The Cunning Linguist

Posted on May 2, 2025 by operaramblings

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.

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Saariaho – complete music for piano and harpsichord

Posted on May 1, 2025 by operaramblings

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 →

Bus Opera workshop

Posted on April 30, 2025 by operaramblings

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.

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Munich’s “new” Fledermaus

Posted on April 29, 2025 by operaramblings

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.

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Searing Wozzeck at the COC

Posted on April 28, 2025 by operaramblings

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
#bachtrack

Garden of Vanished Pleasures

Posted on April 27, 2025 by operaramblings

Tim Albery’s show; Garden of Vanished Pleasures, about Derek Jarman and his Kent coast garden was supposed to figure in Soundstreams 2020/21 season and we know what happened to that! So, it was reengineered as a film and streamed in September of 2021. I reviewed it at some length for Opera Canada. Now director Tim Albery has recreated it as a live show at the Berkeley Street Theatre.

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May 2025

Posted on April 26, 2025 by operaramblings

Here are my top picks for May.

The Cunning Linguist opens at Factory Theatre on May 1st. Previews are April 26th, 27th and 30th and it runs to May 11th. A young queer Mexican woman, with her sidekick God, decides to move to Toronto…
Eugene Onegin in the Robert Carsen production opens May 2nd at the COC. Runs until May 24th.
On May 3rd Confluence has a Teiya Kasahara curated show called Project T: Home Video (this is a change from the originally scheduled May 2nd/3rd show).

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Shedding a Skin

Posted on April 25, 2025 by operaramblings

Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin premiered at London’s Soho Theatre a couple of years ago. It’s now playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a Nightwood Theatre production directed by Cherissa Richards. It’s a one woman show about a young woman escaping from corporate Hell and her boat dwelling boyfriend and discovering herself. It’s set in contemporary London and Myah is black and very, very middle class; the daughter of successful immigrants with, as they tend to, ambitions for their children which Myah isn’t really living up to.

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FLEX

Posted on April 24, 2025 by operaramblings

Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas. The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison. In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.

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Volpini, Varèse, Iannotta

Posted on April 23, 2025 by operaramblings

Tuesday evening in Temerty Theatre Brian Current and the GGS New Music Ensemble presented a three work programme that covered more or less the whole time span of composers writing “sounds rather than notes”; which is an interesting and useful way of thinking about this particular type of music. Continue reading →