Lisa Hirsch asked on Twitter the other day for suggestions for the five most important operas written since 1965 (i.e. in the last fifty years). It’s a really interesting question and I pinged off a quick, semi-considered response. Thinking about it some more I think I would stick with my choices. (Obviously I haven’t seen every eligible opera but it surprises me a bit how many I have seen live or on DVD). So here are my picks:
There are a couple of opera openings next week. Pyramus and Thisbe; the Barbara Monk Feldman, Monteverdi, Chris Alden creation, opens at the COC on Tuesday 20th for a run of seven shows and Opera Atelier are opening a run of six shows of Lully’s Armide at the Elgin starting on Thursday evening. Both shows are very much a case of Canadian talent on display with no big international names. La Traviata continues at the COC in tandem with Pyramus and Thisbe.
There’s one interesting new announcement for the following week. Amanda Smith and Alaina Viau are collaborating on a show called Toronto Darknet Market. It’s inspired by those parts of the internet that even I don’t know about and will run as a sequence of three performances on the 29th starting at 8pm. It’s at 8-11 which is at 233 Spadina (south of Dundas). It’s a PWYC fundraiser for a chamber production of Médée by Marc-Antoine Charpentier next year. Toronto needs more staged baroque opera that’s not Opera Atelier so this initiative deserves support. There will be good young singers on display with music by Purcell, Berg and Cage among others.
So we now know who will be singing at Centre Stage, the COC’s gala competition for aspiring young singers with both cash prizes and places in the Ensemble Studio up for grabs. There are, I think, only two that I’m at all familiar with; soprano Eliza Johnson who was a finalist last year and baritone Zachary Read who was a rather good Sid in UoT Opera’s Albert Herring a couple of years ago. The other six are mezzo-sopranos Emily D’Angelo, Lauren Eberwein, Marjorie Maltais and Pascale Spinney, soprano Samantha Pickett and baritone Bruno Roy. Wow! Four mezzos so the mezzo mafia will likely be ecstatic. No tenors but with four already in the Ensemble Studio that’s probably a good thing. Centre Stage is on November 3rd at 5.30pm at the Four Seasons Centre with a cocktails (well wine mostly) and rather good snacks before the competition itself. Tickets are $100 from the COC box office or coc.ca.
American mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera, with pianist Myra Huang, has recently released a CD of songs by contemporary American composers titled Innocence/Experience. There are four , fairly contrasting, sets of songs by different composers. The first group are settings of texts by Garrison Keillor with music by Robert Aldridge. The texts are predictably sentimental and the music is rather retro. It sounds like it might have come from a musical comedy in the 1940s. It’s not inappropriate for the texts but seems a little out of time. It suits Rivera’s voice though. Her strength is definitely in the lower register where there is a pleasing smokey tone.
Danika Loren
Today’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured the assembled students of UoT Opera in a staged programme called The Art of the Prima Donna. It was a sequence of mostly ensemble numbers drawn from the core 19th century rep. Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Donizetti, Bellini, Bizet and Rossini all featured with works made famous by the great divas of the era’ Patti, Pasta, Malibran etc. Linking narrative, which skipped over who slept with Rossini, was provided by Michael Albano who directed the staging with Anna Theodosakis. Sandra Horst headed up the musical side and accompanied with help from Sue Black, Kate Carver and Ivan Jovanovic. Continue reading
So Opera Lyra in Ottawa has closed down. Here’s the announcement. I’m a little sad that the performance opportunities for hard working but under employed Canadian singers have been reduced but that’s pretty much the extent of it. I’ve watched Opera Lyra as they have lurched along, season after season, with traditional productions of the most mainstream of mainstream operas. Carmen has followed Traviata has followed Figaro. All in the very expensive National Arts Centre; fully staged with a big, expensive orchestra even as their finances have tanked. The strategy has shown all the imagination of a British general on the Western Front in 1916.
Well, after a rather hectic start to the fall season, this coming week is remarkably quiet. La Traviata continues at the COC with performances on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Friday is the first chance to see the second cast (El-Khoury, Haji, Westman) but I’m passing on that until later in the run. Otherwise there’s one lunchtime concert in the RBA on my schedule. It’s the UoT Opera Division previewing The Art of the Prima Donna and it’s on Thursday. It’s often a good opportunity to do some talent spotting ahead of Centre Stage.
Selfie is a work in progress by Chris Thornborrow and Julie Tepperman. It’s still incomplete and the performances over the last couple of days were workshops designed to elicit audience feedback. It had its genesis at the 2013 LibLab and it’s come a long way. The original sketch of two teenagers texting each other is turning into an hour long piece about cyberbullying. It’s a rather disturbing exploration of how technology allows teenagers to do all those things which teenagers do with even less “supervision” than ever. In this case a manipulative girl (Cindy played by Larissa Koniuk) tries to make up for her split from her rather feckless boyfriend (Devon played by Asitha Tennekoon) by engineering a split between her friend Mindy (Meher Pavri) and her bloke Tyler (Giovanni Spanu). The result is a massive on-line slut shaming campaign against the fifth character Heather who has no real identity or agency until the very last scene. Adults encountered along the way are portrayed as clueless, ineffective or bureaucratically indifferent.
There’s a lot to like in the COC’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata that opened at The Four Seasons Centre last night. Arin Arbus’ production; a co-production with Chicago Lyric Opera and Houston Grand Opera avoids the cloying sentimentality of many productions of this piece and, without being in any way gratuitous, deals very directly with the world Verdi wanted us to see; a world of hypocrisy, sex for sale and early, pointless death.
Silence! Singers at Work is a slim volume of humorous drawings about the life of the singer; choral, solo or opera. It’s by graphic artist turned singer Emmanuelle Ayrton and contains about 50 colour drawings and an intro by Joyce DiDonato. It’s published by Edition Peters Group but North American distribution seems a bit patchy. Googling suggests that one could pick up a copy for $10-$15. I got some chuckles out of it and it might make a good stocking stuffer for those of you unfortunate enough to have a singer in your lives.
Here’s a sample:
operaramblings 