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About operaramblings

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

April 2023

april2023Here’s what I know about so far for April.

On April 6th at 1.30pm in Walter Hall, Music in the Afternoon is presenting a concert featuring Marion Newman, Melody Courage, Evan Korbut and Gordon Gerrard in a mix of classical song and contemporary works on Indigenous themes including music by Ian Cusson, Bramwell Tovey and Tomson Highway.

Later that day, at 7.30pm at Koerner Hall, Opera Atelier have the first of three performances of Handel’s The Resurrection.  This is the fully staged version of the production that streamed during lockdown.  There are further performances on the 8th at 7.30pm and the 9th at 2.30pm.

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Introducing Bluebeard

Tuesday’s lunch time concert in the RBA featured some of the people involved in Against the Grain Theatre’s new, updated version of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle which opens next week at the Fleck Dance Theatre.  There was an excellent descripttion of what the project was all about from Gerald Finley (Bluebeard) and Stephen Higgins (conductor and arranger – the orchestration is reduced to a seven person chamber ensemble).

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Ex California semper aliquid novi

love & lightFrom the good people of Silicon Valley, who brought us the iPod and the iPad and the iDontknowwhatelse, we now have iSing Silicon Valley; a choir of young women.  Their new album is titled love and light and features the choir with, on some tracks, harpist Cheryl Fulton and soprano Estelelí Gomez in settings of Latin texts ranging from Hildegard of Bingen to contemporary composers.  It’s all sort of in the range of plainchant to polyphony with young bright vibrato-less voices with maybe a New Agey touch (though that may be guilt by association),

It’s pleasant enough listening though a little unvaried.  The choir is very decent, the harp is a nice touch and Gomez has a rather beautiful voice.  Plus it’s a well engineered recording made at Mont La Salle Chapel in Napa last summer.  The acoustic suits the music.  It’s due for a digital only release on 14th April 2023 in MP3 and standard and hi-res FLAC formats.  I listened to the 24 bit, 96kHz version.

Catalogue number: Avie AV2602

L’amante anonyme

Voicebox: Opera in Concert’s most recent production is Joseph Bologne, Chévalier de St, Georges’ 1780 opéra comique, L’amant anonyme.  It was given in OiC’s usual style; i.e concert dress but some blocking, a few props and no music stands.  The dialogue was given in English with the musical numbers in French with surtitles.  Accompaniment was a 10 piece chamber reduction of the original score by Stephen Hargreaves.  David Fallis conducted.

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Little Match Girl Passion

On Saturday evening the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers gave a very beautiful, carefully constructed and thought provoking concert. To start with it was at the Church of the Holy Trinity which, as most Torontonians will know, is a sort of social hub servicing the spiritual and material needs of Toronto’s homeless as best they can. All the more ironic as it sits in the shadow of that iconic temple of consumer capitalism the Eaton Centre.

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field studies

07 - Emilie Cecilia LeBel - Emilie Cecilia LeBel — field studies (cover) copyfield studies is a CD of chamber music by Canadian composer Emilie Cecilie Lebel.  There are five tracks on the record; each around twelve minutes long, scored for various small forces and recorded in different locations.

The pieces are all different but they have one thing in common.  They make a few notes go a long way!  evaporation blue, which opens the album is typical.  It’s scored for piano and harmonica; both played by Cheryl Duvall, and it’s very sparse with the notes typically given long time values.  It’s quite evocative in a slightly tense kind of way.  It’s also recorded with a lot of resonance which has to be deliberate since it was recorded at Revolution Recording in Toronto.

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Norcop Prize 2023

Thursday lunchtime in Walter Hall saw the winner of the 2023 Norcop Song Prize, Jamal Al-Titi give his prizewinner recital accompanied by Koldolsky Prize winner Indra Egan.  It was an interesting selection of material for baritone in English, French, Italian and Russian.  Starting off with Butterworth’s Loveliest of Trees and Vaughan Williams’ Silent Noon was bold.  The standard for these songs is particularly high and I don’t think they are Al-Titi’s sweet spot.  We would see laster in the recital a leaning towards a very operatic approach that didn’t work so well here.

al-titi

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dreams-bend

dreamsbendTo the intimate (i.e. tiny) Array Space last night for a concert by the Happenstancers who, in this iteration, consisted of Brad Cherwin – clarinet, Madlen Breckbill – viola and Micah Behr – piano. and, in the first number, viola.

Part 1 of the programme was called Dream Images and was intended to evoke the discontinuous and illogical.  It began with Du Yun’s dreams-bend for taped speech, two violas and clarinet as a sort of intro to the main event.  This consisted of Schumann’s Fairy Tale Narrations and Kurtág’s Hommage à R. Schumann; these being two of the very few works for clarinet, viola and piano.  Added to these was a new work; Abstractions by Nahre Sol.  The pieces were played with the movements in the right order but with the composers mixed up so, for example, the first four movements went Kurtág, Sol, Schumann, Kurtág and so on.  I like this approach.  The styles contrast.  The Kurtág is spikey and dissonant, the Schumann structured and Romantic and the Sol playful, tonal (mostly) and rhythmically varied.  Listening to them interspersed somehow focusses attention on their particular qualities and has a kind of focus that the conventional way of doing things doesn’t.

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Please ensure your seatbelt is securely fastened

The GGS’ production of Jonathan Dove’s Flight opened at Koerner Hall last night.  This is going to be a somewhat unusual review and my thoughts about the piece itself should be taken in the context of what I’m about to write.  The basic plot of Flight is, for me, quite literally the stuff of nightmares and by the third act I was having vivid and very disturbing flashbacks.  This undoubtedly skewed my opinion!

flight1

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More March events

march2023suppHere are a few more events not listed in my previous March post.

On Saturday 18th the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir have a concert at 7.30pm at Church of the Holy Trinity featuring David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion and a new work by Shireen Abu-Khader; Diaries of the Forgotten.

Theatre Smith-Gilmour are presenting Metamorphoses 2023 at Crow’s Theatre.  It’s a contemporary take on Ovid that combines mime, illusion, spoken word, silence and Bharatanatyam dance.  Previews are on the 21st through 23rd with the run proper from the 24th to April 9th.

Against the Grain’s reworking Of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle with Gerald Finley in the title role plays at the Fleck Dance Theatre on March 29th and 31st at 7.30pm with a matinee on April 1st.  The new English language libretto is by Daisy Evans who also directs,  Stephen Higgins conducts.