Saturday night at the new performance space at 877 Yonge Street saw a concert inaugurating Cultureland’s residency at Tapestry Opera. The performance consisted mainly of excerpts from Cultureland’s recent and “in progress” operas accompanied on piano by Carolyn Maule and directed by Renée Salewski.
My review of Opera Atelier’s production of Charpentier’s David and Jonathan which opened at Koerner Hall last night is now available at Opera Canada.
Photo: Bruce Zinger
My review of Midori Marsh’s Women’s Musical Club of Toronto’s “sisterhood” themed recital with Frances Armstrong, Alex Hetherington and Rachel Szabo at Walter Hall on Thursday is now published at myscena.org.
This week the Young Artists Studio at the Canadian Children’s Opera Company gave two performances of Purcell’s classic Dido and Aeneas. The YAS is a new initiative designed to give young singers (16-19) additional opportunities to the CCOC’s usual fare and maybe provide a pathway to serious professional study.
My review of Voicebox:Opera in Concert’s production of Puccini’s La Rondine at the weekend is now up at Opera Canada.
Every year Soundstreams has a competition to find a young artist to curate a main stage concert. This year’s lucky winner is Brad Cherwin, who will need little introduction to readers of this blog, and the concert took place at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Saturday night.
It was, in many ways, a typical Cherwin programme. Some works were played in their entirety while others had their individual movements spread through the programme. The overall theme was “Love and Death” and the programme was divided into four cycles with somewhat enigmatic titles. Twelve instrumentalists, plus soprano Danika Lorèn and conductor Gregory Oh were used in various combinations.
My review of Sunday’s Roy Thomson concert by the Vancouver Symphony is now up at Bachtrack.
@bachtrack
The spring production from UoT Opera is Mozart’s Così fan tutte and it’s playing at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. Anna Theodosakios directs with some conceptual input from Michael Patrick Albano. The production is interesting and I think there are three layers to unpack. On the surface it’s a fairly straightforward 18th century setting with uniforms, wigs, elaborate dresses and so on but with a rather striking colour scheme; pinks and lilacs.
So on Saturday night at St.Olave’s CE I finally managed to catch a concert in the Apocryphonia series. It was titled Brews, Beauties and Brawlers and was billed as “classical” meets “punk”. It was a collection of pieces for piano, solo voice and/or choir and organiser Alexander Capellazzo had recruited four voices of each type with soloists coming from the group. Narmina Afaniyeva was at the piano. Everybody (and some of the audience) had dressed for the occasion!
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened the concluding show of their 2024/25 season at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Friday evening. It’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers directed and choreographed by Guillermo Silva-Marin. It’s pretty decent and, besides, TOT is about the only chance to see G&S in Toronto; whatever one thinks of their approach. For those who have seen TOT’s G&S before it’s fair to say this is a very typical TOT G&S production.
