Of all the groups I’ve seen explore the boundaries of “classical music” in Toronto, none goes further than Slow Rise Music and this was especially true of their concert Collide-o-Scope which played at the Tranzac on Saturday and Sunday.
Amy Lane’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the COC is eye catching and enjoyable but doesn’t offer the same level of insight as her Faust last season. My full review is posted at bachtrack,com.
Photo: Michael Cooper
The Happenstancers latest gig; Broken, played on Friday evening at Redeemer Lutheran. Getting back to their core mission, this concert explored the relationships between baroque music and contemporary repertoire and the plusses and minusses of combining music, instruments and techniques from both. So, interspersed between sonatas by Johann Rosenmüller; originally scored for strings and continuo but played here by various combinations of oboe/cor anglais, regular and bass clarinet, strings and accordion, we got contemporary pieces.
Château de Versailles Spectacles have produced a really classy period instruments recording of Purcell’s Hail! Bright Cecilia with a bonus of Blow’s Welcome Every Guest. The band s La Poème Harmonique under the direction of their founder Vincent Dumestre. It’s a very authentic period sound and the small chorus is precise and sings in excellent English.
The Blow piece is short but but interesting and it gets a sprightly and almost jazzy reading. Both baritone Tomáš Král and teHugo Hymas are excellent and have perfect English, “The sacred Nine” is particularly enjoyable.
The Green Line takes two story lines set in Beirut a generation apart and weaves them into a fascinating, sometimes mesmerizing, poetic and sad story about two families torn apart by civil war. It’s written by Makram Ayache and translated by Hiba Sleiman. It opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Factory Theatre and In Arms theatre Company directed by the author.
Tuesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured soprano Teresa Tucci and baritone James Coole-Stevenson; both Rebanks fellows at the Conservatory, and pianist Vlad Soloviev. It was a carefully curated concert with a thematic line and featured far more duets than one usually gets in such a show.
Colonial Circus; currently playing at Aki Studio, is a hilarious and intermittently disturbing sideways look at colonialism. It’s a clown show performed by Two2Mango; Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma. So, we have two people of Indian origin in slightly bizarre white-face playing both “native” characters; a priest and his disciple, and representatives of the Raj; a British lady and her manservant.
It’s been 73 years since the first performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting. The play though has become an established icon of experimental 20th century theatre and millions of words have been written about it. It’s currently running at Coal Mine Theatre in a production directed by Kelli Fox. As far as I remember (and it’s been fifty years since I read the play) this production plays it straight and pretty much entirely according to the stage directions in the script. The set is a tree and a bunch of dirt. Nobody sits in a dust bin. So everything turns on subtlety and timing which is quite a challenge.
My review of last Thursday’s TSO season opener is now published on bachtrack.com.
Photo credit: Alan Cabral
Chelsea Woodley’s Enormity, Girl and the Earthquake in Her Lungs, in a production directed by Andrea Donaldson for Nightwood Theatre, opened at the Jackman Performance Centre on Saturday night. It’s enormously ambitious and performed with great skill and energy but I’m not sure it entirely works.
operaramblings 