Varied recital disk from Connolly and Middleton

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Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton have teamed up for another interesting recital album.  It’s quite varied.  It starts with Chausson’s La Poème de l’amour et de la mer which is actually two songs with a piano interlude.  It’s very fin de siècle chanson with the piano line rather more interesting than the vocal line but pretty decent stuff, if a bit emotionally overwrought.

Barber’s Three Songs Op.10 are quite well known, especially the last; “I hear an army”.  They are dark and dramatic and suit Connolly’s voice very well.  Next is the often heard Debussy piece Trois Chansons de Bilitis which purports to be settings of translations of actual Sapphic texts but which sound exactly like a 19th century Frenchman would imagine a Sapphic text to be;  i.e languorous.  Nicely done though.  Next we come to a pair of declamatory songs by Copland; “The world feels dusty” and “I’ve heard an organ talk sometimes”.  Definitely a welcome change of pace. Continue reading →

August is the quietest month

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After the relative busyness of July; Fringe, TSM, August really does look pretty quiet.  There are a few things on though:

  • Devon Healey’s theatre piece about his own journey into blindness; Rainbow on Mars, runs at the Daniels Spectrum from August 9th to 20th (official opening is the 13th).  It’s a collaboration between the National Ballet and Outside the March Theatre Company.  It’s been described as Pan’s Labyrinth meets The Matrix and it features the debut of a new technology; Immersive Descriptive Audio.
  • Soulpepper offers a comparatively rare opportunity (for Toronto) of seeing some Harold Pinter.  Old Times, in a production directed by Peter Pasyk, is playing at the Michael Young Theatre.  Previews are from the 6th to the 12th with opening on the 13th and the run continuing to September 7th.
  • And if you want an outdoor alternative to CanStage’s Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in the Ruff are presenting Tiff’ny of Athens in Withrow Park from August 14th to 31st.

Zürich Ring – Die Walküre

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Continuing on from Das Rheingold we come to Die Walküre.  There’s a lot of continuity with the earlier work.  It’s basically the same rotating set though in some scenes one of the “rooms” becomes a forest.  Another thing we see is characters who aren’t canonically “there” appearing in scenes.  So right at the beginning, when Siegmund and Sieglinde meet, Wotan is lurking and doing things like handing drinks to Sieglinde.  We’ll see more of this with Hunding’s henchmen appearing in various places, Wotan and the henchmen appearing when Sieglinde is describing her wedding and the Valkyries showing up at the start of Act 2.

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A new Ring from Zürich – Das Rheingold

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A new production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is always a bit of an event and all the more so when it’s in the city where the work was composed.  Andreas Homoki’s production premiered and was recorded for video at Opernhaus Zürich in 2024.  I’ll be working my way through the whole cycle but here are my initial thoughts based on Das Rheingold.

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Feud, what feud?

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Canadian Stage’s Dream in High Park opened on Thursday night.  This year it’s Marie Farsi’s production (adaptation?) of Romeo and Juliet.  It’s given a Southern Italian setting in the 1930s/40s though any reference to Fascism or the war escaped me.  It seemed largely an excuse to introduce some singing and dancing and some slightly forced humour into the opening scenes.  That’s not the big problem though.

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Dancing with Death

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Stephen Langridge’s production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux recorded at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo in 2024 is heavy on death symbolism.  The general look of the sets is fairly abstract with a sort of light box with a gallery and a few bright red elements; the throne, the Nottinghams’ bed and so on, but there are skulls and other memento mori everywhere.  Costuming is sort of operatic Tudor but Elisabetta’s dress is a print that includes skulls and she’s doubled by a human size, identically dressed, Death puppet.  As seems to be the fashion, much of the time only the front of the stage is lit leaving characters lurking in the gloom upstage.

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Baudelaire with a twist

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British soprano Mary Bevan and pianist Roger Vignoles gave a recital of French chansons in Walter Hall on Monday night.  The concept was that the songs were paired; one being a setting of Baudelaire by a male composer and the other song by a female composer of the the same period.  With two exceptions all the composers were French and with one exception from roughly the fin de siècle.  So Duparc, Déodat de Séverac, Fauré Debussy and de Bréville were paired variously with the predictable; les sœurs Boulanger and Pauline Viardot, and less predictable; Mel Bonis, Marguerite Canal, Amy Beach (American) and Jeanne Landry (Canadian and much later).

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