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.
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 
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.
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. 
So on a grungy corner of Dundas and Ossington lies a grungy cellar dive; the Dakota Tavern. It’s not an obvious place to do opera though a mash up of opera and burlesque is more plausible. And so that’s what we got from the Opera Revue crew (Alexander Hajek, Danie Friesen and Claire Harris) and four burlesque dancers.
operaramblings 