Philippe Boesmans’ last opera, On purge bébé, premiered at La Monnaie/De Munt in Dember 2022, a few months after the composer’s death. It’s a one act farce to a libretto by Richard Brunel after Feydeau. Predictably it’s extremely silly and rather French. It begins with an argument between a porcelain manufacturer (Follavoine) and his wife as they try to discover where Les Isles Hébrides are at the request of their unpleasant and constipated seven year old son. Looking under “Z” and “E” doesn’t help very much but it serves as a backdrop to their argument about administering a laxative to said son while awaiting the arrival of a fonctionnaire (Chouilloux) charged with sourcing 300,000 unbreakable chamber pots for the French Army. Continue reading
On purge bébé
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Unfinished Business is a CD of music by Toronto based composer Tristan Zaba. It’s mostly songs for soprano (McKenzie Warriner) and piano (Paul Williamson) but the second and longest track; Matryoski and Blue Vase is a solo piano piece that plays with different textures and densities; sometimes very spare, sometimes very busy, for twelve minutes. There’s also a shorter, ceaselessly busy piece Swan Dive.
The second concert in this year’s West End Micro Music Festival took place at Redeemer Lutheran Church on Friday night. Titled Alchemical Processes it featured a mix of early and modern works written or arranged for some combination of string quartet (Jennifer Murphy, Madlen Breckbill – violins, Laila Zakzook – viola, Philip Bergman – cello), harpsichord (Alexander Malikov) and clarinet or bass clarinet (Brad Cherwin).
Il cappello di paglia di Firenze is a farce by Nino Rota, probably better known as a composer of film music particularly associated with Fellini. It’s playing right now at UoT Opera in a production directed by Jennifer Tarver. It’s an ambitious show. There’s a clever two level set, designed by Michelle Tracey,; indoors on an upper level and outdoors at stage level, and clearly a lot of thought and work has gone into both sets and costumes. The direction and choreography (Anna Theodosakis) is involved and makes use of the full space of the MacMillan Theatre with comings and goings all over the place energetically executed by quite a large cast. 
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