Mezzo-soprano Beste Kalender and pianist Rachel Andrist are performing on line on Tuesday evening (March 24th) at 8.30pm (Toronto time). The recital is titled A Spring Recital: From Venice to Constantinople and will feature music by F. Santoliquido, R. Hahn, G. Faure, H. Berlioz, Komitas and various Turkish composers. Recording will be by Ryan Harper Recordings.
The stream will be posted on Beste’s channel on YouTube at 8.30pm and should be up for a week or so for people in other time zones.
Here’s another chance to hear some “live” music by local artists. Tongue in Cheek Productions are starting a series of webstreamed shows called Arts Anyway in support of artists impacted by the current Covid 19 situation. The first show will go up at 7pm on Sunday evening (tomorrow) with further shows planned to be twice weekly. The initial offering will feature performances by tenor Jaques Arsenault, soprano Jennifer Routhier and pianist Natasha Fransblow as well as interviews and news items. The show will be uploaded to their YouTube channel.
Carlisle Floyd’s Prince of Players was originally written for the Opera Studio in Houston as a chamber work. It was subsequently reworked as a full scale piece and taken up by Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera where it was performed and recorded in 2018. It’s a two act piece with a libretto by the composer that deals with the transition from men playing women on stage to the roles being taken by women for the first time in the reign of Charles II. It’s framed by the final scene of Shakespeare’s Othello. First time around Desdemona is played by noted actor Ned Kynaston to rapturous applause and praise from the king. The rest of the first act is the story of how Charles; influenced by his mistress and aspiring actor Nell Gwynn and the much more talented Meg Hughes who, to complicate matters, is Kynaston’s dresser and secretly in love with him, decides that times must change and women must play women on the stage. The act culminates in a confrontation between the king and Kynaston where the latter accuses the former of destroying his art and livelihood and the theatre with it. The king is unrelenting. This act is tight and well crafted with quite a lot of humour as well as some pathos.
The following just in from Tapestry concerning Saturday night’s livestream of Songbook X.
Although we were heartbroken to cancel, we are thrilled to announce that our headlining artists have agreed to change tack and perform a full recital, streaming for free: Songbook X: Krisztina Szabó and Chris Foley in Livestream Concert – hosted by Michael Hidetoshi Mori, streaming live on our Youtube channel on Saturday, March 21st at 8:00PM.
Krisztina Szabó, mezzo-soprano, will be performing Tapestry selections and other select opera and art song, accompanied by Chris Foley, collaborative pianist, on our fabulous Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano. The performance will be free for all to watch, no matter where in the world.
Let’s see if we can make this the biggest Tapestry gig ever!
Resphigi’s La bella dormente nel bosco (libretto by Gian Bistolfi) is a take on the Charles Perreault fairy story. It was originally written for a puppet theatre and later adapted for human performers. Its heritage shows in it that it’s very much a numbers opera and it’s quite short. The three acts come in at around eighty minutes. Musically it’s a bit of a hodge podge. It’s mostly quite atmospheric and colourful (similar to Resphigi’s better known orchestral works) with elements of parody. One can sort of hear echoes of Debussy, Stravinsky and Strauss. It finishes up with a cakewalk and a Broadway style finale which is decidedly odd.
For Toronto peeps… In case you weren’t aware of it the Toronto Public Library offers free on-line access to Medici TV with its catalogue of opera and concerts. Obviously you need a library card to sign in but the url is https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMEDB0204&R=EDB0204
Tony Palmer’s 2006 documentary about the Salzburg Festival is over three hours long and uncomfortable to watch in the way the best films are. He combines interviews with performance and other documentary footage to extremely good effect to go beyond telling the “Salzburg story ” to explore fundamental questions of the arts and the state and the very purpose of art.
Yesterday I received seven assorted emails about cancellations in Toronto plus news from the Metropolitan Opera. Essentially all the major orchestras and music theatre organisations in Toronto are shuttered until at least the end of the month. Events are also being called off elsewhere so check your location situation. Here’s a quick run down:
More news when I have any…. Stay safe!
Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park opened last night at UoT Opera in a production by Tim Albery. It’s a really interesting show that builds up in “layers” to a very satisfying whole. The Austen novel, of course, is very self consciously a novel. There’s no pretence at “immersion”. The author is both telling the story and commenting on it for the benefit of you, the reader. Librettist Alasdair Middleton both builds on this and does a quite brilliant job of compression to bring in a condensed, and only slightly simplified, version of the story in under two hours.
Hubert Parry’s Judith has been making something of a comeback. A new performing edition by Professor Stephanie Martin was performed at Koerner Hall by the Pax Christi Chorale in May 2015. That seems to have sparked some interest since the piece was transplanted to the Royal Festival Hall in London in April 2019 where rather larger forces presented the piece to generally good reviews. Subsequently the same forces mad a studio recording which has just been released as a hybrid SACD/CD release. If you want to know more googling “Parry Judith” will bring up a small library of articles on the “Judith Project” and how this piece has been unfairly neglected.
operaramblings 