Category Archives: Performance review – RBA

A reet canny lad

Posted on by
2

There was no doubt that the Four Seasons Centre was the place to be at noon today.  Few opera fans would willingly miss a free recital by Sir Thomas Allen and I doubt that anyone who attended was disappointed.  Perhaps the voice doesn’t have the bloom it had twenty years ago but it’s still exceptionally fine and the craftsmanship and sheer stage presence was little short of amazing.  Above all, perhaps, it’s the humanity of the man that shone through for the hour and a bit he entertained us.

Thomas Allen - credit Karen Reeves Continue reading →

That passionate monosyllable

Posted on by
1

applebyYoung American tenor Paul Appleby has been delighting audiences in the current COC production of Così fan tutte where he sings Ferrando. Today he got to show us what he could do as a lieder singer in a lunchtime concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  He started off with a stylish, if occasionally tentative, set of five Schubert songs.  It was a promising start with some very stylish and controlled singing and unhistrionic acting with the voice.  Hitting his stride, he gave us seven songs from Schumann’s Myrten cycle.  These covered a wide range of moods from tender passion to drunken ecstasy.  Again great skill and artistry and lovely accompaniment from Anne Larlee at the piano.

Continue reading →

Lunchtime with Tracy Dahl

Posted on by
Reply

Dahl, Tracy (c)Kevin ClarkI’ve attended many very good concerts in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre but I’m not sure I’ve ever attended one as intense as Tracy Dahl and Liz Upchurch’s Songs from the Heart recital today.  Tracy really is a rather extraordinary artist.  She is the antithesis of the lieder singer who stands demurely by the piano and Schuberts mellifluously.  She throws every fibre of her being into the performance.  It’s not campily histrionic but voice, facial expression and gesture are all used to the full whether she’s  hiccupping a drunken Harlequin or sibilantly suggesting a slithery singing snake.

Continue reading →

Così preview

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s lunchtime concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre featured members of the COC Studio Ensemble performing extracts from Act 1 of Così fan tutte as a teaser for their performance of Atom Egoyan’s production on February 7th.  This promises to beeven more confusing than usual as the young lover roles are all being shared to accommodate everyone.  Today, Clraence Frazer and Danielle MacMillan being sick we had but one Guglielmo, Cameron McPhail, and one Dorabella, Charlotte Burrage.  Andrew Haji and Owen McAusland alternated as Ferrando and Sasha Djihanian and Aviva Fortunata doubled Fiordiligi (those two, at least, are easy to tell apart).  Gordon Bintner sang Don Alphonso and Claire de Sévigné played Despina.

2014-01-28-Ensemble-044 Continue reading →

Love and Life

Posted on by
2

Songs of Life&Love HR (4 of 25)Anne Larlee and Simone Osborne brought their Maureen Forrester recital tour to Toronto today, courtesy of Jeunesses Musicales Canada and the COC’s free lunchtime concert series.  The programme featured works by Bellini, Schumann, Hahn and Richard Strauss plus two specially commissioned pieces from Brian Current.

I particularly enjoyed the Schumann and Strauss pieces.  Simone’s interpretation of the Frauenliebe und -Leben showed a very wide range of emotion and tone colour and exceptionally good German diction.  The three Strauss songs also displayed considerable power.  This was very classy lieder singing.

Continue reading →

English Song

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday’s free concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre featured three members of the Ensemble Studio singing 20th century English language songs.  The concert opened and closed with Vaughan Williams.  Baritone Clarence Frazer gave us five songs from Songs of Travel (texts by Robert Louis Stevenson) and Cameron McPhail sang three songs from The House of Life (texts by Dante Gabriel Rossetti).  These are some of my favourites and I must have almost worn out my CD of Thomas Allen singing them (On the Idle Hill of Summer on Virgin Classics).  So, I don’t know whether that made me more or less critical but I thoroughly enjoyed both performances.  Clarence sang strongly, straightforwardly and with very fine diction while Cam was more overtly emotional.  Both approaches worked.

Clarence Frazer

Clarence Frazer

Continue reading →

Robert Pomakov with members of the Gryphon Trio

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday’s lunch time concert featured bass Robert Pomakov accompanied by members of the Gryphom Trio.  The programme kicked off with two songs by Glinka with Bob accompanied by Roman Borys on cello and Jamie Parker on piano.  The first piece was called Lullaby but it’s hard to imagine anyone sleeping through Bob’s powerful rendering.  The second piece, Doubt, showcased some lovely playing by Borys.

Pomakov Gryphon Trio - Tim Flynn Continue reading →

Poetic Echoes: A Britten Celebration

Posted on by
2

Yesterday’s free concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre saw four members of the Ensemble Studio singing contrasting works by Benjamin Britten.  First up was bass-baritone Gordon Bintner with excerpts from Tit for Tat; settings of works by Walter de la Mare.  These were full blooded performances and Bintner gave full reign to his powerful and flexible voice.  It’s a terrific instrument but I would have preferred a little more restraint and subtlety, especially in something as intimate as these pieces.  Next up was tenor Andrew Haji with excerpts from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo.  It was rather a similar story.  He has a fine, operatic voice and gave the songs a rather operatic treatment.  It was good singing but not in the idiom one is accustomed to hearing this music sung in.

Photo: Karen Reeves

Photo: Karen Reeves

Continue reading →

Here we go again

Posted on by
1

Yesterday saw the first of this season’s free concerts in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  As has become the norm it featured the singers of the COC’s Ensemble Studio.  This year it was dedicated to the memory of the late Lotfi Mansouri and included a couple of short tributes to him.

Six of the Ensemble’s singers are new this year, as is the sole pianist, so these were mostly singers I haven’t heard a lot of.  I’ve also observed how much members of the Ensemble Studio develop in the programme and last year we had a solid group of third years with a few new entrants.  The balance has shifted to the other extreme and so no surprise that yesterday we heard more potential than polish.

ensemble2013

Front (l – r): Clarence Frazer, Sasha Djihanian, Danielle MacMillan, Michael Shannon
Middle (l – r): Gordon Bintner, Aviva Fortunata, Claire de Sévigné, Cameron McPhail
Back (l – r): Andrew Haji, Charlotte Burrage, Owen McCausland
Photographer: Karen Reeves

Continue reading →