My review of Californian composer Mark Abel’s CD 4.4.2 featuring Canadian mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh is now available at La Scena Musicale.
4.4.2
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Ein Traumspiel
My review of the recent CD release of Aribert Reimanns’s first opera Ein Traumspiel is now on-line at La Scene Musicale. The disk also includes his rather unusual Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.
Sankofa: The Soldier’s Tale Retold
My review of the recording of Art of Time Ensemble’s adaptation of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale is now on-line at La Scena Musicale. Sankofa is a very moving reframing of the story to relate the experiences of a young man from the Caribbean trying to join the Canadian Army in WW1.
Canuck Cantatas
Canuck Cantatas is the first live show from Against the Grain Theatre since, I think, 2023. It’s good to see what was once a staple of the Toronto indy scene in action again. This show is three short monodramas. Each features a soprano singer who is also either composer or librettist and all are based around the story of one, Canadian, character. The accompanying ensemble consisted of piano (Spencer Kryzanowski), string trio (Julia Mirzoev, Russell Iceberg, Peter Eom) and bass clarinet (Brad Cherwin). Since the show was at the Redwood everybody was miked and amplified with speakers all around the performance space which was an interesting effect.
I Want to Tell You Everything
Soundstreams’ penultimate concert of the season at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Thursday evening featured “love songs” from a range of (more or less) contemporary Canadian composers under the overall direction of David Fallis.
Ee, it’s grim oop north
Jen Silverman’s The Moors is a sort magic realist comedic parody of the Gothic novel in general and the Brontës in particular. It’s currently playing at The Theatre Centre in a Riot King Art Market production directed by Bryn Kennedy.
Yiddish Glory again
Way back in 2018 I wrote about a CD called Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of WW2 (though I don’t think I wrote an actual review of the CD… I should fix that). Since then various participants in that project including UoT’s Professor Anna Shternshis plus the members of Payadora Tango Ensemble and Likht Ensemble among others have unearthed more lost songs from the ghettoes, labour camps, DP camps and so on. I’ve written about some of it and some of it features on Payadora’s Silent Tears CD. Other songs were released on the Yiddish Glory Youtube channel during COVID.
Pedal to the Metal
On Saturday night I saw a double bill of works, inspired by memories of Hong Kong, for percussion, electronics and live video at That Art Box black box theatre on Dupont. It’s quite a large, very black space and for this show there were video screens on two adjacent walls wit the audience placed diagonally across from the corner between them. There were speakers all around and a drum and some other props in the middle of the space. The performers for both works were Thomas Li on stage acting and percussing withTim Roth and Fish Yu in the control booth doing live video and sound.
What do I have to do to get some disrespect?
The headline is a quote from late in the second half of Zaiba Baig’s double header Kainchee Lagaa + Jhooti: The Begging Brown Bitch Plays which opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy for House of Beida Inc. The plays are loosely linked in that both deal one way or another with queerness and Pakistani-Canadian identity and experience.
White Girls in Moccasins
Yolanda Bonnell’s White Girls in Moccasins, presented by manidoons collective and Native Earth Performing Arts opened at the Aki Studio on Friday night. Co-directed by Bonnell and Carmen Alvis, it’s a play about identity and and recovering roots. The principal character Miskozi, like the playwright, is Indigenous but I don’t think the play is entirely about Indigenous identity. The other two roles are Ziibi, played by a Bermudian Trans Woman of African ancestry and Waabishkizi; played by a second generation Settler woman. So while the focus is on Indigenous identity I think it raises a lot of other questions too.
operaramblings 