Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

Walk and Touch Peace

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The Elmer Iseler Singers and their conductor Lydia Adams returned to live performance at Eglinton St. George’s United Church yesterday with a programme that included the World Premiere of Timothy Corlis’ Om Saha Nāvavatu.  The first half of the programme though consisted of four shorter works.  First up was Three Motets to Our Lady by Healey Willan.  The piece sets three texts; two invoking the Virgin Mary and one from The Song of Songs.  They are conventional but effective polyphonic settings and were very skilfully performed.  I’m not a huge Willan fan (heresy I know)  but I really enjoyed these.

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TOT’s Orpheus

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Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a run of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at the St. Lawrence Centre last night.  Guillermo Silva-Marin gives it a pretty conventional treatment with minimal scenery, “Greek” costumes and no big surprises.  It’s sung in English which has pros and cons for while the dialogue is intelligible enough the comprehensibility of the sung part is a bit variable.

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VOCES8 at St. James

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UK based vocal octet VOCES8 sang Tuesday night at St. James Anglican Cathedral.  The whole thing was arranged by Daniel Taylor of the Theatre of Early Music at the UoT and marked VOCES8’s Canadian debut.  I confess to a weakness for choral music in the Anglican tradition so this was a welcome opportunity to hear some very highly regarded performers.  They didn’t disappoint.  They are a finely tuned and highly skilled group.

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The Pilgrim’s Way

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Saturday night saw the inaugural concert of the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers; the professional core of the much larger Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, at Trinity St. Paul’s with Jean-Sébastien Vallée conducting.  There were four pieces on the programme; one very substantial and three shorter works.  Things kicked off with a pleasant but essentially conventional arrangement by Dierdre Robinson of Steal Away. This was followed by an Arabic piece by composer-in-residence Shireen Abu-Khader called I Forgive where the choir was joined by soloist Raneem Barakat.  This dealt with the short life and death of Egyptian LGBTQ activist Sarah Hegazi and was rather beautiful with intriguing Arab influences especially in the solo part.  Then came Elgar’s Lux Aeterna arranged for choir by John Cameron.

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Opera Sustenida’s Il Trovatore

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Opera Sustenida was started during the pandemic and came to my attention because of a couple of well produced on-line shows.  Feeling very strongly that it’s time to move back to live performance, and not seeing much yet from the smaller opera companies, I could hardly overlook Opera Sustenida’s show, even if I might not have chosen Verdi’s Il Trovatore for my first go at a live production.

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The Drawing Room

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Confluence Concerts opened their season yesterday at 918 Bathurst with a concert featuring a new work by Ian Cusson and André Alexis.  We’ll come to that because before it there was about 45 minutes of music doing what Confluence does; the relatively unexpected.  There were arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments of songs by the likes of Kate Bush, Coldplay and Neil Young.  There was an instrumental version of Bruce Cockburn’s Pacing the Cage (Larry Beckwith – violin, Andrew Downing – bass) and a Mozart violin sonata (Beckwith and Cusson) plus an intriguing percussion solo by Bevis Ng and more.  It featured the usual suspects; Larry Beckwith, Andrew Downing, Suba Sankaran, Dylan Bell and Patricia O’Callaghan plus Messrs Cusson and Ng and it was fun.

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Choral Splendour

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Soundstreams opened their season on Wednesday night at Koerner Hall with a concert of modern music for string orchestra, electronics, percussion and chorus.  The first, and most substantial work, was Paul Frehner’s LEX, being given its world premiere.  It sets diverse texts; quotes from Einstein, Newton’s laws of motion in the original Latin[1}, fragments of the Old testament in Hebrew, extensive passages from Michael Symmons Roberts’ Corpus etc.

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The Shape of Home

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The Shape of Home is a show about the life and works of Al Purdy currently being presented by the Festival Players in the Studio Theatre at the Streetcar Crowsnest. Actually I think it’s about a lot more than Al Purdy.  It does tell his story and use his poems as song material but in the creative process something a bit magical happened. It was created during lockdown using Zoom with the creator/participants messaging back and forth with ideas, snippets of songs and (mostly dark) thoughts.  The creative process must have been gruelling and at times disheartening but the final result is a show of high energy, and humour.  But above all it’s life and art affirming.  Performed in the tiny Studio Theatre it’s also very intimate.  For the first time since the theatres reopened I felt I had got my old life back.

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Uncle Vanya

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Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is the sort of play that makes one wonder why the Russian Revolution didn’t happen much sooner.  If the land owning class were living such miserable lives it must have been absolute hell for the peasants.  Maybe they just couldn’t afford a guillotine?  Anyway it’s playing at Crow’s Theatre right now in a production directed by Chris Abraham which runs until October 2nd.

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