The Futures Market is a new on-line opera by Douglas Rodger (librettist) and Njo Kong Kie (composer) featuring Teiya Kasahara, Derek Kwan, Keith Lam and Wesley Hui.  Some readers may remember Njo Kong Kie as the composer of the music for Mr Shi and His Lover a few years ago and probably just about all Toronto opera people will be familiar with the singers.

It’s basically a “cliff-hanger” with fourteen nine minute or so episodes so spoilers would be mean.  All I can say, having watched the first episode, is that is set in a prison and that it looks like organ harvesting is involved.  There’s some excellent singing from Keith and Teiya in that episode and the piano score, played by the composer, is very atmospheric.

It’s filmed concert style (Videography by Blake Hannahson. Sound engineer Brandon Wells) and looks and sounds good.  All the episodes are now up on Youtube.  Here’s the url for episode 1.  The url for the next episode is contained in the page for each episode or you can just subscribe to the channel.

I’m going to return to this when I’ve watched the whole series.