Life slowly returns to some version of normal.. Here’s what I’m seeing so far for Sptember.
I was curious about Scottish Opera’s new recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia, Limited because it’s a G&S I’ve not heard before. It’s a late work and was less successful than its better known predecessors. The plot concerns an island in the “South Seas” where the king is so taken with all things English that he sends his daughter to Cambridge and has her return with a bevy of English worthies including Captain Joseph Corcoran KCB. Eventually the king enacts all kinds of reforms including turning the entire population into limited liability companies. They revolt but the day is saved by Princess Zara pointing out that with party government all the reforms will inevitably be repealed after the next election. Continue reading
Old Times by Harold Pinter is currently playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Peter Pasyk. It premiered in 1971 in London and i’s very much an artefact of its time and place besides being decidedly weird in a Pinteresque way. A well off married couple living somewhere fairly remote on the English coast are being visited by the woman who, twenty years earlier, was the wife’s roommate when they were both young “secretaries” in London but who is now married to a Sicilian aristo.
Quintette Imaginaire is a disk of Schubert song arrangements from soprano Sandrine Piau and the Quatuor Psophos. There’s about 43 minutes of songs including such well known ones as “Kennst du das land”, “Viola” “Ganymed” and “Erlkörnig”. There are also a couple of movements from Schubert quartets to make up a total of 67 minutes of music.
It’s a change to hear these songs sung by a soprano and the textures of the quartet arrangements are interesting. I particularly enjoyed the bouncy arrangement of “Ganymed” and a thoughtful reading of “Viola”. I’m not sure a soprano can really sound dark enough for “Erlkönig” though. All in all there’s some excellent playing and Piau sounds idiomatic in German. Continue reading
Devon Healey’s Rainbow on Mars opened on Wednesday evening at the Ada Slaight Hall at the Daniels Spectrum. It’s a co-production by Outside the March and the National Ballet directed by Nate Bitton and Mitchell Cushman with choreography by Robert Binet.
Overall I rate this cycle very highly. Andreas Homoki’s production is unusual in that it’s really not conceptual and is often very literal. That’s rare in Wagner productions in major European houses. But it’s also not cluttered up with superfluous 19th century “stuff”. When a thing is essential, it’s there as described. If it’s not essential more often than not it’s omitted.
And so to the final instalment… We open with the Rock but now the background room; while still the same 18th/19th century mansion, looks a bit the worse for wear with peeling and cracked paint. The Norns, predictably, are all in white. It’s all pretty conventional but done well.
The last Koerner Hall concert of this year’s Toronto Summer Music riffed off the Vienna Phil’s traditional New Year extravaganza with lots of Johann Strauss waltzes and the cheesiest fake Magyar (mezzo) soprano arias from operetta. I was skeptical when I first saw the programme but it turned out to be extremely enjoyable; partly on account of excellent musicianship and partly because everyone involved was having so much fun.
Siegfried has been described as the scherzo of the Ring cycle and Andreas Homoki seems to have at least partly run with that. There are quite a few places, including some less obvious ones, where he seems to be going for laughs. The obvious ones are obvious enough. You can’t really have a bear in the first scene without it being comic but there were also times when Wanderer was camping it up a bit. We’ll come back to that.
The last great castrato, we are told, was Vellutti who was a favourite with many early 19th century composers. Tuesday night’s concert at Koerner Hall as part of Toronto Summer Music was a tribute to him with counter-tenor Franco Fagioli accompanied by L’Orchestre de l’Opéra de Versailles and their flamboyant violinist/conductor Stefan Plewniak performing music associated with Vellutti interspersed with orchestral music from (mostly) the same operas.
operaramblings 