Aida Garifullina

Posted on March 3, 2017 by operaramblings

Aida Garifullina is a young lyric soprano of Tatar origin who already has some interesting achievements under her belt. She played Lily Pons in the Florence Foster Jenkins movie, placed first at Operalia in 2013, has sung a string of -ina roles at the Marinsky and is currently a member of the ensemble at the Wiener Staatsoper. She’s also done concert work with the likes of Dmitri Hvostorovsky and Andrea Bocelli. Now she’s released a debut CD called Aida Garifullina recorded with the ORF Radio-Symponieorchester Wien and Cornelius Meister.

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Newbury’s Norma on DVD

Posted on March 2, 2017 by operaramblings

Kevin Newbury’s production of Bellini’s Norma made it to Toronto via San Francisco, Barcelona and Chicago with Sondra Radvanovsky singing the title role (at least some of the time) in all four cities. It was recorded for DVD and Blu-ray at the Liceu in Barcelona in 2015. Watching the DVD didn’t change my opinion of the production. Here’s what I said about it on opening night in Toronto:

Kevin Newbury’s production is perhaps best described as serviceable. I have seen various rather desperate efforts made to draw deep meaning from it but I really don’t think there is any. That said, it looks pretty decent and is efficient. The single set allows seamless transitions between scenes which is a huge plus. So, what does it look like? It’s basically a sort of cross between a barn and a temple with a back wall that can raised or moved out of the way to expose the druids’ sacred forest. There’s also a sort of two level cart thing which characters ascend when they have something especially important to sing. Costumes were said to have been inspired by Game of Thrones; animal skins, leather, tattoos (which actually don’t really read except up very close), flowing robes. Norma herself appears to be styled, somewhat oddly, on a Klingon drag queen. The lighting is effective and there are some effective pyrotechnics at the end. All in all a pretty good frame for the story and the singing.

There did seem to be far fewer pyrotechnics in the Barcelona staging though (either that or the video direction pretty much ignores them).

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Sad news

Posted on March 2, 2017 by operaramblings

Effective the end of the, not yet announced, 2017/18 season Larry Beckwith will step down as Artistic Director of Toronto Masque Theatre and with his going the company will pack up its tents. It’s unfortunate because TMT filled an interesting niche but fifteen years of organising, directing, administering and fund raising (especially the last) is a pretty long innings. TMT has done a lot of innovative stuff over the years but I’ll remember them as a company that was not afraid to experiment with ideas and elements from outside the Western Classical tradition as exemplified by Alice Ping Yee Ho’s The Lesson of Da Ji and their upcoming show The Man Who Married Himself. Toronto, of all cities, needs to find ways to incorporate the different cultural and musical traditions we come from into new art. Larry and his collaborators did that.

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Signal boosting

Posted on March 2, 2017 by operaramblings

I’m passing on information here for anyone who may be interested in a summer program in Ukrainian Art Song organised by the Ukrainian Art Song Project. It’s a week long course at UoT running from August 7th to 13th headed up by baritone Pavlo Hunka. I’m familiar with Hunka’s work with the UASP but not as a teacher so I’m signal boosting here not endorsing! Full details (MS Word) are here.

Shattering Parsifal

Posted on March 1, 2017 by operaramblings

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2015 production of Wagner’s Parsifal recorded at the Staatsoper in Berlin in 2015 left me emotionally drained as I don’t think I’ve ever been after watching a recording. I can only imagine what it must have been like to experience this live. The combination of the production, exceptional singing and acting and Daniel Barenboim’s conducting is quite exceptional. It’s not going to be easy to unpack it all coherently but here goes…

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News from Tapestry

Posted on March 1, 2017 by operaramblings

So the rumours have been around for a while but today the big announcement about Tapestry’s major project for 2017/18 went public. It’s a joint production with Canadian Stage and Vancouver Opera of an operatic version of Morris Panych’s adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat which, as a stage play, won critical acclaim in 1998. The music is by James Rolfe and it will premiere at the Bluma Appel Thaetre in March 2018 before moving to the Vancouver Playhouse as part of the second Vancouver Opera Festival. The idea originated in the 2014 LibLab which produced a very funny scene of a hapless customer being beaten senseless by his tailors. (something that should have happened to Cheetoh Benito long ago).

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Turandot with the Berio completion

Posted on February 27, 2017 by operaramblings

La Scala and Riccardo Chailly have embarked on a project to record all the Puccini operas. The first one, recorded in 2015, is Turandot with a new completion of the third act by Berio rather than the usual Alfano version. The director was Nikolaus Lehnhoff with Nina Stemme as Turandot and Aleksandrs Antonenko as Calaf.

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A new Salzburg da Ponte cycle – Così fan tutte

Posted on February 26, 2017 by operaramblings

Every few years the Salzburg Festival replaces the productions of the three Mozart/da Ponte collaborations with new productions. At least in recent years they have entrusted all three to the same director but the “refresh” happens in different years and not always in the same order. I reviewed Claus Guth’s offerings here (Le nozze di Figaro, 2006; Don Giovanni, 2008; Così fan tutte, 2009) and noted the way that certain linking elements developed over the course of the “cycle”. I was interested to see whether the same thing held for the newest iteration by Sven-Eric Bechtolf. All three have now been released on Blu-ray (though due to availability issues I have the Così on DVD) so I thought I should watch them in the order they appeared at the festival and see what transpires. So here we go with Così fan tutte recorded in 2013 in the Haus für Mozart.

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Into March

Posted on February 25, 2017 by operaramblings

Next week is rather back end loaded. There’s not much on early in the week but then things hot up. On Thursday Against the Grain host the monthly opera pub night at The Amsterdam Bicycle Club at 9pm. This time we are promised Topher and present and past members of the Ensemble Studio. That evening is also the opening of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company show Brundibár which I previewed last week and which runs until March 5th. Also on Thursday there’s the opening of R. Murray Schafer’s Odditorium, presented by Soundstreams at the Crow’s Theatre. That one runs until the 5th. Finally, on Saturday the amazing Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq is appearing with the TSO at Roy Thomson Hall in a concert that features two world premiers and a Canadian premier.

Tapestry Songbook VII

Posted on February 25, 2017 by operaramblings

Tapestry Songbook is the culmination of New Opera 101; a week long masterclass where young singers get to work with established performers on repertoire from Tapestry’s extensive collection of recent Canadian work. This year the “masters” were Krisztina Szabó, Keith Klassen and Steven Philcox. The week culminates with a series of concerts of :scenes”; some performed by the “masters” and some by the students. As there were fourteen pieces performed and a cast of thousands I’m just going to report on my personal favourites with due apologies to anyone who got left out.

Klassen, Szabó and Philcox kicked things off with the rather disturbing Merk’s Dream; a collaboration from the 2011 LibLab by Nick Carpenter and Elisabeth Mehl Greene. It’s a creepy vignette of a dying man trying to get through, and largely failing, to his developmentally challenged daughter, brilliantly portrayed by Szabó. This was followed by In This World George is Heartbroken; a 2012 LibLab piece by Hannah Moscovitch and Lembit Beecher about various, largely imagined, aspects of a dull middle class marriage. By turns hilarious and violent it featured a really interesting prepared piano accompaniment and featured three of the stars of the evening; Gwenna Fairchild-Taylor, Janaka Welihinda and, new to me, the very impressive Markéta Ornova on piano.

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