Soulpepper opened a run of a revival of their 2019 production of Tennessee William’s A Street Car Named Desire at the Young Centre on Tuesday evening. It’s a terrific production and performance but, as usually happens to me with Mr. Williams’ plays, I found myself admiring it more than enjoying it. Showcasing dishonest, violent people living lives of noisy despair without any form of redemption, however brilliantly portrayed, leaves me wondering what the point of it all is.
I attended the third and final performance of Aportia Chryptych: A Black Opera for Portia White by HAUI x Sean Hayes at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre on Sunday afternoon. It’s a very ambitious piece which has some really excellent ideas and scenes but perhaps bites off a bit more than it can chew.
Back in 2017 Bicycle Opera Project toured the a cappella opera Sweat by Anna Chatterton and Juliet Palmer. I caught it in Hamilton and Toronto. In the intervening years it’s been turned into a film that premiered at the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles on Saturday night.
The second performance of Opera 5’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw on Thursday night was sung by the “apprentice” cast drawn from Opera McGill. Curiously, it was an all female cast with women singing both Miles and Peter Quint.
It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why Britten’s chamber operas are not done more often by smaller opera companies. They use a modest orchestra (13 players for The Turn of the Screw), have equally modest sized casts, no chorus and they are in English. They offer the chance to perform a work as written at much lower cost than grand opera and without the compromises inherent in downscaling works written on a larger scale.
The Caged Bird Sings opened last night at the Aga Khan Museum. It’s a co-pro between the museum and Modern Times Stage Company (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) with Theatre ARTaud. The play is written by Rouvan Silogix, Rafeh Mahmud and Ahad Lakhani. It’s based on the poetry of Rumi and deals with Sufi ideas of freedom, love and self-abnegation. It’s sophisticated, often very funny and thought provoking.
Echoes of Bi-Sotoon is a new opera by Cultureland Opera Collective. It’s in nine scenes based on the legends and the iconography of the Bi-Sotoon mountain; an important cultural site and transportation route in Khermanshah province in present day Iran. It includes music by seven BIPOC composers[1] co-ordinated by artistic director Afarin Mansouri. It premiered at Arrayspace on Thursday evening.
Jennifer Tung
About a year ago I attended the Women in Musical Leadership‘s conducting masterclass with the TSO and Gustavo Gimeno at Roy Thomson Hall. Last night I went back for this year’s version. Three of last year’s participants; Jennifer Tung, Juliane Gallant and Naomi Woo were back. Last year’s fourth participant, Maria Fuller, was off in Poland conducting Hänsel and Gretel which I think says a lot for the programme. There were two new conductors; Monica Chen and Kelly Lin. Continue reading
Following on from Das Rheingold, the second instalment of Dmiti Tcherniakov’s Ring cycle; Die Walküre, recorded at Staatsoper unter den Linden in 2022, has now been released on video. We are sill in the ESCHE psychological research centre. During the Prelude we see news footage of Siegmund’s escape from the programme he is in. He staggers into Hunding’s staff apartment to find Sieglinde. Hunding, when he appears, is some sort of armed security guard. This illustrates the problems I have with this production. The psychology of the Siegmund/Sieglinde/Hunding trio works well but the back story of Wälse, Sieglinde’s forced marriage etc makes no sense at all. Oh, and Wotan seems to be watching everything that goes on.
What I’m going to do here is use a review of a new CD by Toronto based musician/actor Ahmed Moneka as a means to explore some ideas about listening to music. But first the CD itself. It’s called Kanzafula and it contains nine tracks rooted in an unusual musical tradition; that of the Afro/Iraqi Sufis of Basra. These are descendants of people originally from the East coast of Africa who wound up in Basra in the 8th century CE and have maintained a rich musical tradition combining Arabic and African influences. Continue reading
