On April 1st and 2nd Bicycle Opera Project will present Travelogue; four new operas that explore travel by bicycle, car and rocket ship. It’s part of Toy Piano Composers’ inaugural Curiosity Festival
The four operas are:
April by Monica Pearce
Cycling up the Don Valley Trail, a young woman grapples with a decision she cannot put off any longer.
Road Trip by Elisha Denburg
What you’d expect from two guys on a road trip. Until it’s not.
My Mouth on Your Heart by August Murphy-King with a libretto by Colleen Murphy
Liam encounters Life and Death as he travels to the spot where his girlfriend died.
Waterfront by Tobin Stokes
On the shuttle to Mars, scientists dispute their quest. The perfect espresso? Or something else entirely?
A packed out Koerner Hall just saw something half way between an art song recital and a revivalist meeting. To say that Mr. Hvorostovsky has a fan club would be a gross understatement. He was greeted by cheers, every song got prolonged applause (alas for those of us who prefer some continuity in a set), there were more flowers than at Princess Di’s funeral and about the only thing missing was that, mercifully, no underwear got thrown on stage. Oh, and, despite the requests to the contrary, the whole show was “artfully” lit by the constant flashes from phone cameras. He also sang some songs. In fact it was a nicely chosen mixture of Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Tchaikovsky and Strauss. Full details are 
The next couple of weeks have some items of interest. Tonight at 7pm Dmitri Hvostorovsky is singing at Koerner Hall with a program of Russian songs plus some Strauss. This recital has been getting very good reviews in the US. On Wednesday there is, after a fashion, a chance to see Jonas Kaufmann in concert. It’s a cinema broadcast of a La Scala concert from last June and it’s an all Puccini program. Curiously it’s directed by Brian Large who I had long since thought retired. It’s being distributed by Arts Alliance who are the folks who do the ROH cinema broadcasts but the Met doesn’t seem to have got heavy on this so you can see it at your local Cineplex. Full dates and listings are 
I took a quick look at the Metropolitan Opera’s recently announced 2016/17 and while for the most part it’s business as usual there’s maybe one surprise. There are 26 productions; 6 new, 20 revivals for a total of 225 performances. The first thing that struck me was how little Puccini there is. Only two Puccini works (La Bohème and Manon Lescaut) are being performed for a total of 23 shows (10.2%). There’s nothing pre Mozart and only one opera written post WW1; L’Amour de Loin which gets 8 performances (ETA: Apparently Cyrano dates from 1936 though you wouldn’t guess that to hear it. Still only 4 performances so it doesn’t affect the stats much). There are only two other works which could, at a stretch, be called “modern” stylistically; Salome and Jenůfa, but they were written in 1905 and 1903 respectively, and get only 6 performances each. Then there’ Rusalka (1901) and Rosenkavalier (1911) which are 20th century but not by any stretch “modern”. So, even on generous definitions of “modernity”, over 85% of the Met’s output is, essentially, 19th century.
The Met has announced it’s 2016/17 cinema season. There are again ten productions with what seems now to be a settled mix of a smattering of the Met’s new productions and a bunch of war horses that have already been broadcast. For myself, I’ve pretty much had it with watching opera this way. There aren’t that many productions in the program that I have any interest in and the combination of far too common technical problems, cheesey scripted and rehearsed “interviews” and over long intervals make it all rather tedious. For the operas I want to see I’ll wait for the DVD release. Still for those who are still interested, here’s the line up. 
A vocalist accompanying himself on the guitar (or one of it’s predecessors) is one of the oldest and most prevalent tropes in western music. From Blondel to Billy Bragg it’s always been with us but it’s quite rare in the world of modern art music where the roles of singer and accompanist are trades as rigidly delineated as anything in a Clydeside shipyard. Doug MacNaughton breaks the rules by playing a variety of kinds of guitar and singing in a range of styles. For that question of style is vital too. The mechanics of doing two jobs simultaneously affect singing style and centuries of performance history offer a bewildering range of stylistic choices. It’s an issue I examined once before when reviewing a Bud Roach CD for Opera Canada.
operaramblings 