Last night the faculty of music at UoT hosted a concert in memory of John Beckwith who passed away in December. It was a fitting tribute to a man whose 70 year career in Canadian music was massively influential. There were speeches; informative, funny, sometimes both, and lots of John’s music showcasing both the breadth of his output and its evolution. But there’s really no need for me to say more because the whole thing is available on Youtube. Recommended.
The National Ballet has announced a season that includes two world premieres, two Noorth American premieres and two Canadian premieres. It makes me wonder whether this isn’t part of why ballet isn’t suffering the same long term audience decline as opera. Worth thinking about.
Anyway the first of the world firsts is a new piece based on Flaubert’s Emma Bovary with a score by Peter Salem and choreography by Emma Pickett. The other is The other is a yet to be announced short work by choreographer William Yong.
Here’s a look ahead to March.
March 3rd and 5th, Opera York are presenting Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts. Details are here. Also on the 5th at 1pm Opera Revue are playing a new venue; The Aviary in the Canary District. (They are playing another new venue, Granite Brewery, on the 12th. Opera Revue your source for craft beer!) And the following night at 7.30pm it’s AtG’s Opera Pub at the Drake at 7.30pm.
From the 9th to the 12th it’s UoT Opera’s spring offering at the MacMillan Theatre. This year it’s Arthur (not George) Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities. Benjamin is probably the only opera composer to be shot down by Hermann Göring. I’m not sure what, if anything, that says about his music.
Thursday’s concert in the Music in the Afternoon series at Walter Hall was curated by Canadian-Icelandic composer Fjóla Evans and had a distinctly Icelandic flavour (fortunately not fermented shark flavour).
What do we mean by “forgiveness” or “redemption”? Prodigal, written and directed by Paolo Santalucia currently being presented by the Howland Company at Crow’s Theatre asks us to consider just that. It’s a curiously structured play. On one level it’s a black comedy about a seriously dysfunctional elite family but there’s an intro to each act in which a preacher exegises on the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Lost Sheep. We are invited to compare the characters we are about to see with the dramatic personae of Christ’s teaching. But are they really comparable?”
It’s that time of year when departing members of the COC Ensemble Studio give their farewell recitals in the RBA. On Tuesday it was the turn of Midori Marsh and Alex Halliday and they did it in style. The programme was interesting and the music making excellent. Although they alternated sets it’s probably easy to deal with each singer in turn.
Things are a bit sub fusc at the COC these days. The season reveal isn’t a glitzy gala with a big fight to grab the charcuterie. It isn’t even a 10am doughnuts and coffee presser in the RBA where the ghost of Robert Everett-Green could ask what happened to the promised new Canadian operas . It’s just an email arriving at the prescribed time. There isn’t even an embargoed press only version to let us get our ducks in a row before the broader public get the news. Such is life.
There was never a chance that Emily D’Angelo’s solo recital at Koerner Hall was going to be a steady procession of German lieder and French chansons with the odd Broadway number thrown in and it wasn’t. It was what D’Angelo fans would expect and (some of us at least) crave; lots of women composers and lots of contemporary music. There were five sets.
The first linked Hildegard von Bingen, Arnold Schoenberg and Missy Mazzoli. I’m going to focus on the Mazzoli. There was “Hello Lord” from Vespers for a New Dark Age and “You Are the Dust” from Songs from the Uproar. Both of these are stage works scored for chamber ensemble and electronics so they sound very different in piano score. Emily sang the with great purity and clarity and Sophia accompanied beautifully though there’s just no way one can capture the synth pop inflections of Mazzoli on piano. That said, it was a great advert for two works a I really admire. Continue reading
Cherubini’s Médée is a French opéra comique (i.e. with spoken dialogue) which premiered in March 1797. It’s based on Euripides by way of Corneille whose Médée of 1635 was written, as one might expect, in alexandrines. So its roots, and the work itself, are very much in the French classical tradition. The complication is that the work is much better known in its Italian version with sung recitatives (not authorised by Cherubini) and has developed as a “show off” vehicle for star sopranos; notably Maria Callas and, more recently, Sondra Radvanovsky. Along the way it’s lost a lot of its classicism and become almost verismo like. So I was intrigued to see how much Guillermo Silva-Marin, in presenting the work “in concert” at the St. Lawrence Centre, would try, and how much he would succeed, in reclaiming the Cherubini of a Paris tipping from revolution to Bonaparte.
To 918 Bathurst last night to hear the Happenstancers’ latest offering Hypersuite. The concept was to take movements from Bach suites and partitas for solo instrument and combine them into sets with (mostly) contemporary music of like form. The one exception was some Telemann but we’ll come to that.
So the first set consisted of cellist Sarah Gans playing Ana Sokolovic’s vez before a brief segue brought in Katya Poplanskaya on violin for the adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata BWV 1005. It’s really interesting as, although the Sokolovic piece uses a fair amount of extended technique there’s a definite sense that they belong to the same soundworld. Both are spare and spiky and eschew anything that might conventionally be called melody.
The second set had a lot in common with it. Brad Cherwin on clarinet played Augusta R. Thomas’ d(i)agon(als) followed by the sarabande from Bach’s Partita BWV 1013 (usually played on flute). This segued into Telemann’s fantasie 8 played on English horn by Aleh Remezau. Completely different from the first set; more melodic and dance like, these three pieces also had much in common.
The second half kicked off with The allemande from BWV 1013 on clarinet, followed by Sokolovic’s cinq danze, II on violin and the gigue from from BWV 1008 on cello. Here there is more contrast with the Sokolovic exploring a more complex sound world though still with clear affinities to the Bach. This was followed by Elliott Carter’s a 6 letter letter on English horn. It’s a quite long and complex piece which clearly places serious physical demands on the player. Continue reading
operaramblings 