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.
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
You may recall that Bicycle Opera Project’s film Sweat won a major award at the Digital Excellence in Opera Awards. The film is now being streamed for free at the Opera America website until June.
FWIW here are links to my reviews of the film and the show it was based on.
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.
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.
Piano, piano, piano, piano (as Elmer Fudd might say) along with double bass and electronics are the basis for Kalaisan Kalaichelvan’s Poitu Varen which premiered at Hugh’s Room last night as part of the Soundstreams TD Encounters series.
On Sunday evening OPUS Chamber Music and the Canadian Chamber Orchestra joined forces at Eglinton-St. George’s United Church to present an all Shostakovich programme. It was really, perhaps surprisingly, varied.
My review of Bilodeau/Bouchard’s La Reine-garçon at the COC is now up at Bachtrack.
TL:DR everything I want in a new opera pretty much.
Photo credit: Michael Cooper
Massenet’s Grisélidis gets the Bru-Zane treatment. Review at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: Bru Zane BZ105
The latest CD from the Toronto Symphony and Gustavo Gimeno features two works by Stravinsky and a Glenn Gould inspired piece by Kelly-Marie Murphy. The first piece is the 24 minute long suite from the ballet Le baiser de la fée which is a sort of pastiche of what Tchaikovsky might sound like if Tchaikovsky could orchestrate as well as Stravinsky! It’s well played but I don’t find it terribly exciting.
Murphy’s piece is another story. There’s a running joke about short pieces by contemporary composers at the TSO. They get called “garage pieces” because they get played at the beginning of concerts when half the patrons are still on their way up from parking. Murphy’s Curiosity, Genius and the Search for Petula Clark absolutely does not deserve the label. It was inspired by a road trip Glenn Gould took up north one time and it’s fascinating. There’s a restless energy to it and a kind of flirting with atonality coupled with lyricism and a lot of percussion. It’s kind of like a feral love child of Holst’s Mars; Bringer of War and a Shostakovich symphony crammed into ten minutes. Continue reading
