music is confirmed.

Lillian Alling will have its world premiere with Vancouver Opera in October 2010. Mark your calendars!

Postcard from Banff Workshop

It’s chilly here – brisk but sunny. I’m dressed for Vancouver’s summer in shorts but luckily threw my fleece in the suitcase as I was racing out the door to the airport. Banff is so restorative. The rushing Bow River combined with creativity at every turn at The Banff Centre. Today there’s an energy in the dance studio of The Banff Centre. Singers warming up. Actors stretching. Composer John Estacio, librettist John Murrell, director Kelly Robinson and repetiteur Kinza Tyrrell have their heads together over the music that ends Act 1 of Lillian Alling as 12 singers, 5 actors and pianist Rhoda Dullea gather for the staging rehearsal.

The scene opens with Jimmy and Irene, parked in his truck on the side of the road:

JIMMY. They put her in jail? After all she’d been through?
IRENE. It was prison, not jail. Oakalla, near Vancouver.
JIMMY. For what?
IRENE. Vagrancy and an unlicensed firearm.

Irene looks past Jimmy – where a vast field at Oakalla Prison gradually appears: male and female prisoners at hard labour, harvesting, or cleaning up after harvest. Lillian is among them as armed guards patrol.

The opportunity to explore this large chorus scene with the opera program students is unique – wish you could hear all these glorious voices together!

PS. Did you know?
Any history of BC provincial detention centres must include Burnaby’s Oakalla Prison Farm, a full-service facility which opened on September 2, 1912. The first inmate was William Daley, sentenced on July 31, 1912 to serve a year of hard labour for stealing some fountain pens valued at over $10. By April 30, 1913, some 328 prisoners had passed through the jail’s doors. From 1919 until the abolition of the death penalty in 1959, 44 prisoners were executed by hanging on the Oakalla site….Thousands of prisoners passed through the doors of Oakalla – renamed Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Centre in 1970 – before it closed on June 30, 1991.
– from Vancouver Prisons by Stuart Derdeyn

~ Jennifer Lord, Special Projects Manager

Lillian Alling: An Operatic Journey

A little google interactive map I made of Lillian Alling's journey from NYC to Telegraph Creek.



View Lillian Alling - An Operatic Journey in a larger map

I'll keep tweaking it as we go along....

Lillian Alling: Your First Listen

For your listening pleasure, here's a clip from Act 1, Scene 4 of Lillian Alling.

This is Act One, Scene 4 circa 1920's:

We find Lillian Alling in search of a library to find a map of the Dakotas. She comes across a group of boys from Brooklyn singing Polly from Poughkeepsie, when they take notice of Lillian and begin circling around her, catcalling and making other bad-boy noises…



Stay tuned.

More to come...

Workshop #4 Update

A few weeks ago, during the performance run of Salome, we held the fourth workshop – and second music workshop – for our new, commissioned opera, Lillian Alling.

It was an exciting week, as composer John Estacio brought lots of new music to the rehearsal hall. Librettist John Murrell, stage director and dramaturge Kelly Robinson and music dramaturge Les Dala, worked with a group of singers and a pianist all day everyday probing and refining. Every evening John Estacio returned to his rooms and wrote and re-wrote and refined, bringing yet more new music to the rehearsal hall each morning!

It is an intense and energetic and exciting process!

I am a big fan of Estacio’s music. Another time I’ll go into greater detail as to why. For now, let me say that his lush sound and full bodied vocal writing, which will be amply on display throughout Lillian, is punctuated by some very different music written to give us an exact aural picture of place and time. One example is the “Tin Pan Alley-esque” ensemble for a group of Brooklyn boys circa 1920s, singing John’s “Polly from Poughkeepsie,” as they “take notice of Lillian and begin to catcall and make other bad-boy noises as they circle around… (Murrell’s description of the scene).

Another example of Estacio’s aural postcard from another time and place is the music he has written for a raucous barn dance on the Norwegian farm in North Dakota that Lillian visits on her way from New York to British Columbia. During her brief time there she meets young Kristian who – reluctantly – sends her on toward BC to meet her fiancé.

We’ll put a bit of the music from these two scenes on this site for your enjoyment. Check back soon.

~Jim Wright, General Director

Spring workshop cast announced

We are holding the next workshop of Lillian Alling leading up to a private presentation on May 8. Here's our cast:

Lillian – Robyn Driedger-Klassen website

Irene – Lynne McMurtry website

Jimmy/Bobby/Kristian/Charlie – Tom Macleay

Scotty – Ben Covey website

Sergei/Wyman/Sam – Willy Miles-Grenzberg

Drifter/Karl/Bill – Calvin Powell

SM – Theresa Tsang