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About operaramblings

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

August

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

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.

1.recognition

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La Wally

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

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”.

applerieger

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Music Garden

Rebecca Cuddy-p-500Today at 4pm in The Music Garden (Harbourfront) there’s a free concert of music by Métis composers performed by Rebecca Cuddy and the Wood and Wire Quartet.  Here’s the full program:

N. Weisensel, Three Songs from Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North, book and text by SM Steele

“The Mending of Violence Song”
“Beneath the Endless Azure Sky”
“You Come and Go”

T. Patrick Carrabré, Métis Songs (2022)

Chanson de la Gornouillèr (from a song by Pierre Falcon)

My People Will Sleep… (story chosen by the soloist)

Since When (poem by Gregory Scofield)

I. Cusson, Five Songs on Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2017) (new arrangement for voice and string quartet)

Letter to Sir John A. MacDonald
The Red & White
Helen Betty Osborne
Half-Human/Half Devil (Halfbreed) Muse
The Devil’s Language

Sorry for the short notice but I only just heard about it.

Inspirations

Toronto Summer Music opened on Thursday night at Koerner Hall with a concert called Inspirations featuring chamber and vocal music drawn from folk influences.  It began with Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folk Style Op. 102 for piano and cello played by Rachael Kerr and Matthew Zalkind.  The folk roots are pretty clear here and since the pieces were written with amateur performance in mind those roots aren’t over elaborated and the result is satisfying.  Not that they got an amateurish performance.  Quite the opposite.

TSM - Opening Night - 7.7.2022 - Photo Caroline Barbier de Reulle

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A Cup of Sins

Parisa Sabet — A Cup Of Sins (cover)A Cup of Sins is a new CD release of works by Iranian-Canadian composer Parisa Sabet.  If there’s a unifying theme it’s religious/cultural persecution in Iran and there’s a strong Bahai influence.  The six pieces are scored for various combinations of voice, piano and small ensemble and add up to about an hour of very rewarding music.

The first piece, Shurangiz, is a riff on music for the tar (a kind of Iranian lute) and it’s scored for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello.  It’s an interesting combination of traditional Iranian influences with a nod to Western minimalism.  It’s quite meditative in mood. Continue reading