It was the “farewell to the Ensemble Studio” show for Vlad Soloviev and Jonah Spungin yesterday and they put on a great show enhanced by an informal, witty approach. Jonah’s singing was excellent. I especially liked his take on Wolf’s “Der Feuerreiter” and a set of Swedish songs by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. He clearly has power to spare and can be subtle too. Nice going.
A Left Coast is baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer’s tribute to British Columbia and its music. Seven composers with birthdates ranging from 1908 to 1985 are featured on the disk. BC is a young country as far as western classical music is concerned though, of course, it has rich artistic traditions stretching far back into the mists of the north west.
It’s quite varied and, inevitably, I like some sets more than others. My top pick is Leslie Uyeda’s Plato’s Angel songs which set poems by Lorna Crozier. There’s a deep melancholy in the text that’s reflected in a dark, somewhat atonal musical idiom. I also really liked Jeffrey Ryan’s Everything Already Lost; the longest set on the record, setting quite sonically/musically evocative texts by Jan Zwicky with quite varied sonorities mixing elements of minimalism and onomatopoeia, especially in the piano part.
The final concert of this year’s Toronto Bach Festival took place at Eastminster United Church yesterday afternoon. It offered two of the cantatas Bach wrote in Leipzig in 1723; Die Elenden sollen essen and Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes Each is written in two parts which, originally would have bookended a sermon (mercifully absent yesterday). Each begins with a choral setting of a biblical verse and proceeds via recits on arias on related texts. The second half of each starts with a Sinfonia and finishes with a chorale based on a Lutheran hymn.
Confluence Concerts last show of the season; All the Diamonds, was dedicated to the night sky. It’s not easy to find new things to say about Confluence, unless there’s a new work or sometging on the programme. Every show is different but there are elements in common. The styles of the music vary from pop, to singer-songwriter, to jazz to classical to spoken word and the performance styles are equally varied and not always what one expects for the piece in question. So for instance, Don McLean’s “Starry Night” got the Suba Sankaran/Dylan Bell two part a cappella treatment and the traditional Ladino number “Yo menamori d’un aire” got full on jazz vocals from Patricia ‘Callaghan with instrumentals from Larry Beckwith n violin and Andrew Downing on bass. It was fun, varied and joyous and no two bits of the 23 item line up was quite like anything else.
Last night saw the first of two performances of Haydn’s rarely performed 1791 work Orfeo: L’anima del filosofo. I know how much effort and indeed passion went into creating this production and the singing is pretty good. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but I can’t. There were just too many issues.
Let’s start with the opera itself. Maybe it was never completely finished as it was shut down by the authorities during rehearsals in London. Maybe that’s why it feels horribly unbalanced. The first half (two acts) tell us of Eurydice being betrothed, against her will, to her father, King Creonte’s, rival Arideo. She runs off into the forest where she is about to be devoured by beasts when the news is brought to Orfeo who then sings at length before “rushing” off to rescue Euridice.
Offenbach’s La Périchole is one of his less often performed works and I think I can see why. It really isn’t as good as La Belle Hélène or Orphée aux Enfers but it has its moment and in the completely mad, over the top, utterly French treatment it got at the Opéra Comique in 2022 it’s really quite enjoyable.
I saw Fatuma Adar’s one woman show She’s Not Special presented by Nightwood Theatre and Tarragon at Tarragon Theatre last night. It’s an interesting blend of stand up, confessional and very loud music in a sort of rap meets rock vein. The comedy and the confessional element turn on the vagaries of growing up as a black Muslim woman in Canada who aspires to be a writer. Some of this stuff is familiar to anyone “in the arts”; the tick box nature of grant applications. “Tick, tick, tick… that’s sound of ticking the boxes… doesn’t work so well at the airport”. Some of t, like the throw away line there is much more about specific cultural experience. Also lots of jokes about “intersectionality”.
I don’t often get deeply emotionally affected by an opera video. Generally it’s less immersive than a live performance in a way that diminishes emotion. That wasn’t my experience though with the 2022 recording of Handel’s Theodora from the Royal Opera. Admittedly Theodora is an opera I can get very emotionally involved in but Katie Mitchell’s production really did get to me.
I sort of remember when I saw an early stage workshop of soprano Stacie Dunlop’s interpretation of Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child. I think it was back in 2019 and I remember it was in a grungy former industrial space on Sterling Road. There’s a video of/about that performance. Time has passed and the work has now been fully realised and it’s available as a 17 minute film which I’ve had a chance to watch the latter. There’s more work going on to make it the core of a longer live show.
June is fast approaching and, as ever, it’s one of the odder months in the performance calendar. Here’s what has caught my eye (so far).
operaramblings 