Wednesday night’s main event in Toronto Summer Music was Teiya Kasahara’s The Butterfly Project performed at Walter Hall. Teiya’s introduction was most interesting. For them, the project is about exploring their Japanese-ness. As the child of a Japanese father and a German mother growing up in Vancouver that’s inevitably a complex thing. When it gets combined with opera and, specifically, Puccini’s “Japanese” travesty Madama Butterfly it gets really complicated. So The Butterfly Project raises some really interesting questions; for Teiya ones related to being a to-some-extent-Japanese performer of works like MB, for me ones related to why this opera fascinates people like Teiya when, frankly, I’d be happy to bin it.
Wednesday evening’s early evening shuffle concert at Heliconian Hall featured Karine White and Hyejin Kwon in Love Letter to Toronto. It was a compilation of opera arias, art song and more popular fare; sometimes altered a bit, evoking those things we love and don’t about Toronto. Summer nights, love and loss, wildlife and, inevitably, traffic and the TTC featured prominently. oomposers featured ranged from Mozart to Heisler and Goldrich via Puccini, Bernstein, Menotti and more. All in all, a varied and nicely constructed programme.
One of the strangest records of Kurt Weill’s music that I have ever listened to has just come my way. There are two pieces involved; Propheten and Four Walt Whitman Songs. Propheten has its roots in Weill’s six hour long, Old Testament inspired, opera The Eternal Road which premiered at the Manhattan Opera House in 1937 with a cast of 245 and which ran for 153 performances before, perhaps unsurprisingly, disappearing for a long,long time. Propheten is a 1998 adaptation of the last act by David Drew using the original German text by Franz Werfel plus biblical quotations and additional orchestration by Noam Sheriff. It basically deals with the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and comes in at a more digestible 45 minutes.
Mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton have produced a CD with three of Mahler’s best known song cycles; the Rückert-Lieder, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the Kindertotenlieder. It’s a very fine recording. Both performers are, of course, expert recitalists and they take quite an individual way with these well known pieces. In general they are quite slow (less so in the Rückert songs than the other two sets) but very clearly articulated. The phrasing, by both singer and pianist, is very deliberate and sometimes quite individual. This is most pronounced in the Rückert songs. It’s an interesting approach which I enjoyed.
VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert announced their 2023/24 season. It’s quite interesting; three Verdi rarities:
I don’t review a lot of full length audio only recordings of mainstream operas. Generally I think video makes more sense but sometimes something comes along that attracts my attention. The recent recording of Handel’s Serse by the English Concert with Harry Bicket was one such. This time it’s the cast that caught my attention. There’s Emily d’Angelo (are we allowed to call her “young” or “emerging” any more?) in the title role but also such fine Handel singers as Lucy Crowe as Romilda and Mary Bevan as Atalanta. As it turns out there’s not a weak link in the cast and while these three turn in fine performances so do Daniela Mack (Amastre), Paula Murrihy (Arsamene), Neal Davies (Ariodata) and William Dazeley (Elviro). 
operaramblings 