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.
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
The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary. The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices. It’s clever. It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral. Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc. There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum. This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.
The final programme of Confluence Concerts season took place at Heliconian Hall on Wednesday night. It was billed as The Confluence Songbook and, if there was a theme, it was about doing live versions of music that had been streamed during the Plague. But really by the time we saw it it had outgrown that. For, in addition to the full line up of Confluence artistic associates there was a raft of guests which resulted in a fairly lengthy and very eclectic programme. Continue reading
The second Tapestry show this week which played Wednesday night at Theatre Passe Muraille was Jennifer Tung’s Iron Chef d’Orchestre. Knowing Jennifer’s kitchen prowess I expected this to be at least as food inspired as the previous night’s Le Kitchen Party but it wasn’t.
On Tuesday night Theatre Passe Muraille hosted the first of two “music and food” shows curated by members of the Women in Musical Leadership programme under the auspices of Tapestry Opera. Juliane Gallant trawled her Acadian roots to create Le Kitchen Party.fun.
Saturday night’s concert by the Cantabile Chamber Singers, with their conductor Cheryll J. Chung, at Church of the Redeemer; entitled A Prism of Sound, was the last of their 2023/24 season and, I think, the first time I’ve seen this particular choir. It was an all Canadian programme. The first part consisted of works by various choral composers like Matthew Emery and Peter Togni and it was all tonal works for unaccompanied choir on, basically, liturgical texts. It was pleasant enough but, for me at least, after a while one Ave Verum Corpus sounds much like the rest. I surprised myself by really quite liking Emery’s Sweetest Love which was quite complex and rather overturned my previous impressions of his music. I also enjoyed Eleanor Daley’s setting of an extract from the Song of Solomon; Upon Your Heart. But maybe that’s because the text has special resonance for me. No complaints about the performance though. They are a very good choir.
Jacinto Guerrero’s El huésped del Sevillano (The Guest at the Inn) is a zarzuela that premiered in Madrid in 1926. It’s a light hearted musical romp and the soprano doesn’t die at the end. I caught the last of three performances given by Toronto Operetta Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre directed by Guillermo Silva-Marin.
operaramblings 