I just watched the first in a projected series of “aria films” by Carson Gilmore. The first one features Morte col fiero aspetto from Hasse’s Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra. It features the rather impressive British mezzo Rachel Labovitch and it’s rather dark and disturbing. My sort of thing!
In other news the COC has announced a series of “solo spotlights” with some members of the COC orchestra. The first one is on December 15th with Marie Bédard. All the details are here.
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Does creativity follow an arc with age? Is a period of peak creativity followed by inevitable decline or is there, perhaps, a qualitatively different, kind of creativity in the later years of life? Linda and Michael Hutcheon; literary scholar and physician, explored this in their book Four Last Songs, which looked at the later works of Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten. Last night they appeared in the Confluence Concerts Salon series to provide further thoughts with reference to the works of Messiaen and Leonard Cohen. Their thoughts were interwoven with performances of works by Messiaen and Cohen performed by Robert Kortgaard, Patricia O’Callaghan and Larry Beckwith. There’s no need to read my description of the show. It’s freely available on Youtube.
My sense of time, or rather lack of one, has made these “upcoming” posts a bit irregular. So anyway these are things I haven’t mentioned so far.
The usual suspects (check earlier posts for recommendations) are still also mostly producing new content.
Last night Koerner Hall live streamed a concert by the COC orchestra conducted by Johannes Debus with guest soloist Adrienne Pieczonka. It was a mostly Beethoven concert bookended by the Egmont Overture and the Symphony No.2. In between came a set of more Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner sung by Adrienne.
Pietro Antonio Cesti’s 1657 dramma musicale La Dori is a hoot. It seems to prefigure every plot device that will ever be used in opera. A baby sold by bandits who turns out to be a princess. Pirates. A ghost. Mistaken identities. Swapped potions. Men pretending to be women. Women pretending to be men. Love polygons of fiendish complexity. I won’t even attempt to explain the plot because it’s very complex and silly and hardly matters. It took me a half page diagram just to map the relationships between the characters.
My review of Tapestry’s show from the weekend; Lovesongs – A Saxophony is now up on the Opera Canada website.
Photo: Dahlia Katz
The waiting is over. The COC has announced the successor to Alexander Neef and it’s Perryn Leech who currently runs Houston Grand Opera. I think there’s a lot to like in this appointment. Leech is a guy who has done a lot in his career and I like that he comes from a technical background; in lighting as it happens. I would worry that someone from a stage direction background would want to hog that aspect of opera production. After all, it’s happened before at the COC. A conductor background would be redundant given we have an excellent music director. And the last thing we need is a business person with no real passion for opera.
I last saw a live show in a theatre on March 13th. Eight months later I’ve watched a lot of web content as well as continuing to review commercial opera recordings. A month ago I wrote in Opera Canada that “there’s no substitute for live” and I stand by that view. I do think though that there’s an opportunity and a need to rethink how opera and song is produced for webstreaming.
This is a bit of a belated plug for Opera 5 and Musique Trois Femmes’ virtual conference Opera Con. It’s on this Friday/Saturday so it’s too late to catch yesterday’s events live but they are all available on demand. There are more events this afternoon and evening where you can participate in the live text chat. All the sessions are on Opera 5’s Youtube channel. It’s mostly younger artists talking about how to make opera more diverse and accessible with everything from opera for younger audiences to whale song to virtual reality. Worth a look.
Elliot Madore’s recital with Rachel Andrist was supposed to have happened at Mazzoleni all with a limited live audience last weekend but that didn’t happen and the programme was recorded in an empty Koerner Hall and streamed last night. The programme’s first half was all French and the second half English.
operaramblings 