Thursday’s noon hour in the concert was a really great idea; combine the COC Ensemble Studio with the COC Orchestra for an all Mozart concert. Mozart’s Symphony No.35 in D major (Hafner) was split into into its four movements with pairs of arias inserted between the movements to create what Johannes Debus, conducting, described as an opéra imaginaire. It worked really well.
UoT Opera’s annual Student Composer Collective production was presented on Sunday afternoon at CanStage Berkeley Street. This year Michael Patrick Albano’s libretto took three stories from antiquity and presented each twice; essentially in the original and then with a modern twist. The three stories were Antigone, Medea and Helen and five composers were involved in creating the music. Sandra Horst conducted with a seven piece ensemble on stage to one side.
On Wednesday I sat down with Daniela Candillari at the COC’s office for a chat about her approach to opera, conducting and so on. Daniela is in Toronto to conduct the upcoming revival of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the COC. It’s her first Barber and something of a change of pace for someone who has conducted mainly contemporary opera including world premieres at Opera Philadelphia (for example, Jeanine Tessori’s Grounded and Rene Orth’s 10 Days in a Madhouse) and Opera Theatre of St. Louis where she is Music Director (Ricky Ian Gordon’s This House, among others). Continue reading
Canadian Stage opened a production of Amy Herzog’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Bluma Appel Theatre on Wednesday evening. It’s directed by Brendan Healey and stars Hailey Gillis and Gray Powell as Nora and Thorvald. It runs two hours without a break and it’s mesmerizing from start to finish. Direction, acting and designs are all of the highest quality and Gillis gives one of the best performances I have ever experienced.
This year’s New Voices concert from Soundstreams, curated by Haotian Yu, played at Hugh’s Room on Monday evening. It set out to explore some of the issues around human migration through three works by diasporic Canadian composers. It also explored the use of technology in the creation and performance of musical works. Sio pretty ambitious.
Hans Zender’s 1993 “composed interpretation” of Schubert’s Winterreise is really interesting. It’s scored for tenor and a twenty-five piece ensemble including accordion, guitar, loads of percussion and a wind machine. It’s also over eighty minutes long with the additional material being mainly intros and outros. A new recording by Allan Clayton with the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Conlon has just been released. It’s fascinating.
I’m just going to pick up on a few of the tracks to try and give a flavour of what’s going on. It all starts with “Gute Nacht”. Here the singing doesn’t start until almost the four minute mark after an intro including a lot of extended technique for the strings. To begin with, the singing is extremely beautiful and few singers do “beautiful” better than Clayton, then around the six minute mark it goes wild with accordion coming in and Clayton “uglifying” his voice for a minute or so before a more conventional ending. Continue reading
Laughing Out Lonely is a one singer show produced by the Danish group OPE-N. It was presented by Tapestry Opera at Ada Slaight Hall this Friday and Saturday. It’s an interesting and unusual show which has toured extensively in Denmark and Iceland and will be seen this year in Sweden, Edinburgh, Quebec and, Trump cretinism permitting, the USA.
Regular readers will be familiar with the Happenstancers. They are a shifting group of young musicians convened by Brad Cherwin who have been presenting innovative chamber music concerts in an assortment of venues for a few years now. Last year Brad was selected to curate a concert for Soundstreams at the Jane Mallett Theatre which was very like a Happenstancers concert in many ways with the advantage of exposing the approach to a wider audience. On Friday night they were back under their own flag at Temerty Theatre as part of the 21C festival. Which is a long winded way of saying this is a very happening and innovative group who are emerging as a significant player in the Toronto chamber music scene.
Friday’s concert, as you would expect, consisted mostly of 21st century music but in line withe theme of “exploring the space between two people” and in typical Happenstancers’ style there was music from the Renaissace plus Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The ensemble consisted of sopranos Danika Lorèn and Reilly Nelson, Julia Mirzoev, Russell iceberg and Christopher Whitley on violin, Hezekkiah Leung and Hee-See Yoon on viola, Peter Eom on cello and Brad Cherwin on clarinets with constantly changing combos across the evening. Continue reading
Make Banana Cry is a dance work by Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson currently being presented by Toronto Dance Theatre at Buddies in Bad Times. It’s an exploration of Asian stereotypes seen through both Asian and non Asian lenses. Six dancers process through the audience which is arranged so that the dancers’ path is a U shape and nobody is more than two rows away from the action. At the top of the U they add or subtract clothing and pick up props so each “procession” is a bit different. The sound track is eclectic combining, inter alia, K-pop and J-pop with Western pseudo orientalism. Inevitably Un bel di and extracts from Miss Saigon make brief appearances.
So my third Holocaust Remembrance concert was Singing Through the Darkness which played at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Wednesday night. Unlike the previous two concerts which focussed largely on music in the classical tradition with a bit of folk thrown in this time it was more jazz/musical theatre.
The programme was a very varied mix of music and poetry composed in camps and ghettoes, folk songs remembered from a fractured past, partisan songs and even a bit of Kurt Weill.; The arrangements were for various combinations of Aviva Chernick, Lenka Lichtenberg, Theresa Tova and Fern Lindzon on vocals with Fern on the piano (and melodica) and, on occasion, Lenka on guitar. There was even a cameo by Judith Lander. Ori Dagan mceed. Continue reading
operaramblings 