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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cyclops is the only satyr play by Euripides to come down to us though I guess whether it’s “complete” is a bit of an open question. A satyr play was a kind of weird hybrid of comedy and tragedy that closed out the Festival of Dionysos after the tragedies had been performed. Unlike most Athenian comedy it was usually based on mythological source material; in this case Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops from the Odyssey. It would have featured principals and a chorus of satyrs; half man, half goat with enormous erect phalluses.
Thursday’s RBA concert featured members of the Ensemble Studio singing German Lieder. First up were tenor Angelo Moretti and pianist Kimly Wang with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. Although this is probably the first true “song cycle” in German I feel it doesn’t get done nearly as often as the better known Schubert and Schumann cycles and it’s really pretty interesting. I think it was also my first time hearing Angelo sing in German and he’s really very good. This was a well articulated, rather beautifully sung set with equally skilled accompaniment. Continue reading
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