Category Archives: Performance review – RBA

Sea Variations

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This year’s Canadian Art Song Project commission is a setting of poems by EJ Pratt by Dean Burry entitled Sea Variations.  It was given its first performance yesterday in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre by Michael Colvin and Stephen Philcox.  The texts all deal with the moods of the sea and seem curiously archaic for the 1920s when they were written.  They are much more reminiscent of, say, Matthew Arnold than Yeats, let alone Eliot.  They have a certain power though and anybody who knows the North Atlantic will easily appreciate why they might appeal to fellow Newfoundlander Burry.

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From the Depths

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Stéphane Mayer’s Les Adieux recital yesterday in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre was definitely out of the ordinary.  Rather than a concert or recital format we got a fully staged and costumed version of two Oscar Wilde related works.  First up was Saint Saëns’ version of The Nightingale and the Rose with Matt Pilipiak reading the story, Danika Lorèn as the Nightingale and Stéphane at the piano.  It was well done and a reminder of what a truly lovely voice Danika has.

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1001 Nights with Miriam Khalil

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Yesterday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA was a song recital with an Oriental(ist) theme by polyglot soprano Miriam Khalil and pianist Topher Mokrzewski.  It kicked off with the two Suleika songs by Schubert to texts by Marianne von Willimer.  For my taste Miriam’s voice and treatment of the songs was decidedly on the dramatic side.  It was interesting and there’s no doubting the commitment but it’s not my favourite way to hear Schubert.  It was all uphill from there though.  Ravel’s Shéherazade; Debussy inspired music to texts by Tristan Klingsor, was given an equally dramatic treatment, and Miriam is very dramatic in both voice and body language,  but here it worked for me, especially the passionate invocation of the invented East in Asie.

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A Few of Liz Upchurch’s Favourite Things

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Liz Upchurch has now been head of the COC Ensemble Studio for twenty years.  To put that in perspective, Alain Coulombe was an Ensemble Studio member back then.  So Liz has deeply influenced a whole generation of Canadian singers and it was fitting that there should be a concert in her honour in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  It’s named for the man who brought her to the COC and it’s been the venue for countless concerts by the Mama Bear’s cubs.

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Les Adieux: A Poetic Diary

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This was baritone Sam Chan and pianist Stéphane Mayer’s farewell to the Ensemble Studio.  It was an all Schubert program; Poetisches Tagebuch (Schulze), the Impromptu in G flat and the Goethe Lieder.  It was a very classy performance by any standards.  There was no need here to make allowances for “young artists”.  One would have been happy to pay Koerner Hall prices to hear a recital of this quality.

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Stéphane Mayer and Samuel Chan performing in the Canadian Opera Company’s Free Concert Series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, photo: Dan Truong

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Musique 3 Femmes preview

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Yesterday’s concert in the RBA was a sneak preview of the material for a longer workshop/performance in the Ernest Balmer Studio on Saturday night.  The five works involved and the background are covered in this post.

We got excerpts from all five works with Jennifer Szeto at the piano and various combinations of Suzanne Rigden, Kristin Hoff and Lindsay Connolly singing.  There were also brief introductions to each piece from the creative teams.  What struck me most was how different the pieces were but how they seemed to reflect regional differences in musical expectations across Canada.  For example, the two works from Quebec both used extended/prepared piano with a bunch of extended vocal techniques in Margareta Jeric’s Suites d’une ville morte.  Laurence Jobidon’s L’hiver attend beaucoup de moi was perhaps more conventionally lyrical but it wasn’t a sound world one hears much in Toronto (at least in opera).

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Suzanne Rigden performing in the Canadian Opera Company’s Free Concert Series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre

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Water nymphs

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Lauren Eberwein and Rachel Kerr put on a rather different show in the RBA at lunchtime.  The musical component consisted of Ravel’s Jeu d’eaux and Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi.  The surprise was that Lauren painted on a canvas on the floor throughout the performance.  She brought on two palettes of acrylics and used her hands and feet to create a large abstract on the broad theme of “water”.  Needless to say, she ended up covered in paint.

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Not Sam

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Off I went to the Four Seasons Centre to see Samuel Chan and Stéphane Mayer perform some Schubert.  Sadly Sam was indisposed so what we got was a hastily, but very well, constructed program featuring some of the other singers in the Ensemble Studio.

Things kicked off with the increasingly impressive Anne-Sophie Neher in an accomplished rendering of Mozart’s “show off” piece Exsultate jubilate, in which she showed very decent control in the rather fiendish runs.  She was back later with “The Presentation of the Rose” from Der Rosenkavalier which sounded suitably Straussian and sufficiently girlish at the same time.  Nicely done. She made a third appearance with one of Adèles’s arias from Le comte Ory.  This didn’t quite do it for me but it was fun to hear Stéphane playing around with the very Rossiniesque accompaniment.

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Batting 1000

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Yesterday saw the 1000th concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre (*) since the house opened in 2006.  Fittingly it was given by Susan Bullock who sang Brünnhilde in the Canadian premier of the Ring Cycle that christened the new theatre.  She was accompanied by Liz Upchurch who has also been around since before the new house existed.

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The Three Tenors

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Today’s RBA lunchtime concert featured the three tenors; Kammersinger Michael Schade, currently appearing as Aegisth in the COC’s Elektra, Irish tenor Mick O’Schade and Scottish folksinger Michael McSchade.  They were most ably supported by COC Concertmaster Marie Bérard and Sandra Horst at the piano.  The concert was billed as a tribute to John McCormack and Fritz Kreisler but sad events had morphed it into also being a tribute to the CBC’s Neil Crory.  I hope, and believe, that he would have appreciated the combination of whimsy and serious music making.

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