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.
It was National Indigenous People’s Day so what better way to celebrate/commemorate than go listen to an Indigenous artist perform in the music garden ; where the trees almost stand in the water.
We got an hour of music from Inuk soprano Deantha Edmunds; mostly from her CD Connections. These songs are reflections; some in English, some in Inuktitut, on aspects of life as an Indigenous person in contemporary society and sit somewhere between art song and singer/songwriter territory. Subject matter ranges from traditional Indigenous children’s games , to the Northern landscape, to the spirits of Rain and Thunder and, inevitably and very, very sadly to Residential Schools and Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Two Spirited People. They are varied, skilful and heartfelt. Continue reading
Just another Saturday in Toronto? Not really. I was at two shows/events a few blocks apart; one in the morning, one in the evening, and the experiences were very different. In the morning I was at Roy Thomson Hall for a “conducting masterclass” under the auspices of the Women in Musical Leadership programme. I don’t think such events are at all common and it was certainly a first for me. The set up was that four young women conductors (Maria Fuller, Jennifer Tung, Naomi Woo and Juliane Gallant) got to rehearse the TSO in standard repertoire with principal conductor Gustavo Gimeno providing feedback and suggestions. Two of the ladies worked on Brahms’ First Symphony and the other two on Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. Continue reading
Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell, premiered at Harbourfront last night. It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it. The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying. She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.
operaramblings 