The first video disk review in Opera Canada in a while is now up on that site. It’s a review by me of a production by L’Opéra Royale de Versailles of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. There’s plenty of Cancon with Robert Gleadow as the Don, Florie Valiquette as Donna Anna and both Marshal Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg involved.
Versus is a one man show (more or less) by Adam Lazarus about a day in the life of the rather unfortunate (if distressingly normal) Gerald Bloom and worse the day is his birthday. It’s part of Summerworks and playing at the Theatre Centre. While it is mostly a monologue, Lazarus gets assistance from Nicholas Eddie and Irene Ly who do rather more than shift props. He also ropes in audience members, from time to time, to, for example, make him a smoothie or clean up dog poo. If being acutely embarassed is not your thing then don’t sit in the front row! Continue reading
Slug Meal, part of Summerworks, is a one woman show presented by Camille Huang at Theatre Passe Muraille. It’s a sort of dance X performance art piece inspired by unfortunate childhood memories of her mother’s eggplant dish, Western ideas of immigrant food and the idea of “dirt” as “matter out of place”
The highly athletic Huang performs an hour long routine, occasionally talking to herself in (I guess) Chinese and accompanied by a soundtrack that ranges from body noises to a kind of Chinese muzak. Along the way she: Continue reading
Bimbos in Space from Femmepire Theatre is currently playing at Factory Theatre as part of Summerworks. It’s the first play I’ve seen where the content warnings included BDSM and cannibalism! It’s billed as a homage to sex workers and trans people and riffs off every cliché of the B sci-fi horror genre.
Saturday night Toronto Summer Music closed out with a final concert in Walter Hall showcasing the many and various aspects of the festival. It’s a pretty good solution to the problem of how to wrap up such a diverse set of programmes.
So, we got a few numbers from the Community Choir. There was some nicely sung Vivaldi and Brahms and an arrangement by Kathleen Allan of “Come and I Will Sing You” that was firmly in the more fun to sing than to listen to genre.
Rougarou is a work in progress written and directed by Damion LeClair for unnecessary mountain theatre. On Saturday and Sunday it was given in a semi-workshop format in partnership with Native Earth at Aki Studio as part of Summerworks.
The format was basically a reading with one actor playing all the parts and a second person “setting the stage” as there were no sets or props, though the sound design, or at least part of it, was included. I think the intent at this point is for the finished product to use two (or perhaps more) actors; one playing the main character Renee and another perhaps playing everyone else but I’m not sure of that.
Tuesday night’s Toronto Summer Music concert in Walter Hall featured Quebec soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais with Louise Pelletier on piano. The first part of the concert consisted of songs by Brahms and Strauss. I’m not a huge fan of Brahm’s Zigeunerlieder, Op.103 which are very much an example of Germans misunderstanding just about everything about Hungarian folk music let alone gypsies. The texts are cliché ridden and the music isn’t much better. Ms. St-Gelais sang then with a full pleasant tone and some attention to the text but she really needs to work on her German diction.
I first came across the music of Errollyn Wallen in a recent recital by Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton. There was a quality in her music that reminded me of some other composers of Caribbean origin writing about the immigrant experience in Canada. Wallen is from Belize but now lives in Scotland (in a lighthouse no less) and her music is quite varied. Unusually, besides being a classically trained composer, she also sings while accompanying herself on the piano and the works she has written for that genre definitely have a singer/songwriter vibe.
The second disk in pianist Malcolm Martineau’s project to record all the Brahms songs will soon be available. It features twenty nine songs for low voice with, as far as i could tell, no theme. All the works have titles like Fünf Gesänge Op.72 which actually starts the disk.
The singing is shared between mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann. Both are wonderful singers with terrific artistry and sensitive treatment of text. With Martineau at the piano it’s hard to imagine these relatively little performed songs getting better performances.
Rooms of Elsinore is a new CD of music related to Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet. Those familiar with the opera will quickly recognise the sound worlds of all five pieces. Two began life as “character studies” for Ophelia and Gertrude respectively and so set words by Matthew Jocelyn. The first, And once I played Ophelia is scored for soprano and chamber orchestra. Some readers may recall Barbara Hannigan performing it with the TSO in 2019. Here it’s performed by Jennifer France with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the composer. It’s a tough sing with some very high sections and staccato repeated phrases. She does a fine job. Continue reading
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