Once in a while it’s good to take a chance on a concert or play that’s outside one’s normal sort of thing. Sometimes that turns out really well. For example, I’m no great fan of musicals but I loved Tiger Bride at Soulpepper. So t was in that spirit that I went to see Council at Walter Hall on Monday evening.
Musically August is pretty quiet in Toronto. Opéra Queens have a PWYC concert; Sisters in Arms, at the Tranzac on the 1st (5-7pm). Confluence Concerts emerging artists programme has a concert called Side-by-Side at Heliconian Hall on the 20th and that’s about it. There’s a bit more happening in the theatre world. Summerworks runs from the 6th to the 16th with 27 works in the programme at various venues but mainly at The Theatre Centre. It’s heavy on dance but there are half a dozen or so one act plays too. CanStage’s Twelfth Night continues in High Park until September 6th.
This year’s CanStage Dream in High Park presentation is Twelfth Night adapted and directed by Gregory Prest. He takes a pretty straightforward approach. He has added a sort of prologue in which Feste speaks of the relationship between Love and Madness (and makes a few jokes about the audience and their picnics). The Love and Madness thing seems to be the central concept as far as there is one. The first two scenes are reversed too. We first meet Viola on the beach before Orsino gets to make his famous “If music be the food of love” speech. And, of course, there are cuts to fit it into the Dream time slot of 90-100 minutes. None of this really makes a whole lot of difference. The show comes across as a well acted, crisply directed, perfectly intelligible comedy and hurrah for that!
It’s not often that one attends a recital that is so stunning that one struggles to find words to describe it but The Golden Age recital given by soprano Erin Morley, tenor Lawrence Brownlee and pianist Malcolm Martineau at a packed Koerner Hall on Thursday evening, as part of Toronto Summer Music, was in that class. Most of the rep was drawn from the Golden Age album released last year with a few change ups. It’s basically all highly virtuosic material in the bel canto style (plus a couple of piano pieces).
The Imagined is a new album of piano music by Alice Ping Yee Ho played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. There are four works. The first is Pictures from an Imagined Exhibitiion which riffs off pictures by Hong Kong ink master Wesley Tongson and Christina Petrowska Quilico herself. There are four movements. “Free Strokes” is kind of minimalist with arpeggios and repeated figures. It sounds weird to say it but it sounds “watery”. “Distant Drums” is similar in some ways but faster and with some much darker passages. “Mystical Mountains” by contrast is slower and darker with a kind of doom-laden quality. Finally “Dancing Colours” is bright and playful with, I think, some modal elements. It’s all quite virtuosic with occasional distinctly “non-western” touches.
This year’s mentors for Toronto Summer Music’s Art of Song programme are mezzo Sasha Cooke and pianist Warren Jones. On Monday evening they teamed up to give an American themed recital in Walter Hall.
My review of William Christie and Les Arts Florissants’ Charpentier double bill that opened TSM 2026 on Thursday evening at Koerner Hall is now available at bachtrack.com.
Photo: Lucky Tang
#bachtrack
The small Northeastern Ontario town of Buttershire is being terrorized by a cheese pervert; a trench coat clad male who flashes women with cheese attached to his dick. The OPP are helpless (with laughter). Can local dairy heiress and top anti-vegan internet celebrity over 40 Priscilla Patton, recently returned from the big city (Sudbury) save the day?
Songs for Moby Dick from Ubuopera is more of a staged song cycle than an opera. There’s one singer/actor; Peter Thompson (who is also the composer), plus Erika Reiman on keyboards. The text is from the Melville novel and it’s used for a dozen or so songs and some short sections of linking narrative that condense the whole (very long!) novel into a concise 55 minutes.
Marla Torgerson’s one woman show Sinner is the story of her upbringing in an all white Evangelical community in Alberta and her subsequent break with that upbringing. It’s a succinct and very funny exposition of what this particular brand of Xians expect of girls; i.e. that they grow up hard working, unquestioningly obedient, slim but not too sexy, “pure”, ready to marry too young to know what they are missing.
operaramblings 