Toronto Summer Music have announced their revised “virtual” schedule. Alas most of the vocal music is gone but there is plenty of interesting looking chamber music with, of course, a Beethoven focus. It runs July 16th to August 1st and it’s all free. The full schedule is here.
The one vocal recital features mezzo Ema Nikolovska with Steven Philcox in an interesting and varied programme. It airs on July 31st from noon to 2pm. The programme is here.
Last night’s virtual salon by Confluence; Let’s Stay Together, featured an extremely, if unsurprisingly, eclectic selection of music and poetry and some serious techno-wizardry. Two numbers featuring Suba Shankaran and her technical whizz husband Dylan Bell exemplified the techy side. Come Together was an overdubbed. live looped, east meets west version of the Lennon and McCartney number in which the pair built up layers of sound incrementally. Meditation Round, which rounded out the evening, was a moving new work by Suba dealing with how we need to move forward, not back, as life, perhaps, returns to some sort of normality. There was an almost 16th century quality to the music and the performance in which pretty much everyone took part remotely. Brilliant mixing and post production here backing up an extremely affecting work.
If you didn’t catch it live last night there’s a really lovely concert up on the Royal Opera House Youtube channel which should be available for a couple of weeks. Tony Pappano is at the piano with Louise Alder singing Britten, Strauss and Handel, Toby Spence with some Butterworth plus Gerald Finley with Finzi, Turnage and Britten. The boys finish off with the Pearl Fishers duet. Along the way, Morgen is sung by Louise and danced quite beautifully to choreography by Wayne McGregor by Francesca Hayward and Cesar Corrales. It’s weird, and even eerie, to see a concert from a large empty theatre but there we are. Highly recommended.
There are two shows on June 18th. At 6pm EDT Parma records are hosting a concert of contemporary cello music featuring Ovidiu Marinescu. Then at 8pm it’s Opera Pub on Facebook Live from AtG Theatre. If you can’t catch it live it will likely show up on AtG’s Youtube channel a couple of days later.
So the International Resource Centre for Performing Artists (https://ircpa.net) are putting on a Zoom event with ace soprano Sondra Radvanovsky for singers, other musicians and music lovers; which pretty much covers all of us!
Debra Chandler will moderate the conversation with Sondra and it will happen on Wednesday, June 17th, from 1-2 pm EDT. Featured topics will include Opera in the future, Live streaming content, Social Media yes/no?, advice to young singers and Screaming Divas. And if you haven’t been watching Screaming Divas you might want to give it a go.
If you want to join the convo RSVP to info@ircpa.net.
So Arts Anyway brought us dinosaurs (and where are you guys… we worry you know…). Now it’s back to the stone age with Tapestry Opera’s take on rock opera. Keith Klassen I can hear you!
The COC is posting complete performance videos from the archive here. These are “technical” videos designed to inform a future revival rather than material intended for broadcast. They feature a single camera angle (full stage) and the video quality is so-so but it’s quite interesting. There will be one available at a time and the current one is Strauss’ Arabella from a couple of seasons ago.
A couple of days ago Joseph So interviewed Alexander Neef about various aspects of the current situation in a session organised by the IRCPA. Inevitably and appropriately it focussed heavily on the challenges facing performers; especially those at the beginning of their careers, but there were a couple or three things not related to that that really caught my attention.
The first was around the theme of “what does the opera world look like if and when we get back in the theatre?” One part of this question that really wasn’t addressed was “will it be the same audience?” Given the demographics of the current viral epidemic I really wonder whether the oldest section of the audience will come back; at least in the short/medium term. Which is probably linked to a question that was addressed which was “will the financial impact of the crisis make companies program more conservatively?” Alexander handled this pretty diplomatically (surprise!) by answering (more or less) “if we don’t make art, we cease to have a purpose” and saying there was a limit to how many times one could program standard rep, though to be honest I’ve never detected any such limit at the COC. My guess is that we see an intensification of the trend already apparent under the pressure of long term decline in ticket sales. That’s to say one or two marquee productions a season buttressed with unchallenging revivals of the Operabase top 20 but we shall see. That’s been a formula that has, by and large, appealed to the traditional audience but if (big if) future audiences skew younger it may merely make things worse.
Tafelmusik are starting a series of on-line concerts on May 27th. They are ticketed, Pay-What-You-Like with a starting price of $5. Details on the whole series can be found here.
The Guggenheim Museum’ Works & Process Artists (WPA) Virtual Commissions will present the world premiere of Click Clock – Tick Tock by Dick Hyman on June 1st at 7.30pm. It’s described as “a surreal meditation on time during quarantine, with intricate paper cuts and ecstatic musical performances” and features well known countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. It’s free and will play on the WPA Youtube channel.
Tomorrow at 3pm EST Jo So is interviewing Alexander Neef on a Zoom channel under the auspices of the IRCPA. You need to register as space is limited. The topics, how to register etc can be found at https://ircpa.net
On Friday May 29th at 8pm EST there’s another virtual event. The vocal/piano du Chordless (Allegra Chapman and Sarah LeMesh) will be premiering a music video of George Crumb’s The Night in Silence Under Many a Star. I’ve seen a short preview and I’m intrigued. It will be followed by a Q&A on the theme of “How will digital media shape artists’ and audience’s performance experience, even beyond the pandemic era?” Registration information is here
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operaramblings 