On Babi Yar there are no monuments
The real monument to those; young and old, Jew and gentile, who died in the horror that was Babi Yar are Yevtushenko’s words and Shostakovich’s searing setting of them in the opening movement of his thirteenth symphony. It’s a symphony that combines sheer horror with the kind of blistering irony that is unique to Shostakovich. It’s a work that I first met in my teens and like so much Shostakovich it has run like a leitmotif through my adult life. So I was deeply moved to hear it given a red blooded, almost balls out Russian style, performance by the TSO last night. No doubt a Russian conductor; Andrey Boreyko, and a superb Russian bass soloist; Petr Migunov, played a large part in that but so did the players of the TSO and the men of the Amadeus Choir and Elmer Iseler Singers. The brass was strident and the percussion very loud where it needed to be though there was delicacy too from the rumble of the opening line quoted above to the faint dying away of the last note. Most excellent.
There was also a very nice performance of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 but that’s not what I was there for. This program will be repeated at Roy Thomson Hall tonight at at 7.30pm and tomorrow at 3pm at the George Weston Recital Hall.
Photo credit: Malcolm Cook
I met with Aria Umezawa yesterday to talk about Opera 5’s latest project, a rather unusual take on Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. The project grew out of a desire to break Opera 5’s association with reviving rather obscure pieces and to do something “from the canon”. But, of course, for this company there had to be an angle. In this case it’s that Act 2 will be an immersive, audience participation exercise. We are all invited to Orlofsky’s party. There will be aerialists, burlesque dancers and a grand waltz for all which will probably reduce choreographer Jenn Nichols to tears. There a few other change ups. Frosh is gone and Ivan is replaced by drag queen Pearl Harbor, who will emcee the party. It’s in English, as the set up would make surtitles pretty much impossible. And the cast is pretty good. Michael Barrett sings Eisenstein with Rachel Krehm as Rosalinde, Julie Ludwig as Adele and Erin Lawson as Orlofsky among others.
The crazy late April/early May rush seems to be pretty much over. This coming week there are only a few performances of note. On Tuesday in the RBA at noon Aviva Fortunata and Iain MacNeil perform Strauss’ Four Last Songs and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel. Thursday sees the opening of Against the Grain’s A Little Too Cozy at the CBC’s Studio 42. Then on Friday 13th, the TSO are doing, appropriately enough, Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony which sets Yevtushenko poems about the Babi Yar massacres.
This Saturday FAWN Chamber Creative are presenting the first part of 
