John Beckwith turned 95 a little while ago and there’s some good celebratory material up on Youtube. Confluence Concerts are rereleasing their three concerts from last year. The first one is here. Plus, Canadian Art Song project have a really lovely film of Krisztinaa Szabó and Steven Philcox performing The Four Short Songs to texts by Kandinsky. The location filming is the work of Jenn Nicholls and Patrick Hagerty and it’s gorgeous. The performance is rather good too.
Ian Cusson and Colleen Murphy’s Fantasma opened at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre last night. It’s billed as an opera for younger audiences though I think there were more composers than kids in the theatre last night! It’s a ghost story. Two fifteen year old girls and their mother are visiting an old fashioned carnival which is struggling financially. There’s a “ghost” who is employed to scare patrons and generate social media coverage. Then the girls find a real, rather sad, little ghost and things happen. Or maybe they don’t. And the opera ends. Or maybe it doesn’t. It’s surprisingly complex for a 45 minute piece for kids and raises issues about what we see and what we think we see; why adults do and don’t believe kids and so on. When the (virtual) curtain came down rather abruptly I didn’t think I’d be thinking so much about it the next morning. But I am.
Vladimir Soloviev as Dante and Vartan Gabrielian as Tino
This just in…
TORONTO — Today, Opera InReach announces Art for Peace, a streamed concert in support of individuals impacted by the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. The concert will be streamed on March 15th beginning at 6:30pm EST. All proceeds will be split between the BCU Foundation, the Red Cross, and Dobrodiy Club. Donations are being accepted through the link in the linked PDF.
The concert will feature Ukrainian national music, art song, folk music, and poetry, alongside support from musicians from all genres and styles. Exploring themes of resilience, hope, and justice, Art for Peace aims to raise funds for Ukrainian individuals in need while also demanding peace in Ukraine. Along with Opera InReach, Art for Peace is supported by the Ukrainian Art Song Project, Tapestry Opera, Against the Grain Theatre, and individual artists from around the world.
Art for Peace Press Release containing full details of who is performing etc.
Here’s my quick preview of the recently announced 2022/23 Live in HD series from the Met.
Cherubini – Medea – October 22nd 2022 – A strong start. It’s a new David McVicar production with Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role and a generally strong cast. The combination of McVicar and Radvanovsky in Rusalka was one of the best things I’ve seen in years. Continue reading
Brandon Jacobs-Jenkjins’ play Gloria, directed by André Sills is currently playing at Crow’s Theatre. It’s a hard play to describe as spoilers must be avoided and it works at many different levels. The initial setting is the offices of a New York “culture” magazine where we meet various members of the highly dysfunctional workforce. A shocking event happens and the rest of the play explores how various parts of the media industries relate to such events in the internet age along with issues related to who really “owns” an experience and in what sense does that “ownership” validate or privilege their version of events versus any other. One of the ideas here is that the “product” has become in every way secondary. The magazine is little more than a prop for blog posts. Book publishing is largely geared around selling the movie or TV rights. Movie and TV production is largely about providing a package for prefabricated celebrities to feature in. The irony of a print and internet reviewer writing about all this is not lost on me!
athena kaitlin trinh and Nabil Traboulsi
It’s becoming a bit of a habit. The Royal Opera has released a video recording of the 2019 revival of Kaspar Holten’s 2014 production of Don Giovanni directed by Jack Furness and conducted by Helmut Haenchen. I’ve already reviewed both the DVD and the cinema broadcast of the 2014 production so saying much about the production would be superfluous. Suffice to say it’s one of the better Don Giovannis available on disk.
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. Continue reading
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.
This is not intended as a a political blog though, art being what it is, it sometimes is. That said, these are not normal times and sometimes a political stand has to be taken. We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and condemn in the strongest terms the current aggression by the fascist regimes in Moscow and Minsk as well as their enablers and supporters in the United States and elsewhere.
Here’s a quick round up of recent webstreams. The main event is the concert streamed by the COC over the weekend featuring Jane Archibald with the COC Orchestra and Johannes Debus. There’s about forty five minutes of music and it’s predictably classy music making though it’s emotionally taxing to look at an empty Four Seasons centre again. The program includes Mozart. Handel, Strauss, Massenet, Gounod and Bernstein. Arguably it’s a bit predictable but both musical and technical values are high. It’s avaiable free until August 27th via registration at the COC website.
