As we head into summer, as usual, things start to quieten down. I only have five shows in my schedule for the month of June:
- June 2nd, 4th and 5th Toronto City Opera are presenting Cavalleria Rusticana at the Fleck Dance Theatre. It’s the usual TCO format; piano accompaniment, amateur chorus, young professional soloists. Jennifer Tung conducts.
- June 2nd, 3rd, 4th at &.30pm at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre it’s the latest iteration of Teiya Kasahara’s The Queen in Me. It looks like this time it may be with small ensemble rather than just piano. There’s a promo video on the COC’s Youtube channel.
- June 3rd to 10th (preview June 2nd) at Crow’s Theatre it’s Maxime Beauregard-Martin’s Singulières; a play about “single ladies” in Quebec. It’s in French with English surtitles (and/or 3D glasses).
- June 5t at 4pm at Grace Church on the Hill, Soundstreams are presenting a homage to the late R. Murray Schaefer. This one is free but registration is required.
- June 15th, 16th, 18th and 19th at 8pm at Roy Thomson Hall the TSO are presenting Beethoven’s ninth symphony with an impressive line up of soloists including Rihab Chaieb. It’s coupled with three short premiers including a piece by Adam Scime.
That’s about it until Toronto Summer Music opens on July 7th.
So no big launch event to herald the COC’s 2022/23 season announcement, just an email. I’m not surprised because if the season had been announced in front of a large crowd at the Four Seasons Centre there would probably have been a riot. There are six productions on the main stage and each gets only seven or eight performances for a total of 45 which is the lowest since the house opened. Five of them are revivals and there’s no Parsifal. I begin to think that I have more chance of finding the Holy Grail than ever seeing Parsifal in Toronto.
Toronto Summer Music is back for real with the festival running from July 7th to 30th. There are 26 main stage concerts plus the ReGENERATION and shuffle concerts and the community programmes. The main stage line up has now been announced and here’s my curated pick:
It’s not much of a secret that I’m a bit fanatical about new opera. This year Tapestry has two really exciting looking premieres in Toronto. Later in the year there’s Brian Current’s Gould’s Wall which, as an ex climber, I just have to see but first, in fact coming up next month, is RUR: A Torrent of Light by Nicholas Billon and Nicole Lizée. It’s about robots and it’s a collaboration with OCAD U who are developing some way cool technology for the show. There’s now loads of really good preview material about the show on Tapestry’s Youtube channel. So I have two suggestions to make:
The Royal Conservatory of Music did a partial reveal of their classical and jazz programming for Koerner Hall in the 2022/3 season. It’s a pretty typical mx; heavy on piano, strings and chamber music, but there are a few interesting classical vocal concerts. Here are the highlights:
Here’s what’s coming up that I know about in April with some adds for the end of March.
Amplified Opera are back with a line up of three “mini-gigs”. These are combined in a series of three double bills running March 17th to 20th inside Jeffrey Gibson’s installation I AM YOUR RELATIVE at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sterling Road. 
There’s not exactly a flood of events in my calendar for march yet but there are a few. Running March 1st to 20th at Crow’s Theatre is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ satirical play Gloria about a Manhattan magazine staff seeking fame and glory as the internet turns the industry upside down. It’s not an opera but it’s directed by the very talented André Sills which is reason enough for me.
operaramblings 