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About operaramblings

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

Hoffmann in Hamburg

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The 2021 recording of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann from the Staatsoper Hamburg is fairly straightforward but it’s visually interesting and musically excellent.  I don’t think Daniele Finzi Pascas’ production has a “concept” as such.  It’s still about three imaginary women who make up Hoffmann’s dream woman and he still ultimately rejects even her in favour of Art.  Each of the five acts is given as different and distinctive look and feel though the use of mirrors and aerial doubles is a recurrent theme.  It’s worth noting up front that Olga Peretyatko sings all four ladies.

1.kleinzach

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The nightingale flies from its gilded cage

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nightingale1Florence: The Lady with the Lamp, music by Timothy Sullivan, libretto by Anne Mcpherson, premiered at the Elora Festival in 1992 and n 1995 was the first Canadian work performed by VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert.  Yesterday afternoon they presented it again at the St. Lawrence Centre; staged and with orchestra.

It’s an interesting piece.  Some of it I liked a lot and some not so much.  The orchestral writing is excellent; colourful and atmospheric with some jazz influences.  I quite often found myself drifting off into listening to the orchestra when perhaps I should have paid more attention to the words, especially as there were no surtitles.  The vocal writing is less interesting but it had its moments especially in some of the ensembles.  It’s the old dilemma of whether or not to prioritise the comprehensibility of the words over strictly musical values. Continue reading →

A metatheatrical Tannhäuser

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The more I see of Tobias Kratzer’s work the more impressed I get.  Here we look at his 2019 production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at Bayreuth.  It’s the kind of production that traditionalists get off on hating and there were boos at curtain call though they were absolutely drowned out by a storm of applause and stomping.  Personally, I found it insightful, at times very funny, and deeply, deeply moving.

1.hut

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The Lion Heart

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lionheartThe Lion Heart is a new opera by Corey Arnold and Kyle McDonald.  Their aim, as described in an interview on barczablog, was to create an opera that was more accessible to modern audiences than “most modern opera”.  I’m not sure how much “modern opera” they have actually seen/heard but what they seem to mean by accessible is a heavily scored neo-Romanticism supporting a through sung vocal line with nothing much in the way of an aria or any way for their singers to display their chops but we’ll come back to that. Continue reading →

April shows

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orevueHere’s what’s coming up that I know about in April with some adds for the end of March.

    • 26th March 5pm – 7pm.  Opera Revue at Castro’s PWYC.  Expect a completely Weill performance.
    • 27th March 2.30pm.  Voicebox are doing Timothy Sullivan’s Florence: The Lady with the Lamp in concert at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.  Lauren Pearl sings the title role.

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Amplified Opera’s shows this week

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I am really intrigued by how Amplified Opera’s shows this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art are going to work and so I spoke to both Marion Newman and Topher Mokrzewski about them and what the audience might expect.  Despite several hours on the phone I’m still not sure I know and that’s probably a good thing.  It’s pretty fluid and experimental and I don’t think we’ll know exactly what we are getting until we get it.  I do know that we can expect music and talk and discussion with the audience around the themes being explored in each half of the double header.

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Harnoncourt 3 – Così fan tutte

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Well it took me a while to get hold of a copy of the third of the Harnoncourt Mozart/da Ponte operas.  It is, of course, Così fan tutte and like the previous two operas is semi-staged at the Theater an der Wien.  Also like the previous two there’s about an hour documentary which in this case consists almost entirely of rehearsal footage.  It’s well worth watching though there is some obvious overlap with the previous two and most of what I would say about it I already did in my review of Le nozze di Figaro which I recommend reading along with this one.

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Lots of Beckwith

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John Beckwith turned 95 a little while ago and there’s some good celebratory material up on Youtube.  Confluence Concerts are rereleasing their three concerts from last year.  The first one is here.  Plus, Canadian Art Song project have a really lovely film of Krisztinaa Szabó and Steven Philcox performing The Four Short Songs to texts by Kandinsky.  The location filming is the work of Jenn Nicholls and Patrick Hagerty and it’s gorgeous.  The performance is rather good too.

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