Unbridled Theatre Collective, a new outfit, opened a run of Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera at Video Cabaret on Thursday evening. It’s in an updated version created for The National Theatre by Simon Stephens in 2016 and it’s so updated it might well be retitled The 1.25p Opera. It’s raunchy and contains sexually explicit language and action (including some rather disturbing sexual violence) that would never have made it past the censors back in the day.
The last concert of Soundstreams 2024/25 season took place at Hugh’s Room on Wednesday evening. Marion Newman and Angela Park gave a recital called Ancestral Voices which premiered the piano version of the Bramwell Tovey song cycle of that name. I had heard the orchestral version with Marion singing and Bramwell conducting the VSO at Roy Thomson Hall when the orchestral version was new. It’s just as powerful in piano score; maybe more so as the singer can more easily convey the nuances of the text. The selection of texts is clever; tracing an arc from an imagined Eden via environmental destruction and the Residential School system to, maybe, the seeds of Reconciliation. The setting serves the text well and Angela made a really good substitute for an orchestra!
The middle years of the 16th century was an interesting period for English church music. There was no shortage of musical talent or sponsorship but the political and ecclesiastical landscape was pretty mixed as the pieces chosen for a new CD from the Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne reveal.
The first piece is a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in English by John Sheppard; Informator Choristarum at Magdalen College. It’s fairly straightforward polyphony but the text is interesting. It’s in English so it must post date Henry VIII, during whose reign the Mass was still sung in Latin, but the wording is slightly different to that of the first edition of The Book of Common Prayer of 1549 in that, among other minor variations, it concludes with “So be it” rather than “Amen” so we can probably date it to the first two years of Edward’s reign. Continue reading
Euripides’ Iphigenia at Tauris formed the basis for an opera almost a century before the more famous one by Gluck. Henri Desmarets; one of the more notable successors to Lully at Versailles/Paris began work on an Iphigenia opera to a libretto by Joseph-François Duché de Vancy in the 1690s but work was interrupted by Desmarets being exiled from France for marrying a minor without her father’s permission. Eventually the Académie Royale de la Musique entrusted the task of completing the opera to André Campra who teamed up with Antoine Danchet as librettist. The end result was a tragédie lyrique in five acts and a prologue that premiered in 1704 to some success. An even more successful revival in 1711 led to multiple productions across France and abroad before it was effectively replaced by the Gluck work in 1779. Continue reading
My review of the COC’s revival of the Robert Carsen production of Eugene Onegin is now posted at bachtrack.com.
Photo: Michael Cooper
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The Cunning Linguist is a one woman show written and performed by Monica Garrido Huerta. It’s produced by the TCL Collective and Aluna Theatre and directed by Beatriz Pizano. It’s playing at Factory Theatre until May 11th. Monica (the character) is a lesbian living with her conservative but fairly affluent and conventionally Catholic family in a small town in Mexico. She has a direct line to God, a sister who sings in a band in the town’s gay bar and a girlfriend but she’s not out to her family whose gaydar seems to have been made on the Friday afternoon shift.
Kaija Saariaho wrote surprisingly little music for solo piano or harpsichord. Over her 40+ year composing career it amounts to a little under an hour of music and it has now been recorded by Tuija Hakkila who had an association with the composer dating back to 1982. The disk, Touches, contains eight pieces. Five are actually for solo piano with one piece for piano and cello (Anssi Karttunen) and two for harpsichord and electronics.
Most of the solo piano music is quite meditative though with a rhythmic flexibility that kind of comes and goes. It’s complex but not in your face. Arabesques et adages though is a bit different. It was composed as a set piece for a piano competition and so, as you would expect, it’s got lots of technical challenges. It’s fast and complex and louder than much of the other music. Continue reading
Rebecca Grey is a composer with a very individual view of the world and her art. Who else would write operas about nightmares on an overnight bus trip or about a savvy racoon taking on a rapacious Toronto landlord? Or, for that matter, cycle the Highway of Tears? Her most substantial project to date is Bus Opera. I first saw a workshop of an early version of it at the CMC a couple of years ago followed by a performance of extracts at one of New Music Concerts’ MAKEWAY concerts for early career creators at St. George by the Grange a few weeks later. So I was very happy when I was offered the chance to attend a workshop performance of the (pretty much) complete work at Hugh’s Room on Tuesday night.
For many years Bavarian State Opera used a production of Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus that was created by Otto Schenk and Carlos Kleiber back in the 1980s. It was replaced in 2023 with a new production by Barrie Kosky and Vladiimir Jurowski which was issued on video.
My review of the COC’s production of Berg’s Wozzeck that opened on Friday is now up at bachtrack.com.
Wozzeck continues at the Four Seasons Centre until May 16th.
Photo credit: Michael Cooper
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operaramblings 