Evolving Symmetry

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adanyaEvolving Symmetry is the first of a promised series of collaborations by soprano Adanya Dunn, clarinetist Brad Cherwin and pianist Alice Gi-Yong Hwang.  The focus will be on “modern” chamber and vocal works (for some value of “modern”) and last night at Heliconian Hall they presented French works ranging from the 189os to the 1960s.

The program was bookended by two late Poulenc works; the song cycle La courte paille to nonsense verse by Maurice Carème and the clarinet sonata.  These works were composed at the same time and share some musical material though the sonata seems a weightier work.  The songs are fun  and playful and they were interpreted by Ms. Dunn with excellent French diction and lots of humour.  The sonata is seems much sadder and more reflective though its final movement is manic enough.  Fine playing from both musicians here.

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Rationing the rapture

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Katharina Wagner’s take on Tristan und Isolde recorded at Bayreuth in 2015 is hard to unpack.  There are some hints in a short essay in the booklet accompanying the disk and a few more in the interview with conductor Christian Thielemann included as an extra but it still leaves the viewer with a lot to do.  It’s essentially unromantic and quite abstract.  A lot of stuff that happens in a traditional interpretation just doesn’t happen but there’s not really anything much to replace it.  What’s left is the story of two people who fall in love in a situation where that is bound to end badly and where, despite the best efforts of pretty much everyone else, it does.  It’s actually quite nihilistic.  Tristan, and maybe Isolde, seek a kind of transcendence in love/death but there is none.  At the end Isolde doesn’t die but something in her does.  It had me thinking of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (but then so much in life does).

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And so it begins

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evolTime to revive the “upcoming week” post I think.  There are two items of interest in the next week.  Evolving Symmetry at the Heliconian Club on Wednesday 7th at 7pm features soprano Adanya Dunn, clarinetist Brad Cherwin and pianist clarinet Alice Gi-Young Hwang in a program of music by Debussy, Françaix, Milhaud, and Poulenc.  Then on Saturday 10th at Opera Bob’s at 5pm MYOpera have their season launch party.  Last year’s was fun.

The Far West

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The+Far+WestThis review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.

Zachary Wadsworth’s The Far West is a setting for tenor, chorus and strings of texts by poet/priest Tim Duglos, who died of AIDS in 1990. These are very personal and curiously optimistic texts. In G-9 for example death is described as “a great adventure” that will end “in just the right place”. Only in Parachuteis there much in the way of anger. Here AIDs is “an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink”

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Thread of Winter

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Thread of WinterThis review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.

Leslie Fagan and Lorin Shalanko’s new CD, Thread of Winter, is billed as the first CD in the Canadian Art Song Series(not, emphatically not, to be confused with the Canadian Art Song Project). The material it contains is said by the performers to have been selected for “accessibility” and as a resource for students who apparently find it hard to find recordings of Canadian repertoire.

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Tapestry 2016/17

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naomiTapestry Opera has now announced its upcoming season.  There are three shows.  The season begins in November with Naomi’s Road; libretto by Ann Hodges based on the novel by Joy Kogawa with music by Ramona Luengen. Set in Vancouver during the Second World War, the opera follows 9-year-old Japanese-Canadian girl Naomi and her brother, whose lives are upturned when they are sent to internment camps in the BC interior and Alberta. It runs November 16th to 20th at St. David’s Anglican Church, the home of the last Japanese-Canadian Anglican parish in Toronto. Continue reading →

Abstract Fidelio

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Fidelio is an interesting piece.  The music is great and it has a powerful, very straightforward, plot.  There are no convoluted subplots here.  But there is a lot of spoken dialogue which slows things down.  Is it necessary?  Claus Guth doesn’t think so and in his 2015 Salzburg production he replaces the dialogue with ambient noise and also doubles up Leonora and Don Pizarro with silent actor “shadows”; the former using sign language in the manner of the narrator character in Guth’s Messiah.  It works remarkably well.  The ambient noise sections are quite disturbing and the “shadows” add some depth, especially the frantic signing in the final scene.  Perhaps worth noting that the “noise” contains a lot of very low bass and precise spatial location.  It may need a pretty good sound system to have the intended effect.

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Indie Opera Toronto

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So it’s happened.  Indie Opera Toronto is a go.  Eleven companies have got it together to create a website showcasing all the upcoming shows and, mirabile dictu, they are going to co-ordinate schedules so I can stop trying to be Schrödinger’s critic.  The new website is http://indieoperatoronto.ca

And here’s the intro video featuring more of my favourite people in sixty seconds than you can possibly imagine.

Alcina in Aix

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Katie Mitchell’s production of Handel ‘s Alcina recorded at Aix-en-Provence in 2015 is extremely interesting.  It’s almost complete with maybe twenty minutes of the ballet music cut.  None of the ballet is actually staged as such.  It’s also a Mitchell special multi-space set (like Written on Skin) with the lower level having Alcina/Morgana’s boudoir, drawing room or whatever at any given moment flanked by two smaller spaces which are the “personal” spaces of the two sisters.  When the ladies withdraw from the public/enchanted space they are replaced by actresses who look decades older.  Only late in the piece as Alcina’s magic fades do the two worlds get confused.  The upper level of the set is taken up with the giant machine that turns Alcina’s victims into taxidermied animals.  The overall aesthetic is upscale modern with lots of actors as very competent servants.

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