Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

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

Tapestry is back with a bang

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Tapestry Opera has announced its first full season since leaving the Distillery District and it looks like “back to the future”.  Most of the usual (much missed) stuff is there.  So here’s the line up:

  • October 16th-19th – Tapestry Briefs: Under Where? – Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre.  Briefs is back with a new line up of composers and librettists including, I’m delighted to say, the Gray sisters.  Basically this is the performance end of the LibLab where we get to see the best of what the workshops produced.  Always worth seeing.
  • January 16th and 17th – LOL: Laughing Out Lonely – Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre.  This is a solo opera by the Danish company OPE-N.  Created by Matilde Böcher and Asger Kudahl and starring Morten Grove Frandsen inhabiting multiple on-line personas, it explores the darker side of social media.
  • March 26th – 29th – Ana Sokolović’s Love Songs – Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre.  Soprano Xin Wang takes us on a muklti-lingual journey through love and loss in a version of the Sokolovic work adapted for the stage by Michael Hidetoshi Mori.
  • June 16th – 21st – Super Sekret Opera – Bluma Appel Theatre.  This yet to be announced opera will be fully staged with orchestra and chorus.  All I can tell you is that is “the creation of a Canadian playwright you already admire and a composer the New York Times has hailed as one of the most important voices of our time”.

Welcome back Tapestry!

The Welkin is compelling theatre that transcends time and place

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Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin is a rarity.  It’s a serious play with an overwhelmingly female ensemble cast that looks at issues of class, gender, power and authority almost entirely through a female lens.  It’s hard hitting, sometimes violent and often shocking which makes for compelling theatre.  It opened on Thursday evening in the Baillie Theatre at Soulpepper in a co-pro by Soulpepper, Crow’s and the Howland Company, directed by Weyni Mengesha.

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Interesting arrangements of Dowland And Purcell

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Songs of Passion is a new recording from mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre with the Jupiter Vocal and Instrumental Ensemble and their director and lutenist Thomas Dunford.  It’s ninety minutes of music by John Dowland and Henry Purcell arranged for various combinations of voices plus the instruments; violins, viola, double bass, viola da gamba, recorders, lute, harpsichord and organ.  They are interesting and varied arrangements and suit the range of emotions of the music well. Continue reading →

Across the Channel

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On Friday evening Toronto’s Diapente Renaissance Quintet [1] combined with Montreal based medieval music ensemble Comtessa [2] to create an intriguing programme at St. Thomas’ Anglican.  The concert was titled Across the Channel : English and French Music of the Hundred Years War; which was more or less accurate!  The works; vocal and instrumental, actually spanned from the 13th century to the latter half of the 15th; so a rather longer span than the war, but the “English and French” bit was true enough.  Unlike the war, Scots and Gascons were notably absent!

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Strangers in the house

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Every few weeks Second City hosts a couple of sketch comedy acts for two nights in their Theatre 73.  Last night and tonight it’s Toronto troupe Potato, Potato and Montreal based Small Friend Tall Friend.  Details on this are going to be a bit sparse as the house programme contained almost no useful information and the two groups web presence seems to be limited to Instagram (Kids these days!).

Anyway it was fun in a Fringe kind of way (though way more comfortable than most Fringe venues).  I really rather like Potato, Potato’s slanted look at life in Toronto; the housing crisis (room mate drops dead when forced to flatshare with a cat), Ontario Place (apparently gifted to Doug’s favourite German metal band), Doug again (this time shooting a cyclist) sand Olivia Chow (crashing everybody’s parties).  Daft of course, but nicely paced and energetic.  I’d go see them again. Continue reading →

Chamber music with a twist

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There are a couple of concerts at the end of September that I didn’t hear about in time to include in my September listings post.  The concerts are being given by the Happenstancers and Slow Rise Music who each represent some of the interesting and different approaches that Toronto’s younger musicians are taking to presenting chamber music.

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