This year’s Canadian Children’s Opera Company main show is a new production of Alice Ho and Marjorie Chan’s The Monkiest King which the company previously performed in 2018. This time it was at Harbourfront Centre Theatre which offered some additional opportunities and some challenges with its multi level configuration but also some sight line issues.
Male soprano Samuel Mariño was back in town for another concert with Tafelmusik; this time at Koerner Hall. There were three concerts and I caught the last one on Sunday afternoon. The repertoire consisted of opera recitatives and arias from the 18th century interspersed with related instrumental numbers.
It’s quite a story really. Schmaltz and Pepper started life in November 2023 and played their first gig exactly a year ago. They have become, dare I say it, a bit of a cult and their first CD is now on the street in CD and vinyl (really!?!) format with digital to come. My review of the CD is here.
I don’t pay as much attention to the free concert series at Metropolitan United as I should but yesterday I made it there to hear tenor Alexander Cappellazzo and pianist Narmina Afandiyeva in a programme of 20th and 21st century song.
Tapestry Opera are currently presenting a production of Sanctuary Song (music by Abigail Richardson-Schulte, words by Marjorie Chan). It’s a piece that premiered in 2008 and this revival, directed by Michae Mori, represents Tapestry’s first major production in the new Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre.
My review of Asitha Tennekoon and friends’ recital at the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto on Thursday is now posted at La Scena.
The last concert of Soundstreams 2024/25 season took place at Hugh’s Room on Wednesday evening. Marion Newman and Angela Park gave a recital called Ancestral Voices which premiered the piano version of the Bramwell Tovey song cycle of that name. I had heard the orchestral version with Marion singing and Bramwell conducting the VSO at Roy Thomson Hall when the orchestral version was new. It’s just as powerful in piano score; maybe more so as the singer can more easily convey the nuances of the text. The selection of texts is clever; tracing an arc from an imagined Eden via environmental destruction and the Residential School system to, maybe, the seeds of Reconciliation. The setting serves the text well and Angela made a really good substitute for an orchestra!
The Cunning Linguist is a one woman show written and performed by Monica Garrido Huerta. It’s produced by the TCL Collective and Aluna Theatre and directed by Beatriz Pizano. It’s playing at Factory Theatre until May 11th. Monica (the character) is a lesbian living with her conservative but fairly affluent and conventionally Catholic family in a small town in Mexico. She has a direct line to God, a sister who sings in a band in the town’s gay bar and a girlfriend but she’s not out to her family whose gaydar seems to have been made on the Friday afternoon shift.
Rebecca Grey is a composer with a very individual view of the world and her art. Who else would write operas about nightmares on an overnight bus trip or about a savvy racoon taking on a rapacious Toronto landlord? Or, for that matter, cycle the Highway of Tears? Her most substantial project to date is Bus Opera. I first saw a workshop of an early version of it at the CMC a couple of years ago followed by a performance of extracts at one of New Music Concerts’ MAKEWAY concerts for early career creators at St. George by the Grange a few weeks later. So I was very happy when I was offered the chance to attend a workshop performance of the (pretty much) complete work at Hugh’s Room on Tuesday night.
Tim Albery’s show; Garden of Vanished Pleasures, about Derek Jarman and his Kent coast garden was supposed to figure in Soundstreams 2020/21 season and we know what happened to that! So, it was reengineered as a film and streamed in September of 2021. I reviewed it at some length for Opera Canada. Now director Tim Albery has recreated it as a live show at the Berkeley Street Theatre.
operaramblings 