The line up for the Toronto Summer Music Festival for this year, which runs July 11th to August 3rd, was unveiled last night by artistic director Jonathan Crow at the Arts and Letters Club. The full details are here. It’s impressive with high quality and lots of diversity. so, just some personal comments and thoughts on the things I’ll be planning to see. The art song fellow this year is Tony Dean-Griffey. He’ll be working with Stephen Philcox on the Art of Song Academy programme. Like last year the Academy reGENERATION concerts will feature both chamber and vocal music and run on the three Saturdays; July 13th, 20th and 27th. Dean-Griffey will give a recital with Warren Jones on July 16th at 7.30pm in Walter Hall.
There are five Koerner Hall concerts. Opening night, July 11th, highlights the “Beyond Borders” theme of this year’s programme with a variety of works for assorted combinations of voice, chamber orchestra, string quartet, violin and piano including Adrienne Pieczonka singing the Strauss Vier letzte Lieder in a chamber arrangement by John Greer. On the 17th the Dover Quartet present a Britten and Dvorák programme. On the 25th, the Art of Time Ensemble have an eclectic looking show called From Franz Schubert to Freddie Mercury. Not quite sure what to expect there! The 30th sees Angela Hewitt performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. and finally on August 1st there’s a chance to see Jonathan Crow performing Mozart’s “Turkish” concerto before Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (in the Schoenberg/Riehn arrangement) with Mario Bahg and Rihab Chaieb. Gemma New conducts.
There are lots of ways of presenting opera short of a fully staged/costumed performance with an orchestra. In Toronto I’d say “concert” or “semi-staged” performances are probably at least as common as the full Monty; partly for reasons of cost and partly because there aren’t that many venues with a pit and a fly loft. It’s generally pretty clear what “concert” performance means; concert wear and music stands, but what does the average punter expect when they see the words “semi-staged”? I really don’t know what to expect. Surtitles? Costumes? Props? Blocking? Orchestra, piano or something in between? I’ve probably seen all possible combinations of the above described as “semi-staged” and I don’t think I detect any pattern in what works and what doesn’t. Anyway Domoney Artists have a semi-staged version of Rossini’s Le comte Ory coming up on Saturday so I took the opportunity to ask director François Racine about his approach, which turned out to be not quite like any approach I’d come across before.
operaramblings 