Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

Toronto based lover of opera, art song, related music and all forms of theatre.

Nordic Voices and Marion Newman

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The Gryphon Trio pulled out of Wednesday night’s Toronto Summer Music concert for, one supposes, the usual reason.  This forced a reorganisation of the concert.  Elliot Britton’s new piece was cut and instead we got an extended set from the Nordic Voices as the first part of the concert.  Actually the first piece was for a very extended Nordic Voices.  Andrew Balfour’s Omaa Bindig supplemented the vocal sextet with Marion Newman and Jamie Parker (piano) plus a number of string players and voices lined up down the sides of Walter Hall.  It’s one of those soundscape works that envelops you in a variety of sounds and techniques.  I wish I could find the text but I can’t (surtitles used last night as they have been all through TSM… yay!)

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Inspirations

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Last night’s Toronto Summer Music concert at Koerner Hall featured two works played by the TSM Festival Orchestra conducted by Nicolas Ellis .  The first was Keiko Devaux’ Arras.  It’s a sort of tone poem for chamber orchestra.  The base material is drawn from Keiko’s family’s musical and other heritage; agriculture, weaving, plainsong, Buddhist chant, chansons, Japanese-American pop and so on.  Samples are rewoven, looped, distorted etc and mixed to form a “tapestry” (hence the title).  The effect is quite hypnotic and rather soothing though there’s not much to get a “handle” on, which may be the point.

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The Americas

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Last night’s Toronto Summer Music offering in Walter Hall was American themed in the broadest sense.  The New Orford Quartet kicked things off with three pieces for string quartet.  The first was Piazzolla’s Tango Ballet in Bragato’s arrangement for string quartet.  It’s kind of tango/jazz fusion and great fun.  Jessie Montgomery’s Strum is a sort of homage to the southern American tradition of a different kind of string instrument.  Lots of complex pizzicato and other effects.  Carmen Braden’s Raven Conspiracy is a three movement work for spoken voice and quartet dealing with both the mythical and biological raven.  It’s playful and extremely virtuosic.  I was struck by the fact that the New Orfords are not just a very fine ensemble but a very flexible one.  Nothing seems to faze them!

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Pierrot on film

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Last month I posted about a Pierrot themed concert including Danika Lorèn singing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Happenstancers.  Now they have released films of five of the songs studio recordings – not from the concert).  They are very artsy black and white movies with the texts included and I like them a lot.  They can be found on the Happenstancers Youtube channel as five separate films or as one continuous movie.

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August

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As usual it’s pretty quiet.  Here’s a few thlaurenonthewallings I am aware of.

July 31st – Opera Revue @ Castro’s Lounge, 3:00pm-6:00pm. PWYC

Summer Opera Lyric Theatre has a short season at the Alumnae Theatre on Berkeley Street.  There are three shows: (at 8pm unless otherwise specified)

  • Menotti’s The Consul – July 29th, August 3rd (2pm), 4th and 6th.
  • Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel – July 30th, August 2nd, 6th (2pm) and 7th (2pm)
  • Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – July 30th (2pm) and  31st (2pm), August 3rd and 8th.

August 4th to 12th in the atrium at the Royal Conservatory it’s Tapestry’s production of Brian Current’s Gould’s Wall. As of time of writing all performances are sold out.

And a bit further out Iain Scott is organising a tour to Dresden in March to see the Decker/Thielemann Ring.  Details are on his website.  Giving advance notice because apparently numbers for this need to be confirmed by August 22nd.

The Passenger revisited

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Something over three years ago I wrote a review of the video of the 2010 Bregenz Festival production of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger. There’s now been a second fully staged production, at Graz, recorded in 2021 (without an audience i think but otherwise no obvious COVID concessions). The Bregenz review contains a whole lot of information on the performance history of the piece as well as a plot summary so I’ll not repeat that. Having a quick look at it before reading on will likely make the rest of this post more comprehensible.

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La Wally

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Catalani’s La Wally is not much performed outside Italy so I was interested to get my hands on a recording made at the Theater an der Wien in 2021.  It’s about what one might expect from an Italian opera of the 1890s; an everyday story of country folk plus murder.

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Appl and Rieger

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Baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist Wolfram Rieger gave us Die schöne Müllerin with a twist at Walter Hall last night.  The twist was a companion/introductory piece by David Lang called flower, forget me based on one of the Müller poems that Schubert didn’t set with fragments of other flower related Schubert song texts.  If death is a major theme in the main cycle it’s an obsession in the new piece!  It’s also very low for a baritone with some really difficult phrasing.  One had to admire Appl’s skill in navigating its lugubrious depths but there was an almost tangible sense of relief in the audience when the duo launched into the sunnier and more familiar territory of “Das Wandern”.

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