Sighs Too Deep For Words

Posted on by
Reply

Friday evening at Heliconian Hall saw the second of two performances of Confluence Concerts’ Sighs Too Deep For Words: A Canadian Valentine.  It was an all Canadian concert featuring songs and spoken word including two world premieres and a performance of Omar Daniel’s 2005 piece Neruda Canzones.

The spoken word pieces, read beautifully by Alison Beckwith, ranged from Lucy Maud Montgomery to Margaret Atwood.  Some pieces straightforwardly celebrated romantic love and others came at it a bit sideways!  Songs by Canadian composers were well represented With Derek Holman, Jeffrey Ryan and John Beckwith all represented.  Anaïs Kelsey-Verdecchia performed (with Christopher Bagan) her own setting of “The Lark in the Clear Air” and Patricia O’Callaghan gave us her setting of “Some by Fire” with Chris again at the pianio, Andrew Downing on bass and a backing group.  So many styles!  No-one could say that Canadian music is samey or boring. Continue reading →

Don’t look down

Posted on by
Reply

Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places and Things opened last night at Coal Mine Theatre.  It premiered in London in 2015 and has now been adapted to relocate the setting to Toronto and to customize the movement elements to the small, intimate space at Coal Mine.  It’s a play about addiction, addiction treatment, theatre and how we construct and cope with “reality” (whatever that is).  It’s long, intense, disturbing and, ultimately, very thought provoking.

Continue reading →

Opera Atelier 2025/26

Posted on by
Reply

Opera Atelier has announced its 2025/26 season and while it’s not especially surprising it is intriguing.  As usual it’s two shows.  The first show is pretty conventional.  It’s a revival of OA’s production of The Magic Flute at the Elgin Theatre on October 15th, 16th, 18th and 19th 2025.  Nice cast though with Colin Ainsworth as Tamino, Meghan Lindsey as Pamina, Douglas Williams as Papageno, Karine White as Papagena and Stephen Hegedus as Sarastro.

Soprano Meghan Lindsay as Mélisande and bass baritone Douglas Williams as Golaud in Act One of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in Opera Atelier’s fully-staged production of ALL IS LOVE. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Continue reading →

A bit of an oddball

Posted on by
Reply

Once in a while I go out on a limb with recordings.  Sometimes it’s great.  I’m not as a rule particularly fond of “cross-over” material but I loved Emily D’Angelo’s freezing for example.  So I took a listen to Schubert Beatles from the New York Festival of Song.  Broadly speaking, it pairs Schubert Lieder with Beatles’ songs on a similar theme; Yesterday and Im Frühling for example.  The Schubert is mostly presented pretty straight (except for guitar accompaniment on Du bist die Ruh).  The Beatles songs are arranged, by Steven Beier, for various combinations of piano, violin, bass and guitar.  The principal singer is baritone Theo Hoffman with tenor Andrew Owens and soprano Julia Bullock joining on some tracks. Continue reading →

What We Carry

Posted on by
Reply

I made a rare excursion into the world of dance on Friday evening to catch Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo’s one woman show What We Carry presented by Native Earth Performing Arts and A’nó:wara Dance Theatre.  Barbara is Kanien’keha;ka originally from Kahnawake and as well as being trained in classical and contemporary settler dance traditions she’s also a powwow performer in a range of dance disciplines.  She also has a pretty complex personal history.  All of this bears on what happens in the 45 minutes or so of this show.

Continue reading →

Kim’s Convenience

Posted on by
Reply

After five seasons of TV shows it’s easy to forget that Kim’s Convenience started life as a play at the Toronto Fringe in 2011.  It’s now playing in it’s original stage form at Soulpepper in a production directed by Weyni Mengesha and with playwright Ins Choi this time playing the Appa (father) rather than the son Jung.

Continue reading →