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.
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. 
operaramblings 