Saturday evening in Walter Hall saw the conclusion of this year’s Toronto Summer Music with a concert that showcased different parts of the festival programme. There was the community element. The Community Choir, with their professional section leads and conductor Jamie Hillman produced very competent versions of Mozart’s Veni Sancte Spiritus and Lydia Adam;s arrangement of the rankin Family’s We Rise Again. The omnicompetent and omnipresent Rachael Kerr accompanied on piano.
Sondra Radvanovsky was due to give a recital in Koerner Hall on Thursday night but she cancelled due to illness. Toronto Summer Music did extremely well to find a replacement of the calibre of American mezzo J’nai Bridges at such short notice. While many people turned their tickets in for refunds and others, it seems, just didn’t show up, those who did were treated to a performance by Ms. Bridges, accompanied by the ever reliable Rachel Kerr, that most certainly did not disappoint.
Toronto Summer Music’s presentation in the Isabel Bader Theatre on Monday evening featured the Payadora Tango Ensemble and dance company PointeTango. It was very much a two part show. The first half featured typical Payadora fare; some original compositions, some arrangements of standards, all in a tango style. And all, of course, performed with the excellence we have come to expect from this group. The twist here was that many of the numbers were accompanied by dance by Erin Scott- Kafadar and Alexander Richardson of PointeTango.
TSM Wednesday night in Walter Hall featured the Isidore Quartet (Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon – violins, Devin Moore – viola and Joshua McClendon – cello). The first half of the programme featured two new works plus the first four fugues from Bach’s Art of the Fugue.
Wednesday night’s main event in Toronto Summer Music was Teiya Kasahara’s The Butterfly Project performed at Walter Hall. Teiya’s introduction was most interesting. For them, the project is about exploring their Japanese-ness. As the child of a Japanese father and a German mother growing up in Vancouver that’s inevitably a complex thing. When it gets combined with opera and, specifically, Puccini’s “Japanese” travesty Madama Butterfly it gets really complicated. So The Butterfly Project raises some really interesting questions; for Teiya ones related to being a to-some-extent-Japanese performer of works like MB, for me ones related to why this opera fascinates people like Teiya when, frankly, I’d be happy to bin it.
Wednesday evening’s early evening shuffle concert at Heliconian Hall featured Karine White and Hyejin Kwon in Love Letter to Toronto. It was a compilation of opera arias, art song and more popular fare; sometimes altered a bit, evoking those things we love and don’t about Toronto. Summer nights, love and loss, wildlife and, inevitably, traffic and the TTC featured prominently. oomposers featured ranged from Mozart to Heisler and Goldrich via Puccini, Bernstein, Menotti and more. All in all, a varied and nicely constructed programme.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Karine White and I think when I last did it was in something classically operatic like Purcell. What she revealed on Wednesday, besides some very fine singing, was a really engaging stage personality. She’s just fun to watch and listen too and she has the knack of making everything sound personal. Seductive or struck dumb by love; nervous or brash, She can do it all convincingly. Hyejin’s contribution was fun too. It’s not just her top notch pianism but she played off well as Karine’s “straight woman” rather as David Eliakis did in Teiya Kasahara’s first iteration of The Queen in Me. It was a fun way to spend an hour that could only have been improved by adding raccoons.
Toronto Summer Music isn’t afraid to offer the unusual or unexpected, which is admirable. Last night’s short performance at Walter Hall; Parting Wild Horse’s Mane, paired contemporary music for string quartet with moves from Tai Chi Chuan. It was OK but I’m not convinced that was much synergy between music and movement.
Soprano Ana María Martínez gave a recital last night at Walter Hall with pianist Craig Terry as part of Toronto Summer Music. Ana’s background is Cuban and Puerto Rican and, of course, linguistically Spanish. So it felt appropriate to have a programme in two halves. One devoted to Spain and one to the trans-Atlantic diaspora (if we can call it that).
This year’s Toronto Summer Music; theme “Metamorphosis”, kicked off on Thursday evening in a packed Koerner Hall. It was TSM at its best; the concept a bit odd, even a bit mad, the execution brilliant and the result exciting and very enjoyable. Basically take two seriously virtuosic pianists and as the late, lamented Humphrey Lyttleton might have said “given then silly things to do”. Well they weren’t really silly, just a bit unusual.
Rossini’s Otello is an interesting piece with a completely different plot to the Shakespeare/Verdi version. It’s entirely set in Venice for a start. For more details on the plot and the not insignificant casting demands you might find the first few paragraphs of my review of a 2012 recording from Zurich helpful.
operaramblings 