Here are a couple more season announcements.
The 2023/24 TSO season is the usual mix of symphonic, vocal and lighter fare. Several concerts caught my eye. The first is the return of Sir Andrew Davis on November 8th and 9th 2023 with a programme that includes Fauré’s Requiem. Later that month, on the 22nd, there’s the first of two concerts featuring Emily D’Angelo. She’ll be singing the Berg Seven Early Songs with Michael Tilson-Thomas on the podium. That programme also includes Mahler Symphony No. 5. She’s back on May 1st and 2nd 2024 with the music from her excellent enargeia CD. Gustavo Gimeno conducts a programme that also includes Brahms Symphony No.1 and a new work by Alison Yun-Fei Jiang. On Sunday June 16th in North York there’s a programme that includes a new piece by Ian Cusson created as part of the Art of Healing project with CAMH. Gimeno conducts a programme that also includes Bartok and Mozart. Full details of the season are here. Continue reading
On May 26th and 27th in the MacMillan Theatre there’s a chance to see Haydn’s rarely performed Orfeo: L’anima del filosofo. It was composed for London in 1791 but was shut down during rehearsals because the Lord Chamberlain’s office thought it subversively supportive of enlightenment values at a time when Pitt’s government was cracking down brutally on pro French Revolutionary sentiment in the UK.
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.
Here’s a look ahead to March.
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.
operaramblings 