Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

The Flying Welshman

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BrynAdrianneThe Royal Opera House production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer finally made it to Toronto yesterday with a showing of the film at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.  There areva couple of Toronto connections.  The production was created by Tim Albery, although Daniel Dooner directs this revival, and the Senta is sung by Adrianne Pieczonka who was present with her family and introduced the film.  The Dutchman, of course, is played by hulking Welshman Bryn Terfel who wasn’t there.  He was probably crying into his beer somewhere at Wales coming up short in the Six Nations. Continue reading →

Turning the Tables

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Not Alfred Hitchcock

Not Alfred Hitchcock

Last night’s Tap:Ex Tables Turned lived up to the hype.  It was a pretty incredible experience but extremely difficult to describe.  The first half consisted of Nicole Lizée’s reprocessed clips from classic films (The Shining, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Birds, The Graduate and, of course, The Sound of Music but there were others).  It was mostly short loop stuff; for example, the ball bouncing scene from TSoM over and over again.  Beside the sound from the film there was live accompaniment from Ben Reimer on a variety of tuned percussion instruments and Carla Huhtanen with a variety of vocal effects and weirdly disturbing acting, helped along by the fact that she does look a bit like Julie Andrews, especially exploding Julie Andrews.  I think there may have been more electronics from Nicole in the mix too.  It was weird and fascinating and very enjoyable.

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La belle Hélène from the GGS

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Christina Campsall

Christina Campsall

The Glenn Gould School’s production of Offenbach’s 1864 operetta La belle Hélène opened at Koerner Hall last night.  Overall, it’s an enjoyable show with some strong performances though there are aspects of it that, in my view, rather missed the mark.  Certainly it made me realise just what a difficult piece to really bring off really well La belle Hélène is.  There are some very difficult singing roles and yet they need to sound effortless.  It needs the exquisite comic timing of a bedroom farce.  There’s also a difficult to define quality; very French and with a sexiness of the “I know it when I see it” variety.  I think it was a shortage of this last that was largely the problem last night.

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Postcard from Morocco

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Dominick Argento’s 1971 work Postcard from Morocco is unusual.  It’s opera meets Ionesco meets acid rock.  It’s a weird and wonderful kaleidoscope of scenes and music “about” a group of characters who seem to have nothing in common except that they have showed up at a railway station in Morocco c. 1914.  Michael Cavanagh’s production for UoT Opera plays it straight veering to OTT which seems about right.  This piece doesn’t need directorial “interpretation” but it does need careful organisation and lots of energy.  Cavanagh’s approach provided plenty of both.

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On a Darkling Plain

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Joel-Allison

Joel Allison

The Talisker Players latest offering is a concert titled On a Darkling Plain.  It’s an ambitious program of 20th and 21st century music interspersed, in the Talisker manner, with selected texts read (very expressively) by Stewart Arnott.

It kicks off with Samuel Barber’s 1931 setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.  It’s a dark and evocative piece for a 21 year old and was sensitively performed by baritone Joel Allison supported by violinists Michelle Ordorico and Andrew Chung, Talisker music director Mary McGeer on viola and Laura Jones on cello.  Allison is very young and hasn’t been seen much in Toronto but he seems to have the hallmarks of a lieder singer.  He’s expressive and attentive to the text, has an attractive voice but can summon up a surprising amount of volume when he needs it.  I was impressed.

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Winterreise

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It’s hard to think of a more appropriate work for Toronto this February than A Winter Journey although one could make a good case for A Winter Stay at Home with a Hot Water Bottle and a Bottle of Whisky.  Unfortunately Schubert didn’t set the latter so it was Winterreise we got from German baritone and pianist Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber at Koerner Hall last night.  It was completely classical.  Two men in tails walked out and performed the 24 songs of this most demanding cycle.  There were no histrionics.  There was no interpretive dance.  There were no video projections.  Indeed so unhistrionic was it that I don’t believe Herr Gerhaher’s right hand left the piano the entire time.

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Modern (Family) Opera

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Opera 5’s new show at the Arts and letters Club pairs Wolf-Ferrari’s 1909 comedy Il segreto di Susanna with a new work , Storybook, by Darren Russo inspired by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.  I can’t do a full review as I’m writing it up for Opera Canada but I think I can fairly say that the Wolf-Ferrari is hilarious and the Russo weird, rather wonderful and quite disturbing.  It’s a show well worth seeing and you can catch it tonight or tomorrow at 7.30pm.  Here are some production photos by Emily Ding.   Continue reading →

First we take Manhattan

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Irving-BerlinYesterday the Talisker Players ventured into new territory for them with a program of Irving Berlin songs entitled Puttin’ on the Ritz.  I’m no expert on Broadway in general or Tin Pan Alley in particular but, I suppose like most people, I’ve been exposed to a lot of this music through TV and films.  The Talisker presentation was interesting and unusual in that they employed a string quartet and two classically trained singers rather than a dance band or a pianist and voices from a different tradition.

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Anne Sofie von Otter and Angela Hewitt at Koerner Hall

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hewittI don’t usually give colloborative pianists headline billing but last night’s packed Koerner Hall recital certainly had an element of “They came for Ms. von Otter but stayed for Ms. Hewitt”.  Hewitt was phenomenal in a program that interspersed solo piano pieces with sets of songs.  In the songs she was simultaneously an individual voice and supportive of her colleague while the solo piano pieces were breathtaking; elegant Scubert and Brahms before the interval, staggeringly virtuosic Chabrier after.  She’s also fascinating to watch.   Continue reading →