So Toronto’s hottest indie opera company, Against the Grain Theatre, has finally announced a 14/15 season. Not entirely unexpectedly they are bringing #UncleJohn; a transladaptation (©Lydia Perovic) of Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Toronto after it’s successful appearance in Banff this summer. With a new English libretto by Joel Ivany, #UncleJohn will be staged at The Black Box Theatre at 1087 Queen St. West’s vintage rock venue, The Great Hall. .
Also in today’s mailbox, the season announcement from the Talisker Players; a group who specialize in mixing music and the spoken word.
The 2013/14 season kicks off with City of the Mind, a concert about cities, ancient and modern featuring soprano Erin Bardua, mezzo soprano Vicki St. Pierre and baritone Joel Allison. The show begins in the 15th century, with Les Cris de Paris, a consort piece based on the cries of street vendors in the French capital. Moving ahead a couple of centuries, Tommasso Giordani’s Addio di Londra, for soprano with violin, viola and continuo, is an ode to a famous but unnamed personage upon his departure from London, entreating him to remember the sights of the city in his travels abroad. The programme also features a rare North American performance of a selection of Wiener lieder and the Venetian Boat Song, a 19th century salon piece by Jacques Blumenthal, for mezzo soprano, violin and piano. Very popular in its day, it is a reminder of the era of the “grand tour” of Europe. Moving into the 20thcentury we start in New York City with excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s iconic On the Town, arranged by Laura Jones for baritone, soprano and string quartet, and finishing in Toronto with two pieces; Andrew Ager’s Ellis Portal, for baritone, mezzo soprano, clarinet and string quartet, about the city at night; and Erik Ross’s Concrete Toronto for soprano and saxophone.
Announcements for the upcoming season in Toronto are starting to come in. Voicebox: Opera in Concert have announced a thee show season at the St. Lawrence Centre for the arts. The season opens on Sunday, November 24, 2013 at 2:30 PM with Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana. This isn’t a work one gets to see very often so even a piano accompanied concert version is very welcome. Musical Director and Pianist will be Peter Tiefenbach. Soprano Betty Waynne Allison will sing Elizabeth I with tenor Adam Luther as Essex. The cast also includes Jennifer Sullivan, Jesse Clark and Mark Petracchi.
Miriam Khalil
Last night was the first night of a four night run for Against the Grain Theatre‘s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. These are the folks who did La Bohème at the Tranzac and The Seven Deadly Sins in an art gallery. Last night’s space was only marginally less unconventional. We were in some upstairs space at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse reached via the back entrance and lots of stairs. It was a sort of loft set up so that the performance space was a narrow strip bounded at each end by a door and at the sides by three banked rows of seats. There was seating for maybe eighty people so it was intimate, even claustrophobic. Add to the space a few simple props, lights and a fog machine and you have the raw materials for Joel Ivany’s production. Continue reading
John Adams is in Toronto for the TSO’s New Creations Festival. Today he MC’d a free concert of extracts from his operas at the Four Seasons Centre. I feel really privileged to have been able to attend. Adams’ introductions for each piece were thoughtful, informative and deeply human. We had arias from A Flowering Tree, Nixon in China, Dr. Atomic and The Death of Klinghoffer performed by Peter McGillivray (baritone) and Betty Waynne Allison (soprano) with Anne Larlee at the piano. They both did very well with McGillivray being particularly effective, especially in Nixon’s “Mister Premier, distinguished guests”. To be fair to Ms. Allison, Adams’ writing for soprano is fiendish and throttling back a big voice in a fairly small space can’t have been easy.
I’m starting to feel a bit more at home with Adams’ music and to understand better why I like what I do like. Adams’ music seems to work best when it is fairly up tempo and has real rhythmic drive to it. Adams said that very little of his non operatic music is as slow as much of his operatic music and I think that’s significant. He doesn’t do relaxed and/or lyrical as well as the more driven stuff. So Nixon in China works pretty well because it is driven along at a pretty relentless pace and even the set piece arias are mostly fairly brisk. Dr. Atomic drags, has slow passages that lack any other real interest and is correspondingly less effective.
operaramblings 