Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

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

UoT Opera’s Orpheus in the Underworld

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Brittany Cann

French operetta is notoriously difficult to get right.  The genre treacherously combines a kind of humour that doesn’t always translate well in time or language, difficult music to sing and a need to be as “naughty” as the original seemed without being crass.  It’s a huge credit to Michael Patrick Albano and his student cast that they pretty much pulled off all of that last night with their new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.  One could nit pick details (I shall) but overall it was a well paced show with some good singing and acting and it was genuinely funny.  Unsurprisingly the audience lapped it up.  Continue reading →

Music of the Rainbow Nation

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This year’s Soundstreams concert season was supposed to feature a performance by the Nelson Mandela University Choir.  The current student and other social unrest in South Africa led to that tour being cancelled and left Soundstreams with the problem of organising a replacement line up in just four and a half weeks.  I think they should be congratulated for sticking with the South African theme and producing the line up we saw last night subtitled A Tribute to Nelson Mandela’s Dream.

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LooseTEA’s Carmen

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Last night LooseTEA Theatre presented a work-in-progress version of their reimagined Carmen.  Director and librettist Alaina Viau promised a “a radically envisioned” Carmen and she wasn’t kidding.  Apart from the fact that Ricardo (Escamilio) and John Anderson (Don José) are rivals for Carmen’s affections and there’s a woman, Michaela, with a prior attachment to John and, of course, that John kills Carmen there’s not a whole lot left of Mérimée’s story.  We are in Toronto.  John is a vet suffering from PTSD who has left his wife (Michaela) and kids.  Carmen manages a bar but is about to open her own place with the help of investment banker Ricardo.  She comes across as an everyday working girl rather than someone whose life is a serial process of picking up and discarding men.  Episodes that fit the big numbers of the score are quite cleverly crafted together to weave a narrative that works but rather relies on John’s PTSD to explain the two murders.  Woven into the opera are videos by Darren Bryant that contain some of the characters’ back stories.  Music is a mix of a conventional keyboard reduction played by Natasha Fransblow and live electronics from sound artist SlowPitchSound.  The use of electronics brings a grittiness that feels like an essential way of undermining the “prettiness” of the score.  Running around 55 minutes all told it feels a bit episodic and I hope (and expect) that the final version will seem more continuous.  Certainly there’s already more than just the basis for a very interesting piece of music theatre.

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Balancing on the Edge

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Balancing on the Edge combines the talents of A Girl in the Sky Productions and the Thin Edge New Music Collective.  It’s a challenging and exciting blend of New Circus and Contemporary Music (for some definition of both/either).  The circus element included aerialists, juggling and clowns while the music varied from Cage and Xenakis to pieces composed for the show.  There were live projections too.  The show was divided into six “acts” with some clowning interludes and other breaks for set up but mostly it was pretty fluid.  The performance space, the Harbourfront Theatre, was pretty much cleared down to a single ring of seats at ground level with more seating in the galleries, which allowed plenty of space for the various rigs employed.

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This week

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5720421dc9-jpgToday at 2.30pm Voicebox:Opera in Concert are performing Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi.  It’s Bellini’s take on Bandello rather than Shakespeare, not a lot happens and the orchestral music is ho hum so a semistaged version with piano isn’t a bad bet if the singing is good.  Juliet is the up and coming Caitlin Wood.  Romeo, on whom much depends, is Anita Krause.  It’s at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

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Cendrillon in Viardot’s salon

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The Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music opened a two performance run of Viardot’s Cendrillon last night at Mazzoleni Hall.  The conceit was that we and the performers were all guests in Mme, Viardot’s salon and to this end we were all given a slip of paper with our character name on it but I promptly lost mine and it wasn’t actually needed for anything,  Cute idea though.  It also allowed for a production that fitted with the acutely limited staging resources of Mazzoleni.  The piece is heavy on dialogue and it was presented in English, in an updated translation that had its moments.  I doubt the Viardot household had ever heard of “organic, non GMO, fair trade” coffee.

Photo: Nicola Betts

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All the Mozart

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dg0743902Deutsche Grammophon have re-released the Mozart M22 recordings in a new edition.  It contains all the operas, singspiels and other bits and pieces mostly recorded at Salzburg in 2006.  The whole thing comes to 33 DVDs recorded in HD and with 5.1 surround sound.  It’s also incredibly cheap.  Amazon.ca has it listed at C$139.99 including shipping.  Full details are available on the Presto Classical site which is likely a good source for UK buyers but others might want to watch the postage charges on this one!  The set includes some fine productions including Kušej’s Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito and Guth’s Le nozze di Figaro.  It’s also still currently the only way of getting hold of Herheim’s notorious Die Entführung aus dem Serail which has been out of the catalogue for ages and still isn’t available separately.  The only drawbacks I can see are that many collectors will already have many of these discs and it’s only available on DVD rather than Blu-ray (but most of these recordings never did make it to Blu-ray).  It would make a great Christmas present for someone starting an opera DVD collection.

Ambur Braid is Oksana G.

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So finally we have dates and casting for the long awaited Oksana G (music Aaron Gervais, libretto Colleen Murphy) from Tapestry Opera.  This one has been years in the making.  Back when I saw the second act workshop in 2012 there were all kinds of rumours about who would eventually (co)produce it.  Now it looks like Tapestry have come up the resources to do it as a standalone.  That’s no mean feat as this is a full blown two acter with orchestra and chorus.  It will play May 24th – 30th, 2017, at the Imperial Oil Opera Theatre of the Canadian Opera Company, 227 Front St. E. (just around the corner from the Kitten Kondo) and the title role will be played by Operaramblings’ favourite crazy lady Ambur Braid.  As she showed recently as Dalinda in the COC’s Ariodante she’s now much more than a series of impressive high notes.  She’s become a singing actress of real substance and Oksana is certainly a role a girl could get her teeth into.  The rest of the casting is also impressive with the always impressive Krisztina Szabó as Oksana’s mother, Adam Fisher as Father Alexander, and Keith Klassen as the baddy Konstantin.  Jordan de Souza conducts and Tom Diamond directs.  This is one not to miss!

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Photo Credit: Jennifer Toole

Naomi’s Road

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Naomi’s Road; music by Ramona Luengen, lbretto by Anne Hodges, has been around as an opera for ten years or so and it got its Toronto premier last night at St. David’s Anglican Church in a production directed by Michael Mori for Tapestry Opera.  It’s based on Joy Kogawa’s novel for children of the same name which tells the story of Naomi and her brother Stephen; Japanese-Canadian children torn from a comfortable middle class Vancouver home by the WW2 era Canadian government’s policy of interning Canadians of Japanese descent as “enemy aliens”.  It’s a shameful story and one that Canadians need to know about in an era when fear of the “other” is being stoked on all sides.  Perhaps we like to look down our noses at the antics of our neighbours to the south but our own history has its dark side and we need to remember.

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Four Seasons of Mother Russia

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Off Centre Music Salon’s opening concert of the season featured a largely Russian, largely 19th century program.  There were plenty of songs by Glinka, Tchaikovsky and the like sung by an interestingly contrasted mix of Ilana Zarankin, Joni Henson and Ryan Harper with Inna Perkis and Boris Zarankin accompanying.  It was good to hear Joni in this program in the warm acoustic of Trinity St. Paul’s.  I think I’ve mostly heard her in the RBA which is notoriously hard on dramatic sopranos.  Here the combination of the acoustic and Russian vowel sounds resulted in a very pleasing richness of tone rather than stridency.  She also blended well with Harper’s very tenorish tenor and made an interesting contrast with the much lighter, brighter Zarankin.  Nice work all round.

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