Author Archives: operaramblings

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About operaramblings

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

Soundstreams subscription offer

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Soundstreams, Toronto’s contemporary music specialists, have pointed out that one can use their “Pick 3” subscription package to get a discount on all three of their vocal offerings in 2015/16.  The three shows are:

  • A concert with Adrianne Pieczonka and Kristina Szabó in a varied, indeed fascinatingly eclectic, programme on September 29th 2015.
  • Boesmans’ opera Julie which runs November 17th to 29th 2015.
  • A choral concert with Scottish composer James MacMillan including his Seven Last Words from the Cross.  This one is on March 8th 2016.

Subscription packages start at $135 and are available at soundstreams.ca

Weint! Weint! Weint! Weint!

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Aribert Reimann’s Lear is a pretty good example of how to create a thoroughly modern opera within a thoroughly traditional framework.  It’s a classic story of course.  Here librettist Claus Henneberg has taken the classic German translationof the Shakespeare play and condensed it in a highly intelligent fashion; retaining all the emotional drama while sacrificing some fairly peripheral narrative.  Reimann’s score is modern though not strictly twelve tone.  He creates a distinct musical voice for each character; speech/Sprechstimme for the Fool, weird coloratura for General etc. This is reinforced by many of the characters having a tone row that serves as a sort of leitmotiv.  Atonality and quarter tones are used for varying effects from the violence of the Blasted Heath scene; apparently inspired by the composer’s experience, as a nine year old, of the bombing of Potsdam, to the shimmering, ethereal quarter tones of Lear’s final monologue.  For anyone with even a vague tolerance for “modern” music it’s a fascinating listen.

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Majesty, Murder and Madness

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Friday night I went to see Teiya Kasahara and Stephanie Yelovich’s recital at First Unitarian.  Unusually for a voice and piano (Mark-Anthony Del Brocco) recital it was essentially all bel canto; a mix of Bellini and Verdi songs with some Donizetti opera excerpts (plus a duet from Norma as an encore).  It would be unusual programming for almost anyone and I was frankly a bit surprised because I don’t think of either singer as a bel canto specialist and, Teiya’s Lucia aside, a bel canto singer at all really.

I know that the event was a fundraiser to help pay for their summer in Italy studying mainly this rep and I guess, wherever one is headed as a singer, being able to sing bel canto well is an asset.  So maybe, to use a rugby analogy, it wasn’t so surprising that this felt a bit more like the training field than a competitive game; especially when the duets were both mezzo/soprano pieces being sung by two sopranos.

Both these young ladies have big voices.  Teiya in particular has real power, as well as coloratura chops, so perhaps she’s on the way to being that rare voice that can sing Norma and the Tudor queens.  Who knows?  Stephanie’s future probably lies north of the Alps though and it’s potentially a bright one.  I’ve seen these two ladies separately and together in contemporary works and they were really, really good.  Bel canto‘s not my sweet spot so maybe that’s part of the problem but I’m really not convinced it’s theirs either.

How it Storms

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How it Storms; music by Allen Cole, libretto by Maristella Roca, is a chamber opera for four soloists and gamelan ensemble.  It was premiered last night at the Array Space and is co-production of Array Music and the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan.  It’s a really interesting piece.  The libretto is allusive (at times even elusive) rather than being a straight forward linear narrative.  There’s a soon to be wedded couple, her sister and a very strange beggar.  There’s a hunting scene and a curse but what’s really going on is never entirely clear.  The libretto is beautiful to listen to with repetitive elements and non-English elements.  It’s clearly as much the work of a poet as a playwright(1).  Using gamelan to accompany this makes so much sense.  The instruments mirror, amplify and transcend the rhythmical, shimmering nature of the words.  The solo vocal parts too give the singers an opportunity to sing beautifully as well as tell the story.

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Is Vancouver Opera cutting its own throat?

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2015/16 will be the last conventional four production September to May season for Vancouver Opera.  April 2017 will see a new look “opera festival” with three productions running in a three week window.  There’s the bright and cheerful official spin here.  But, seriously, this is a major cut by any other name.  For eleven months of the year Canada’s third largest metropolis will see no fully staged opera.  So even fewer opera jobs for singers, other musicians and everyone else who makes opera happen.  Sad.

sweeney-todd-vo

Vancouver Opera’s 2015 production of Sweeney Todd

Late listing

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tkTeiya Kasahara and Stephanie Yelovich have a couple of recitals this week.  The show is billed as Majesty, Madness and Murder and will feature Italian opera and art song.  Mark-Anthony Del Brocco will accompany.  It’s a fund raiser for the girls to study in Italy this summer and it’s pay-by-donation.

You can catch them tomorrow night at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, 320 Charlton Ave W, Hamilton or on Friday at First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, 175 St. Clair Ave W, Toronto.  Both shows start at 7.30pm.

Eine Frau von Heute

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I don’t usually associate Arnold Schoenberg with comedy but he did write a one act comic opera Von Heute auf Morgen which premiered in 1929.  It was an attempt to cash in on the vogue for satirical operas on modern themes characterised by Brecht and Weill and , if a bit slight and lacking Brechtian punch, it works well enough.  A bourgeios husband and wife have returned from an evening out where they have met an iold friend of the wife who has become something of a femme fatale.  There’s also a singer, inevitably a tenor, involved.  The husband is rabbiting on rather gormlessly about the charms of the “other woman” so his wife decides to teach him a lesson.  She apes the manners of a “modern woman”, neglects their child, plans assignations etc.  There’s a long phone conversation inwhich the “friend” and the singer invite them back to the bar.  By now the husband is beginning to realise what he stands to lose.  The wife realises she has won.  The other couple show up and there’s a “modern” vs. “traditional” quartet after which the “moderns” leave in disgust and the husband and wife revort to bourgeois domesticity.

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Rehearsing the Apocalypse

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R. Murray Shafer’s 1980 “musical pageant”, Apocalypsis, is being restaged this year by Luminato.  It’s currently in rehearsal and yestrday I got to see part of a staging rehearsal.  It’s an unusual work requiring massive forces (500-1000 performers depending who you read) and combines spoken word, dance, singing and other things I’m not sure I have the vocabulary for.  Oh, and yes, it depicts the end of the world!  It’s big, loud, exciting and a bit mad.  Part ego trip, part acid trip perhaps?

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Mahler Resurrection

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Mahler’s Symphony No.2 in C Minor “Resurrection” is a massive beast using multiple percussionists, a very large brass section (who rather disconcertingly troop on and off stage multiple times), choir and two vocal soloists and it lasts an hour and a half.  It’s also a very peculiar animal emotionally; combining almost naive folk dance tunes with passages of haunting beauty and extreme bombast.  Last night, in the second of two performances at Roy Thomson Hall, Peter Oundjian and the TSO give it a spectacularly unrestrained performance.

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