Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

Komitas at Koerner

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Last night’s concert at Koerner Hall was a celebration of the life and work of Armenian composer and song collector Komitas on the occasion of his 150th birthday.  Unsurprisingly Koerner was packed with members of Toronto’s Armenian community.  Sometimes I feel uncomfortable at events like this; unable to really appreciate what the music means in its home culture, but last night what I felt was joy and inclusion.  It was an extremely well curated concert of rather beautiful music extremely well performed.

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What’s old is new

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Back to the Tranzac last night for the first Toronto performance of Against the Grain’s national tour of the Joel Ivany transladaptation of Puccini’s La Bohème which started it all back in 2011.  The Tranzac has changed a lot and so, of course, has Against the Grain.  The room is way smarter, they brought in a proper piano to replace the one that Topher plonked the first performance out on (and which memorably accompanied Jonathan MacArthur’s rather startling Hitler a few years later).  And not in any way to knock that first cast it’s a sign of AtG’s rising stature that this time they are fielding a cast that would not be out of place in most regional houses in Canada.

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The Way I See It

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The first of Amplified Opera’s series of three shows in the Ernest Balmer Studio took place last night. The series explores the idea of “otherness” in opera.  The Way I See It , directed by Aria Umezawa, explores how the opera and wider world treat the visually impaired and how we (in the broadest sense) can not just accommodate but incorporate their insights and perspectives into our performance practice.

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A Mexican and French afternoon

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We went to a recital of French and Mexican vocal music at Heliconian Hall yeaterday.  It was given by soprano Renée Bouthot and pianist Ana Cervantes.  Far the most interesting part sof the programme were the Mexican pieces.  Federico Ibarra’s 1988 setting of Tres Canciones by Lorca was really fine.  The three pieces were quite varied.  Canción has a complex piano part, an interesting vocal line and quite playful interaction between the two.  By no means always to be found in modern art song.  Canción de Cuna has a less interesting, kind of scoopy vocal line but a really virtuoso piano part while the final Canción de la muerte pequeña blends a wildly percussive piano part with dance rhythms in the vocal line.  All three texts are really interesting too.

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Hannigan at UoT 2019 edition

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There was a two part session with Barbara Hannigan at UoT yesterday.  The first part consisted of an open rehearsal/masterclass for the Contemporary Ensemble conducted by Wallace Halladay with Maeve Palmer as soloist of Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre.  The piece is a mash up of three areas for the character Gepopo from the opera Le Grand Macabre.  The basic premise is that Gepopo, the head of the secret police, is trying to warn her boss that the Earth is about to be hit by a comet.  Unfortunately Gepopo has spent so long in the underworld of spooks and spies that she’s utterly paranoid and can only speak in broken fragments and secret codes.  It’s weird and surreal and often funny in a disturbing way.  It’s a piece very much associated with Hannigan who has sung it many times and worked on it with the composer. 

mysteries

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This is Prophetic!

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This summer Against the Grain Theatre and UoT Opera have been collaborating on an Intensive focussed on modern opera.  Last night saw the culminating show; This is Prophetic, featuring staged scenes from twelve post 1950 operas.  Since there were one tenor, one baritone and nineteen assorted sopranos and mezzos selecting the scenes must have been quite a challenge. Unsurprisingly perhaps there was nothing from Billy Budd.

Alasdair Campbell & Morgan Reid (Gloriana)

Alasdair Campbell & Morgan Reid (Gloriana)

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Muse

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Yesterday I saw the culmination of the project that I had seen in rehearsal earlier in the week.  The Ukrainian Art Song Project Summer Intensive presented 21 songs in a linked narrative about losing and regaining inspiration.  It was staged in the round in the Temerty Theatre with the piano in the middle of the room and the action taking place all over.  Pavlo Hunka directed.  Albert Krywolt and Robert Kortgaard shared piano duties and there were eight young singers from Canada, the US and Ukraine.

dreamless

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Song of the Earth

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Last night’s final Koerner Hall event in Toronto Summer Music started off with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major.  It’s a tuneful, well constructed piece which in places riffs off Romany music, hence its nickname “Turkish”.  Jonathan Crow was the soloist with a small orchestra drawn from all the area’s major orchestras plus TSM Fellows.  Gemma New conducted.  It was very satisfying.  The orchestra was excellent and the interplay between solist and orchestra worked very well.  It’s quite a demanding piece for the soloist and I really enjoyed the sound that Jonathan produced.  He plays an instrument with a rather distinctive timbre which worked well here.  I’m curious about the first movement cadenza.  I don’t know the work well enough to knoew what the options are but this one was very virtuosic though sounding distinctly post-Mozartian.

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Driftwood’s Dream

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Driftwood Theatre’s Bard’s Bus Tour touched down at Withrow Park yesterday evening in near perfect conditions for their lightly updated musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  D. Jeremy Smith’s production is cleverly constructed to cover off all the bases with a cast of only eight and with the minimal staging possible for an outdoor touring production.  The updating makes the Mechanicals into Oshawa auto workers.  The music is largely integral; parts of the text being set to music by Kevin Fox and Tom Lillington further adapted and performed by Alison Beckwith with support from various members of the cast.  There are cuts and the whole piece runs about an hour and forty five minutes without an interval.

MusicalMidsummer-photobyDahliaKatz-Ahmed Moneka

Ahmed Moneka as Puck

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Schubert to Mercury to Beethoven

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The main stage concert for TSM at Koerner Hall last night was given by the Art of Time Ensemble with vocalists John Southworth and Sarah Slean.  It’s my first encounter with Art of Time have been around for about ten years and specialise in cross genre collaborations inspired by their founder, pianist Andrew Burashko.

TSM July 25-Dale Butterill

Last night was classical meets singer songwriter.  There was an introductory piece by Christos Hatzis, some Schubert, plenty of Gershwin and lashings of Leonard Cohen plus much more (there was no set list and I didn’t take notes).  It’s rather out of my usual zone but I enjoyed.  Southworth is a really quirky vocalist, exemplified by a rather weird version of The Old Folks at Home; which needed to be weird!  Slean is quite a performer; good voice, very funny, great mover.  The ensemble was terrific across the board.  I’m sold.  There are lots of reasons to stretch the boundaries of classical performance.  Larry Beckwith does it very well with his Confluence series.  Here’s another example.

TSM July 25-Photo Dale Butterill

The late show, also at Koerner, featured Jonathan Crow, Katya Poplyansky, Minkyoung Lee and Allison Rich in a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12 in B-flat Major Op. 130 but with a twist.  They played the full original version in which the Grosse Fuge Op. 133 forms the finale.  So, basically, an hour long string quartet!  It was very well done though I confess late Beethoven at 10.30 pm was straining the grey matter.

Photo credit: Dale Butteril