Thursday lunchtime in Walter Hall saw the 2024 edition of the annual recital by the winners of the Norcop Prize in Song and the Koldofsky Prize in Accompanying. This year’s winners are mezzo-soprano Nicole Percifield and pianist Minira Najafzade.
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is a very unusual opera. It breaks all the rules and yet, done well, is an immensely compelling piece of music theatre. There are no show stopper arias. The ensemble numbers are mainly drawn from Catholic liturgy. And yet it maintains a coherent and compelling narrative arc that builds steadily to an emotionally devastating conclusion. The Glenn Gould School’s current production at Koerner Hall directed by Stephen Carr gets all the elements right and makes for a memorable evening at the opera.
Here are some upcoming shows for April:
Music
Charlie Petch’s No One’s Special at the Hot Dog Cart is a one man show about his experiences as a hot dog vendor in Toronto and his subsequent life working as a 911 dispatcher, on the front desk of an ER and as a hospital bed allocator. It’s currently being presented by Theatre Passe Muraille and Erroneous Productions.
Collage and poster design by Emily Jung | Pictured: Charlie Petch
I’ve seen Schubert’s Winterreise done many ways. There’s the classic one with baritone and piano and more rarely soprano (including a memorable performance by Adrienne Pieczonka as a passing cold front battered the hall!). I’ve seen it done with projections and three singers and I’ve seen made into a film. So there’s nothing particularly outré about arranging it to add a choir to baritone and piano. The choir can function as Greek chorus or alter ego or whatever. Any way that’s what Gregor Meyer did and what the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers conducted by Jean-Sébastian Vallée performed when they joined forces with Brett Polegato and Philip Chiu at Trinity St. Paul’s on Saturday night.
Metropolitan United Church that is. Not the other place. Anyway, it was a very pleasant Thursday lunchtime recital in which Maeve was accompanied on piano by Helen Becqué. It was essentially a “turn of the century” (as in around 1900) programme.
The first set was Debussy’s Ariettes Oubliees. The six songs are very Debussy. Maeve sang them idiomatically, in excellent French and with a fair amount of variation in emotional intensity from quite restrained to exuberant. She does “exuberant” rather well. Equally excellent and idiomatic playing from Helen who also provided a bit of a break between song sets with pieces drawn from the Preludes Op. 12 of Luise Adolpha Le Beau.
Dana H, by Lucas Hnath, is a rather unusual piece of theatre. The sole actor, Jordan Baker, lip synchs to tapes of Dana Higginbotham (Lucas’ mother) being interviewed by Steve Cosson. In these interviews she relates the events of five months of her life where she was kidnapped and held prisoner by a psychotic member of a racist criminal gang.
UoT Opera’s spring production; Massenet’s 1899 opera Cendrillon, has been transferred to the Elgin Theatre with the MacMillan currently out of commission. They have made some sensible accommodations to the rather unfriendly Elgin acoustic. The orchestra is reduced to about thirty players and placed at floor level in front of the stage. Almost all the stage action takes place right at the front which helped significantly with voice projection.
Pandolfe & Servants
The new recording of Handel’s Alcina from Marc Minkowski, Les musiciens du Louvre and a rather starry line up of soloists is very good and quite interesting. It’s very complete. As far as I can tell all the ballet/dance music is included and so are all the Oberto scenes and all his arias. In all the staged performances I’ve seen (live or video) one or both are usually heavily truncated and I have seen versions where Oberto doesn’t feature at all.
There was one thing that puzzled me a bit. The relatively large (40 or so) orchestra includes trumpets and bassoons but not horns. I think this is unusual but maybe someone more knowledgeable might comment? In any event there’s some really good playing, quite often at very fast tempi in the instrumental sections. Minkowski also gets a really wide range of colours from the orchestra. A good example is the low strings in “È gelosia”. Continue reading
My review of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah at Toronto City Opera is now up at Opera Canada.
Photo: Dahlia Katz
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