Tuesday was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the COC programmed Innu soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais, with pianist Louise Pelletier, for the lunchtime concert series. They began very appropriately with Ian Cusson’s Le Récital des Anges; settings of two elegiac poems by Émile Nelligan about death and childhood. They are very beautiful and deeply sad songs that seemed just right for the occasion.
Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play opened at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre on Wednesday night. The TL:DR version of this review is that it’s raunchy, extremely funny and rather disturbing. The more considered version contains spoilers so you might want to stop here if you are planning to see it soon.
Confluence Concerts’ first show of the season was curated by Patricia O’Callaghan and aimed to explore the Divine in music from many angles. It played at Heliconian Hall on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Of all the groups I’ve seen explore the boundaries of “classical music” in Toronto, none goes further than Slow Rise Music and this was especially true of their concert Collide-o-Scope which played at the Tranzac on Saturday and Sunday.
Amy Lane’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the COC is eye catching and enjoyable but doesn’t offer the same level of insight as her Faust last season. My full review is posted at bachtrack,com.
Photo: Michael Cooper
The Happenstancers latest gig; Broken, played on Friday evening at Redeemer Lutheran. Getting back to their core mission, this concert explored the relationships between baroque music and contemporary repertoire and the plusses and minusses of combining music, instruments and techniques from both. So, interspersed between sonatas by Johann Rosenmüller; originally scored for strings and continuo but played here by various combinations of oboe/cor anglais, regular and bass clarinet, strings and accordion, we got contemporary pieces.
Château de Versailles Spectacles have produced a really classy period instruments recording of Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia with a bonus of Blow’s Welcome Every Guest. The band s La Poème Harmonique under the direction of their founder Vincent Dumestre. It’s a very authentic period sound and the small chorus is precise and sings in excellent English.
The Blow piece is short but but interesting and it gets a sprightly and almost jazzy reading. Both baritone Tomáš Král and teHugo Hymas are excellent and have perfect English, “The sacred Nine” is particularly enjoyable.
The Green Line takes two story lines set in Beirut a generation apart and weaves them into a fascinating, sometimes mesmerizing, poetic and sad story about two families torn apart by civil war. It’s written by Makram Ayache and translated by Hiba Sleiman. It opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Factory Theatre and In Arms theatre Company directed by the author.
Tuesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured soprano Teresa Tucci and baritone James Coole-Stevenson; both Rebanks fellows at the Conservatory, and pianist Vlad Soloviev. It was a carefully curated concert with a thematic line and featured far more duets than one usually gets in such a show.
Colonial Circus; currently playing at Aki Studio, is a hilarious and intermittently disturbing sideways look at colonialism. It’s a clown show performed by Two2Mango; Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma. So, we have two people of Indian origin in slightly bizarre white-face playing both “native” characters; a priest and his disciple, and representatives of the Raj; a British lady and her manservant.
operaramblings 