Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

UoT Opera’s Orpheus in the Underworld

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Brittany Cann

French operetta is notoriously difficult to get right.  The genre treacherously combines a kind of humour that doesn’t always translate well in time or language, difficult music to sing and a need to be as “naughty” as the original seemed without being crass.  It’s a huge credit to Michael Patrick Albano and his student cast that they pretty much pulled off all of that last night with their new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.  One could nit pick details (I shall) but overall it was a well paced show with some good singing and acting and it was genuinely funny.  Unsurprisingly the audience lapped it up.  Continue reading →

Music of the Rainbow Nation

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This year’s Soundstreams concert season was supposed to feature a performance by the Nelson Mandela University Choir.  The current student and other social unrest in South Africa led to that tour being cancelled and left Soundstreams with the problem of organising a replacement line up in just four and a half weeks.  I think they should be congratulated for sticking with the South African theme and producing the line up we saw last night subtitled A Tribute to Nelson Mandela’s Dream.

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LooseTEA’s Carmen

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Last night LooseTEA Theatre presented a work-in-progress version of their reimagined Carmen.  Director and librettist Alaina Viau promised a “a radically envisioned” Carmen and she wasn’t kidding.  Apart from the fact that Ricardo (Escamilio) and John Anderson (Don José) are rivals for Carmen’s affections and there’s a woman, Michaela, with a prior attachment to John and, of course, that John kills Carmen there’s not a whole lot left of Mérimée’s story.  We are in Toronto.  John is a vet suffering from PTSD who has left his wife (Michaela) and kids.  Carmen manages a bar but is about to open her own place with the help of investment banker Ricardo.  She comes across as an everyday working girl rather than someone whose life is a serial process of picking up and discarding men.  Episodes that fit the big numbers of the score are quite cleverly crafted together to weave a narrative that works but rather relies on John’s PTSD to explain the two murders.  Woven into the opera are videos by Darren Bryant that contain some of the characters’ back stories.  Music is a mix of a conventional keyboard reduction played by Natasha Fransblow and live electronics from sound artist SlowPitchSound.  The use of electronics brings a grittiness that feels like an essential way of undermining the “prettiness” of the score.  Running around 55 minutes all told it feels a bit episodic and I hope (and expect) that the final version will seem more continuous.  Certainly there’s already more than just the basis for a very interesting piece of music theatre.

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Balancing on the Edge

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Balancing on the Edge combines the talents of A Girl in the Sky Productions and the Thin Edge New Music Collective.  It’s a challenging and exciting blend of New Circus and Contemporary Music (for some definition of both/either).  The circus element included aerialists, juggling and clowns while the music varied from Cage and Xenakis to pieces composed for the show.  There were live projections too.  The show was divided into six “acts” with some clowning interludes and other breaks for set up but mostly it was pretty fluid.  The performance space, the Harbourfront Theatre, was pretty much cleared down to a single ring of seats at ground level with more seating in the galleries, which allowed plenty of space for the various rigs employed.

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Cendrillon in Viardot’s salon

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The Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music opened a two performance run of Viardot’s Cendrillon last night at Mazzoleni Hall.  The conceit was that we and the performers were all guests in Mme, Viardot’s salon and to this end we were all given a slip of paper with our character name on it but I promptly lost mine and it wasn’t actually needed for anything,  Cute idea though.  It also allowed for a production that fitted with the acutely limited staging resources of Mazzoleni.  The piece is heavy on dialogue and it was presented in English, in an updated translation that had its moments.  I doubt the Viardot household had ever heard of “organic, non GMO, fair trade” coffee.

Photo: Nicola Betts

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Naomi’s Road

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Naomi’s Road; music by Ramona Luengen, lbretto by Anne Hodges, has been around as an opera for ten years or so and it got its Toronto premier last night at St. David’s Anglican Church in a production directed by Michael Mori for Tapestry Opera.  It’s based on Joy Kogawa’s novel for children of the same name which tells the story of Naomi and her brother Stephen; Japanese-Canadian children torn from a comfortable middle class Vancouver home by the WW2 era Canadian government’s policy of interning Canadians of Japanese descent as “enemy aliens”.  It’s a shameful story and one that Canadians need to know about in an era when fear of the “other” is being stoked on all sides.  Perhaps we like to look down our noses at the antics of our neighbours to the south but our own history has its dark side and we need to remember.

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Four Seasons of Mother Russia

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Off Centre Music Salon’s opening concert of the season featured a largely Russian, largely 19th century program.  There were plenty of songs by Glinka, Tchaikovsky and the like sung by an interestingly contrasted mix of Ilana Zarankin, Joni Henson and Ryan Harper with Inna Perkis and Boris Zarankin accompanying.  It was good to hear Joni in this program in the warm acoustic of Trinity St. Paul’s.  I think I’ve mostly heard her in the RBA which is notoriously hard on dramatic sopranos.  Here the combination of the acoustic and Russian vowel sounds resulted in a very pleasing richness of tone rather than stridency.  She also blended well with Harper’s very tenorish tenor and made an interesting contrast with the much lighter, brighter Zarankin.  Nice work all round.

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Deb Voigt in recital

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Deborah Voigt appeared with Brian Zeger at Koerner Hall last night.  I guess I was expecting something rather more ebullient from Ms. Voigt but what we got was a perfectly decent, slightly low key, recital with a heavy emphasis on American repertoire and very little banter, though she did unwind a bit toward the end of the program.

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Deb Voigt and Brian Zeger at Carnegie Hall 2007

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An evening with Osvaldo Golijov

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Against the Grain Theatre’s latest production, Ayre, continues their run of innovative, site specific shows.  This time it was a presentation of four works by Argentinian Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov at the Ismaili Centre; part of the Aga Khan complex on Wynford Drive.  The “appetisers” were three short works presented in three of the public spaces of the Centre.  Yiddishbbuk, for string quartet (Jennifer Murphy, Barry Shiffman, Laila Zakzook, Drew Comstock), was inspired by apocryphal psalms and is a fractured piece employing a lot of extended techniques to create a three movement work “in the mode of Babylonic Lamentations”.  Lua Descolorida, with Adanya Dunn as soprano soloist, sets a 19th century text in Gallego.  It’s a folksy, Arab inflected piece over a kind of string “ground” with pizzicato cello.  Short but rather beautiful.  For Tenebrae the quartet was joined by clarinetist Brad Cherwin and soprano Ellen McAteer.  It’s a beautiful piece with a melismatic vocal  line culminating with multiple repeats of the single word “Jerusalem”.

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Arias and Maqams

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To the Aga Khan Museum last night for a program of Syrian and Western music by Lubana Al Quntar and friends; Eylam Basaidi on violin and April Centrone on oud and percussion..  It was my first time at the museum and the auditorium there is just gorgeous.  In a city with some pretty spectacular performance spaces this may just be the most beautiful.  It’s just a pity it’s so hard to get to on the TTC.  The program was distinctly heavy on the “Syrian” side of “Syrian and Western”.  There were Syriac hymns, muwasshahat, specifically waṣla of Aleppo and Syrian folk songs in a tradition sung by the women of Damascus (I believe).  I’m no expert in this music but it was possible to hear developments and continuities.  The hymns (in Aramaic) clearly influenced the later classical music though the former were basically modal while there was a lot more tone bending in the later pieces.  I hesitate to speculate on the relationship between the waṣla and the folk songs.  I know from my own experience with the folk music of the British Isles how influences go back and forth and how folk songs sung by a classically trained singer may not always reflect how they sound when performed more demotically.  Still, the audience lapped this bit up with much singing along and clapping accompaniment.

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