Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

Another conducting masterclass

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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 →

One Ring to Rule Them All

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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.

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The Whole Gang and Then Some

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heliconian-club-2022-4-1024x768The 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 →

Iron Chef d’Orchestre

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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.

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Le Kitchen Party

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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.

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A Prism of Sound

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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.

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Cervantes finds a plot

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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.

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Dichterliebe: Whose Love?

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I caught the second performance of Teiya Kasahara and David Eliakis’ Dichterliebe: Whose Love at Heliconian Hall on Saturday evening.  It was part of the Confluence Concerts series and not untypical of the eclectic nature of that series.  Also it was a logical continuation of these two partnering on shows that question gender norms in the classical music industry.

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Verdi Requiem with The TMC

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I caught the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir’s second performance of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem at Koerner Hall on Tuesday evening. It’s a piece that’s deservedly famous but I think that this was my first time seeing it live.  It’s an interesting piece.  It’s not a conventional requiem but nor would I call it “operatic”.  It’s far more dramatic than any other mass setting I can think of (even Britten’s War Requiem) but in its own way.  Part of it is structural.  Verdi keeps bringing back the “Dies Irae” text and music; even right down to. the final “Libera Me”.  As his setting for the “Dies Irae” is extremely dramatic (I want to say gonzo but that doesn’t seem very ecclesiastical!) it injects a degree of drama where the core text doesn’t really call for it.  FWIW the setting is very loud with choir and orchestra going full out and the timpani being almost scary.  It’s particularly so first up where it segues straight into the “Tuba Mirum” with trumpets up on either side of the choir loft.

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Diasporic Bridges

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Diasporic Bridges, at Trinity St. Paul’s on Sunday afternoon, was the Amici Chamber Ensemble’s final concert of the season.  It celebrated the way that music binds emigrant communities together and provides a link to “home”.  Most, though not all, of the pieces performed were by composers of diverse styles and backgrounds living and working in Canada and the live music was preceded by an excerpt from Amici’s upcoming film on the same topic.  I’ll save writing about that until I’ve seen the whole thing.

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