Soprano Karoline Podolak and pianist Rachael Kerr’s recital at the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto on Thursday afternoon featured seven languages and lots of coloratura. Full review at La Scena Musicale.
A very polished recital
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Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous
Schrödinger’s passengers
Realscape Productions have brought the DARKFIELD audiosensory experiences to Toronto. Last night I took in both shows; FLIGHT and SÉANCE. What they have in common is that they take place in the dark, in a specially equipped shipping container using binaural headsets for the audio and some sort of trickery for the other sensory effects.
Credit: Alex Purcell
What is Divine?
Confluence Concerts’ first show of the season was curated by Patricia O’Callaghan and aimed to explore the Divine in music from many angles. It played at Heliconian Hall on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Collide-o-Scope
Of all the groups I’ve seen explore the boundaries of “classical music” in Toronto, none goes further than Slow Rise Music and this was especially true of their concert Collide-o-Scope which played at the Tranzac on Saturday and Sunday.
Broken from the Happenstancers
The Happenstancers latest gig; Broken, played on Friday evening at Redeemer Lutheran. Getting back to their core mission, this concert explored the relationships between baroque music and contemporary repertoire and the plusses and minusses of combining music, instruments and techniques from both. So, interspersed between sonatas by Johann Rosenmüller; originally scored for strings and continuo but played here by various combinations of oboe/cor anglais, regular and bass clarinet, strings and accordion, we got contemporary pieces.
Across the Channel
On Friday evening Toronto’s Diapente Renaissance Quintet [1] combined with Montreal based medieval music ensemble Comtessa [2] to create an intriguing programme at St. Thomas’ Anglican. The concert was titled Across the Channel : English and French Music of the Hundred Years War; which was more or less accurate! The works; vocal and instrumental, actually spanned from the 13th century to the latter half of the 15th; so a rather longer span than the war, but the “English and French” bit was true enough. Unlike the war, Scots and Gascons were notably absent!
Strangers in the house
Every few weeks Second City hosts a couple of sketch comedy acts for two nights in their Theatre 73. Last night and tonight it’s Toronto troupe Potato, Potato and Montreal based Small Friend Tall Friend. Details on this are going to be a bit sparse as the house programme contained almost no useful information and the two groups web presence seems to be limited to Instagram (Kids these days!).
Anyway it was fun in a Fringe kind of way (though way more comfortable than most Fringe venues). I really rather like Potato, Potato’s slanted look at life in Toronto; the housing crisis (room mate drops dead when forced to flatshare with a cat), Ontario Place (apparently gifted to Doug’s favourite German metal band), Doug again (this time shooting a cyclist) sand Olivia Chow (crashing everybody’s parties). Daft of course, but nicely paced and energetic. I’d go see them again. Continue reading
Neujahrs in Vienna… in Toronto… in July
The last Koerner Hall concert of this year’s Toronto Summer Music riffed off the Vienna Phil’s traditional New Year extravaganza with lots of Johann Strauss waltzes and the cheesiest fake Magyar (mezzo) soprano arias from operetta. I was skeptical when I first saw the programme but it turned out to be extremely enjoyable; partly on account of excellent musicianship and partly because everyone involved was having so much fun.
The Last Castrato
The last great castrato, we are told, was Vellutti who was a favourite with many early 19th century composers. Tuesday night’s concert at Koerner Hall as part of Toronto Summer Music was a tribute to him with counter-tenor Franco Fagioli accompanied by L’Orchestre de l’Opéra de Versailles and their flamboyant violinist/conductor Stefan Plewniak performing music associated with Vellutti interspersed with orchestral music from (mostly) the same operas.
MISSING in concert
My review of Thursday’s performance of Brian Current and Marie Clements’ MISSING at Toronto Summer Music is now up at La Scena Musicale.
Photo: Lucky Tang
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