The line up for 21C for 2026 has been announced. This is always one of the city’s best programmes of contemporary and related music. Details… Continue reading
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Author Archives: operaramblings
A couple more interesting things this week
I’ve only just found out about a couple of events this week that may be of interest.
Soulpepper has a free showing of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 masterpiece The Seventh Seal. It’s on Wednesday, November 12th at 7pm and it’s free. If you have seen The Comeuppance and the movie you’ll get the connection! If you haven’t seen the movie I would say it’s one of the most important post war films. It has a fantastic performance by Max von Sydow as a world weary crusader and an equally fine one by Bengt Kerot as Death. The cinematography, by Gunnar Fischer is exceptional. No gimmicks. No special effects. Just a very beautiful and moving film.
Then on Sunday November 16th at 7.30pm at Arrayspace Lindsay McIntyre is performing and producing Morton Feldman’s Three Voices in which the live singer works with two pre-recorded vocal tracks. It’s a most interesting hour long piece. I recently reviewed a recording of it by Dory Hayley for La Scena Musicale. Tickets for that are “at the door” or here.
The Comeuppance comes up a bit short
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ The Comeuppance is playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Frank Cox-O’Connell. It’s an enormously ambitious play. It takes the relatively banal setting of a pre-party for a high school 20th reunion and uses it to explore a wide range of issues concerning memory, personal growth (or not), what we keep and what we leave behind and, ultimately, our relationship with Death.
GGS double bill
This year’s fall opera offering from the Glenn Gould School was a double bill of short chamber operas. It played at Mazzoleni Hall on Friday and Saturday evenings with Liza Balkan directing and Jennifer Tung conducting.
Dissonant Species isn’t on my wavelength
Theatre Gargantua’s Dissonant Species opened at Factory Theatre on Friday night. It’s written by Heather Marie Annis and Michael Gordon Spence and directed by Jacquie P.A Thomas. It’s a multi-disciplinary exploration of the idea that “everything is sound” and it also explores other ideas about waves; vibration, the notion that two people can be (metaphorically) on different wavelengths and it flirts with the idea that everything is “vibration” which is sort of true in a QFT way.
Telling Tales
This year’s Wirth Vocal Prize winner, Kate Fogg, gave the now customary recital in the RBA on Thursday accompanied by Nate Ben-Horin. The recital was titled Telling Tales and covered soprano rep across art song, musical theatre and opera (just); all in English. Since the opera and art song pieces were by Ricky Ian Gordon, Ned Rorem and Stephen Sondhem as opposed to say brett Dean or George Benjamin it all had pretty much a musical theatre feel; so in many ways not really my music.
Composers who fled the Nazis
Äneas Humm and Renata Rohlfing’s new album Sehnsucht features songs from four composers whose careers were derailed by Nazi persecution of the Jews. Three of them; Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Eric Zeisl were Viennese composers who left for the United States though none of them managed to make the kind of success (financially at least) that Korngold and Weill achieved, though Schoenberg’s reputation was sufficiently established that he survived the transition pretty much intact. The fourth composer is Henriette Bosmans who was half Jewish and survived the war in Amsterdam though unable to perform after 1942. The songs by the Germans are settings of German texts. Bosmans’ songs are in French. Continue reading
Julie Boulianne and friends
Last Wednesday’s concert in the RBA was a showcase for the collaborative pianists of the McGill-UdeM Piano Vocal Arts programme. Each of the five pianists on show got to accompany mezzo Julie Boulianne for a set of songs. Or put another way, Julie got to perform for an hour with five pianists.
Like Flesh
So another rather interesting chamber opera from Europe has come my way. It’s Like Flesh; music by Sivan Eldar and English language libretto by Cordelia Lynn. It’s 80 minutes long and uses three soloists, a chorus of six and an eight piece instrumental group plus electronics. It’s sort of a modern ecological take on Ovid’s idea of a woman turning into a tree. Here the woman is unhappily married to the Forester who buys into the basic idea that Nature exists to serve humans and is a willing accomplice in environmental degradation. There’s also a female student who is studying the forest and is discovering much that isn’t covered in the classroom. The transformation takes place against a back drop of destructive wild fires and the wanton felling of woodland to make way for concrete. Given the subject matter, the libretto is really quite poetic. Continue reading
The Far Side of the Moon
The Far Side of the Moon opened at Canadian Stage on Saturday evening. It’s a Robert Lepage production; written, designed and directed by him. It’s very Lepage with the strengths and weaknesses one might expect. We will come to that in more detail. It’s a homage to Lepage’s childhood obsession with the US and Soviet space programmes and to the moon in general. It plays out in two parallel narratives; the space programmes from Sputnik 1 to the Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975 and the tale of two brothers in Quebec City circa late 1990s. The older is an introverted nerd working on a doctoral thesis about popular perceptions of the space programmes and narcissism. The younger brother is a presenter for the Weather Channel and is shallower than the water over Dogger Bank at low spring tide. Their mother has just died and they are clearing out her apartment in an Old People’s Home.
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