Apparently Kylie Jenner is one of those people who is famous for being famous which is usually a guarantee that I’ve never heard of him/her/they. But she’s famous enough to have inspired Jasmine Lee-Jones use her as a hook for a play; Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, that opened in the Studi Tneatre at Crow’s on Thursday night in a co-production between Crow’s and Obsidian Theatre.
Wednesday’s lunchtime recital in the RBA featured Simone Osborne; currently appearing as Norina in Don Pasquale, and pianist Rachael Kerr. It was a well curated selection of songs apparently, at least partially, inspired by sleep deprivation singer and pianist both have small children!). There were three sets of four songs. One in each set was by a Canadian composer backed up by two others that were thematically related.
So the first set featured birds. Godfrey Ridout’s arrangement of She’s Like The Swallow was supported by Viardot’s Grands oiseaux blancs and Grieg’s “Ein Schwan” from Sex digte af Henrik Ibsen. It worked. The Ridout got a reasonably folk song like treatment, the Viardot was dramatic and the Grieg was just beautiful. A good start. Continue reading
Tuesday night at the Four Seasons Centre it was the turn of the Ensemble Studio cast to give us Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. It’s the same Barbe et Doucet production of course but director Marilyn Gronsdal, conductor Simone Luti and an excellent cast definitely gave it their own twist. Everybody seemed to have their own bit of business that we didn’t see on opening night and they all worked.
Season announcements for theatre companies for 2024/25 are coming out fast and one notable thing is that a number of shows from Crow’s Theatre have been picked up by other companies. Both Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet of 1812 and Fifteen Dogs have been picked up by Mirvish (as Uncle Vanya was this season). Soulpepper have picked up The Master Plan which will also be seen in Hamilton. I’ve linked to my reviews which are enthusiastic about all except Pierre, Natasha. That was a huge hit, especially with people who like Broadway musicals more than I do and, as the prologue warns, it wasn’t written for opera fans who have read War and Peace three times so my views should be viewed through that lens.
Saturday night’s concert by the Cantabile Chamber Singers, with their conductor Cheryll J. Chung, at Church of the Redeemer; entitled A Prism of Sound, was the last of their 2023/24 season and, I think, the first time I’ve seen this particular choir. It was an all Canadian programme. The first part consisted of works by various choral composers like Matthew Emery and Peter Togni and it was all tonal works for unaccompanied choir on, basically, liturgical texts. It was pleasant enough but, for me at least, after a while one Ave Verum Corpus sounds much like the rest. I surprised myself by really quite liking Emery’s Sweetest Love which was quite complex and rather overturned my previous impressions of his music. I also enjoyed Eleanor Daley’s setting of an extract from the Song of Solomon; Upon Your Heart. But maybe that’s because the text has special resonance for me. No complaints about the performance though. They are a very good choir.
What does Hedda seek? I think that’s the question at the heart of Liisa Ripo-Martelli’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that opened at Coal Mine Theatre on Thursday evening. It’s not heavily adapted. It’s still Kristiania in the late 19th century and the environment is as dull, provincial, stuffy and “respectable” as can be. The language is a little more direct than Ibsen especially in the way men speak to women but still more is left unsaid than not. Presented with the audience on three sides of the tiny Coal Mine space it’s intimate to the point of, entirely appropriate, claustrophobia.
Jacinto Guerrero’s El huésped del Sevillano (The Guest at the Inn) is a zarzuela that premiered in Madrid in 1926. It’s a light hearted musical romp and the soprano doesn’t die at the end. I caught the last of three performances given by Toronto Operetta Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre directed by Guillermo Silva-Marin.
I caught the second performance of Teiya Kasahara and David Eliakis’ Dichterliebe: Whose Love at Heliconian Hall on Saturday evening. It was part of the Confluence Concerts series and not untypical of the eclectic nature of that series. Also it was a logical continuation of these two partnering on shows that question gender norms in the classical music industry.
Cherubini’s Medea, in the 1909 Italian version being used by the COC, got there by a fairly circuitous route. Euripides 5th century BCE tragedy and Seneca’s 1st century CE play inspired a French verse version of 1635 by Thomas Corneille which was turned into an opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier in 1693. In 1797 a version with music by Cherubini to a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman; retaining much of Corneille’s version as spoken dialogue, premiered in Paris. In 1909, for the Italian premiere at La Scala an Italian translation with added recitatives was used and that became, more or less, the standard version for its rare 20th century revivals (most notably in the 1950s with Maria Callas) and that’s the version being given at the COC with Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role. Understandable really. It’s hard enough to find a cast that can do justice to the music. To expect them also to be expert at declaiming Alexandrines en français is probably expecting a bit too much.
My review of Wednesday’s concert at the TSO with Emily D’Angelo is now up at Bachtrack.
Photo credit: Allan Cabral
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