Purcell’s King Arthur contains some wonderful music but it also poses real staging issues. How much of the play that the music supports does one include? How to contextualise the unfamiliar version of the King Arthur story? How to deal with the rather crude nationalism? Sven-Eric Bechtolf and Julian Crouch come up with a very interesting approach for their 2017 production at the Staatsoper Berlin.
I don’t spend a lot of time listening to disks of opera arias. I’s music I much prefer live and in context but right now a dose of good old fashioned verismo tenoring is very welcome! Piotr Beczala’s new CD Vincerò absolutely delivers it. There’s a reason this guy (normally) spends his time commuting between Vienna, Zurich, Salzburg and New York with the odd side trip to Bayreuth. He’s the real deal. There’s power to burn allied to control and proper ringing high notes. His diction is excellent too. There are no unnecessary histrionics, just top class delivery.
Mélodies Passagères is a new CD from Montreal based duo soprano Marianne Lambert and pianist Julien LeBlanc. Toronto folks may remember the latter as the music director/pianist for Against the Grain’s Pelléas et Mélisande a few years ago. The selection of songs; by Barber, Bizet, Delage, Delibes, Granados, Lavallée, Massenet and Paladihle, is intended to evoke escaping, journeying, dreaming and sensuality and it does that pretty well. Most of the pieces are not particularly well known though there are a few chestnuts like Bizet’s Les adieux de l’hôtesse Arabe and Délibes’ Les filles de Cadix.
Living Room Music concert series is an eclectic series of events hosted by Isobel Leonard. As best I can tell they are likely to feature music in a variety of genres plus spoken word and dance. There’s a show called Grateful Embrace tomorrow at 7pm tha includes Toronto based baritone Jorell Williams. There’s lots more information on the whole series here. There are links to the video on the AOP page or you can find them on the American Opera Project Youtube channel.
On May 20th at 8pm Opera Atelier are hosting a virtual showcase called Together/Apart. There’s a really good line up of singers, dancers and instrumentalists including Angela Hewitt and Wallis Giunta. All the details are on the Opera Atelier website which is also where the stream will be hosted.
Both these events are free but donations would be appreciated.
Those clever folks at Tapestry have just announced a “cancellation proof” 2020/21 season. Basically it’s set up so that shows can be given for a live audience or as a webstream or some hybrid solution as circumstances evolve.
There are now many organisations and individuals regularly posting free online content to tide us over the “lockdown”. Here are some of the ones I’m keeping track of:
Youtube channels. Best followed by searching for the channel name and then subscribing. That way you will get notified of new stuff whenever you sign into Youtube. Continue reading
There are a couple of new streams coming up today. At 3pm EST Opera North is releasing a recording of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti from a couple of years ago. The main local attraction is that Dinah is played by Wallis Giunta. That one is on Youtube. At 5pm husband and wife Alexander and Jimin Dobson are performing in the NAC’s Canada Performs series. This link should get you there.
There were a couple of fun things posted yesterday too. Ian Cusson performed in the NAC series playing 10 of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues. It’s still up on Facebook. Also the Kingston Symphony produced a very clever video of the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica with each musician performing their part at home and Evan Mitchell editing to create a complete video. It’s very clever and it’s up on Youtube.
And the Snow did Lie is a multimedia artwork to be appreciated by both the eyes and the ears, using ten images for string quartet based on André Bergeron’s lithographs for Germaine Guèvremont’s French-Canadian classic, Le Survenant. The music is by Adirondack based Welsh composer Hilary Tann and it’s performed by the Sirius Quartet. It plays tonight on Parma Records Livestage at 7pm EDT.
On May 6th from 5pm to 6pm EDT there’s an NAC sponsored livestream concert by husband and wife duo, Alexander Dobson; baritone, and Jimin Dobson on Baroque Violin, Modern Violin and Viola. This performance is presented through Dobshin Arts and there are more details here.
Amplified Opera was created by Teiya Kasahara and Aria Umezawa to promote the values of equity, diversity and inclusion in and through opera. They have produced shows like The Way I See It, showcasing blind soprano Laurie Rubin and visually impaired pianist Liz Upchurch in a show about visual impairment and its challenges in the opera world (and anyone who nows me will realise how near the bone that cut). They’ve also produced Teiya’s The Queen in Me (which I missed but which was based on the earlier show Queer of the Night); both shows exploring the pressures placed on a gay diva by the opera world.
The Royal Opera House Covent Garden has started posting very high quality full length opera and ballet videos on its Youtube channel. So far there’s the 2012 production of Britten’s Gloriana, a 2010 Così fan tutte which, as far as I can tell, is not available on DVD and Handel’s Acis and Galatea directed and choreographed by Wayne McGregor which is definitely worth a look. There’s also several ballet productions.
Oper Frankfurt has also been posting Lieder recitals “zu Hause” though so far none of their contingent of Canadians has featured.
operaramblings 