Bohislav Martinů’s The Greek Passion is a 1961 opera based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nicos Kazantzakis. The English language libretto is by the composer. It was staged in the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg in 2023 in a production directed y Simon Stone and recorded for video.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Ukrainian Art Song Project and the sixth time a summer intensive for young singers has been held in Toronto. The final concert on Sunday afternoon in Temerty Theatre was run on similar lines to the previous year. There was a piano in the middle of the room with the audience “in the round” and singers singing from different places in the room.
Picture a Day Like This is the latest operatic collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp (Written on Skin, Lessons in Love and Violence). It’s basically an hour long chamber opera written for five singers and chamber orchestra and it’s now been recorded for CD by Nimbus.
The basic plot line is that a child has died but her mother can revive her if, within 24 hours, she can obtain a sleeve button from a truly happy person. She is given an itinerary to follow to find the likely candidates. In the course of six scenes she encounters two lovers whose relationship is apparently idyllic until the question of what “open” means comes up. (It’s possibly the first serious use of the idea of polyamory in the modern sense in an opera.) There’s an artisan who is superficially happy though he turns out to be going nuts because he’s been replaced by a machine. There’s a composer who is immensely successful but full of self doubt and a collector who owns everything he admires but is utterly alone. The only truly happy person is the enigmatic Zabelle… who turns out not to exist. Continue reading
Krysztof Warlikowski’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth; recorded for video at Salzburg in 2023 is certainly not short of ideas. Whether it all hangs together is another matter. There seem to be two main ideas in play. We are in a 1940s-ish fascist state with party armbands and so on. This gets more explicit as the piece develops. On top of this there’s a foregrounding of Lady Macbeth as the real driving force of the drama coupled with the idea that what’s driving her is her inability to provide an heir. For example, she’s clearly the one being crowned after Duncan’s murder and babies are a recurrent visual motif.
The first video disk review in Opera Canada in a while is now up on that site. It’s a review by me of a production by L’Opéra Royale de Versailles of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. There’s plenty of Cancon with Robert Gleadow as the Don, Florie Valiquette as Donna Anna and both Marshal Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg involved.
Versus is a one man show (more or less) by Adam Lazarus about a day in the life of the rather unfortunate (if distressingly normal) Gerald Bloom and worse the day is his birthday. It’s part of Summerworks and playing at the Theatre Centre. While it is mostly a monologue, Lazarus gets assistance from Nicholas Eddie and Irene Ly who do rather more than shift props. He also ropes in audience members, from time to time, to, for example, make him a smoothie or clean up dog poo. If being acutely embarassed is not your thing then don’t sit in the front row! Continue reading
Slug Meal, part of Summerworks, is a one woman show presented by Camille Huang at Theatre Passe Muraille. It’s a sort of dance X performance art piece inspired by unfortunate childhood memories of her mother’s eggplant dish, Western ideas of immigrant food and the idea of “dirt” as “matter out of place”
The highly athletic Huang performs an hour long routine, occasionally talking to herself in (I guess) Chinese and accompanied by a soundtrack that ranges from body noises to a kind of Chinese muzak. Along the way she: Continue reading
Bimbos in Space from Femmepire Theatre is currently playing at Factory Theatre as part of Summerworks. It’s the first play I’ve seen where the content warnings included BDSM and cannibalism! It’s billed as a homage to sex workers and trans people and riffs off every cliché of the B sci-fi horror genre.
Saturday night Toronto Summer Music closed out with a final concert in Walter Hall showcasing the many and various aspects of the festival. It’s a pretty good solution to the problem of how to wrap up such a diverse set of programmes.
So, we got a few numbers from the Community Choir. There was some nicely sung Vivaldi and Brahms and an arrangement by Kathleen Allan of “Come and I Will Sing You” that was firmly in the more fun to sing than to listen to genre.
Rougarou is a work in progress written and directed by Damion LeClair for unnecessary mountain theatre. On Saturday and Sunday it was given in a semi-workshop format in partnership with Native Earth at Aki Studio as part of Summerworks.
The format was basically a reading with one actor playing all the parts and a second person “setting the stage” as there were no sets or props, though the sound design, or at least part of it, was included. I think the intent at this point is for the finished product to use two (or perhaps more) actors; one playing the main character Renee and another perhaps playing everyone else but I’m not sure of that.
operaramblings 