UoT Opera’s spring production; Massenet’s 1899 opera Cendrillon, has been transferred to the Elgin Theatre with the MacMillan currently out of commission. They have made some sensible accommodations to the rather unfriendly Elgin acoustic. The orchestra is reduced to about thirty players and placed at floor level in front of the stage. Almost all the stage action takes place right at the front which helped significantly with voice projection.
Pandolfe & Servants
My review of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah at Toronto City Opera is now up at Opera Canada.
Photo: Dahlia Katz
You might have noticed I’ve been expanding my horizons a bit recently. Saturday night was no exception. I was at The Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival at the Theatre Centre for a double bill of sketch comedy. I don’t think I’ve seen sketch comedy live since university so I really didn’t know what to expect.
We were in the BMO Incubator which sounds like the sort of place one would clone investment bankers rather than see a show but whatever. The first shock/surprise was the MC for the evening. He was trying so hard to create “atmosphere”. It was weirdly like a concert at the Zoomerplex only more so. You know like when some hapless stage manager comes out and does a sort of Kermit impersonation… “Let’s hear it for Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.16 in C major, K.545.. YEAH”…CLAP, CLAP, CLAP. It was like that but with dancing and more clapping. Continue reading
Iconic British countertenor James Bowman passed away last March. On Sunday night at Trinity-St. Pauls the Early Music folks at UoT presented a tribute to the man and his career. It was very well done. Music associated with Bowman; mostly Purcell and Britten, was interspersed with video and personal recollections/testimonials that fully reflected the considerable influence Bowman had on the English music scene and on the more widespread acceptance of the countertenor voice in the classical music world generally. Continue reading
Previous concerts from the Happenstancers have typically featured fairly conventional chamber music either arranged or combined in unusual ways; sometimes mixed with more modern/contemporary material. Saturday night’s concert at Redeemer Lutheran was a bit different. Titled Future Pastorale it was built around Claude Vivier’s 1968 work Ojikawa plus the text of Psalm 131 (also used, in French, by Vivier) and text from the “Introduction” to Blake’s Songs of Innocence; “Piping down the valleys wild. Piping songs of pleasant glee” etc with lambs, shepherds and clouds.
Performing were Brad Cherwin on clarinet, Louis Pino on percussion and soprano Hilary Jean Young. All three were also heavily involved with the plentiful electronics and the performance was significantly enhanced by Billy Wong’s imaginative lighting and there was some interesting stage business for some numbers.
The Confluence Concert series is noted for its imaginative and eclectic mix of musical styles so it’s no surprise that when they put on a programme of workshops for young artists and then let them loose on stage the only thing one can expect for sure is the unexpected. And so it was with Side by Side at the Heliconian Club on Thursday night.
Dance to the Abyss is a show of music from the Weimar Republic currently on stage at Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s given by Art of Time Ensemble as part of their 25th and final season.
It’s an interesting mix of instrumental and vocal music. The first piece in the programme is Erwin Schulhoff’s Hot Sonate for Sax and Piano which is a four movement, heavily jazz piece influenced, expertly played by Andrew Burashko and Wallace Halladay (I think). It’s followed by three pieces by the prolific Mischa Spoliansky. There’s the atmospheric instrumental piece Sehnsucht and two songs sung by Patricia O’Callaghan in English translation; I Am a Vamp and L’heure Bleue. The songs are pretty well known and fun and I liked O’Callaghan’s playful treatment of them. Continue reading
Tapestry’s Tap:Ex shows are experimental by design. They combine “classical” music making with something else in the hope that some interesting, and maybe even useful, ideas will emerge for future projects. This year’s show; Tap:Ex Versus in the Great Hall at OCAD, combined piano improvisation with an “art battle”. There were two shows with different pianists. At the early show Morgan-Paige played while Julie Amlin and Enrique Bravo painted.
![TAP EX Versus - Photo by Brian Medina - 89[Cropped]](https://operaramblings.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/tap-ex-versus-photo-by-brian-medina-89cropped.jpg?w=584)
Wednesday night at the Dakota Tavern there were two Debauchery at The Dakota shows from Opera Revue and various more or less scantily clad friends. We caught the early show. It was a BDSM show (Bizet, Donizetti, Saint-Saëns, Mozart… what were you thinking?). Actually this iteration probably stayed more operatic than previous Debaucheries though there were also plenty of show tune, cabaret and even comedy rock numbers plus, of course, burlesque.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir with their conductor Tõnu Kaljuste appeared at the rather spectacular (and very large) St. Paul’s Basilica last night as part of Sounstream’s 2023/24 season. The programme was largely made up of works to liturgical or scriptural texts by Palestrina and Pårt. It was gorgeous polyphony, beautifully sung but in which any sense of the text was largely lost. It also all inhabited a very similar sound world. Even towards the end of the concert when a little variety crept in it was surprisingly little. One might expect a 21st century work setting H.P. Lovecraft to sound more dramatic or abrasive than a 16th century setting of “Ave Maria” but Omar Daniels new piece Antarktos Monodies, despite having a few interesting touches, was much of a piece with the music that surrounded it.
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