Tag Archives: asselin

Dido and Aeneas preview

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meghanlindsayWednesday’s RBA concert was a preview of Opera Atelier’s upcoming production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.  Something between a performance of excerpts and a working rehearsal it featured Marshall Pynkoski introducing a series of excerpts for both singers (in rehearsal dress) and dancers (in costume).  He provided a good linking narrative situating each excerpt in the context of the work together with some general remarks about the nature and origin of the piece.

We got Meghan Lindsay (Dido) and Mireille Asselin (Belinda) with the opening duet.  They wre joined by Colion Ainsworth (Aeneas) for “see, your royal guest appears” followed by the triumphing dance by two members of the OA ballet.  There was some serious witchiness from Danielle MacMillan and Cynthia Smithers, more dance and Mireille with “Thanks to these lonesome vales” before a very dramatic account of the final confrontation between the lovers and Dido’s famous lament. Continue reading →

Inspirations

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Toronto Summer Music opened on Thursday night at Koerner Hall with a concert called Inspirations featuring chamber and vocal music drawn from folk influences.  It began with Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folk Style Op. 102 for piano and cello played by Rachael Kerr and Matthew Zalkind.  The folk roots are pretty clear here and since the pieces were written with amateur performance in mind those roots aren’t over elaborated and the result is satisfying.  Not that they got an amateurish performance.  Quite the opposite.

TSM - Opening Night - 7.7.2022 - Photo Caroline Barbier de Reulle

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Angel

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Opera Atelier’s new film Angel premiered last night.  It consists of six scenes which, we are told, can be performed as a sequence or individually.  There’s a basic theme of “angels” and the texts are drawn from Milton and Rilke (in translation).  The score is by Edwin Huizinga and Christopher Bagan with some of the dance music being actual baroque works.

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Our Song d’Hiver

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Our Song d’Hiver is Tapestry Opera’s latest on-line offering.  It’s a little over an hour long and features Mireille Asselin exploring French-English bilingualism and biculturalism as it manifests itself from l’Acadie to the Ottawa valley with a bit of Provence thrown in for good measure.  It’s very cleverly done and the production values are high.  In places it’s very funny and in others impossibly sad.  There are lovely performances by Mimi and pianist Frédéric and guest appearances from guitarists Maxim and Gervais Cormier, poet Élise Gauthier and composers Ian Cusson and Marie-Claire Saindon.

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Tapestry announces winter line up

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Morgan-Paige Melbourne. Photo by Ian ChangOver the next few months Tapestry will be offering three new shows recorded in the Ernest Balmer Studio and streamed via Youtube.  The line up is:

  • A Joke Before the Gallows: Pianist Adam Sherkin performs a musical story celebrating the dramatic music of Chopin, directed by Tom Diamond, with text by David James Brock, in co-production with The Piano Lunaire.  That premiers on January 30th.
  • Our Song D’Hiver: Soprano Mireille Asselin explores her connection to the shared and unique elements of English-speaking and French-speaking culture.  Premiers February 27th.
  • Where Do I Go?: Pianist Morgan-Paige Melbourne offers up a unique multidisciplinary performance combining piano with dance.  That goes live on March 27th.

Photo credit: Ian Chang

Something Rich and Strange

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Opera Atelier’s fall show Something Rich and Strange was originally conceived as a show that could be given before a (limited) live audience as well as via web stream. That’s obviously constraining compared to a show that is created without a fourth wall and can include location filming. All the other constraints of these strange times had also to be observed. Despite this there was much to like in a show that presented a number of scenes from the 17th and 18th century repertoire plus a couple of “neo-baroque” pieces composed by Edwin Huizinga.

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The Angel Speaks

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The Angel Speaks got its North American premiere last night at the Royal Ontario Museum.  It’s a new piece born out of Opera Atelier’s collaboration with the Chapel Royal at Versailles and represents something of a new direction for the company.  Structurally I suppose one could describe it as a cantata with dance for baroque instruments.  It combines works by Purcell (and a little William Boyce) with two new works by Edwin Huizinga to create a loose plot line around the Archangel Gabriel and the Annunciation of the Virgin.  It incorporates Huizinga’s Inception, first seen in Toronto as a sort of entr’acte to OA’s Pygmalion show last October.  But at the core of the piece is a new Huizinga composition; Annunciation, for baritone, soprano and small ensemble, setting text by Rilke.

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Opera Atelier 2019/20

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Opera Atelier has announced its 2019/20 season.  As usual there are two main stage shows.  The first is a revival of their 2011 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  It runs from October 31st to November 9th, 2019, in the Ed Mirvish Theatre.  It’s a production that plays up the comedy and the elements of the commedia dell’arte in the piece while pretty much eschewing anything deeper or darker.  The cast includes Douglas Williams as the Don with Stephen Hegedus as Leporello, Colin Ainsworth, as Don Ottavio, Meghan Lindsay as Donna Anna, Carla Huhtanen as Donna Elvira, Mireille Asselin as Zerlina, Olivier Laquerre as Masetto, and Gustav Andreassen as Commendatore. beautiful Ed Mirvish Theatre.  David Fallis conducts.

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Actéon et Pygmalion

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Opera Atelier’s french double header opened last night at the Elgin Theatre.  It was, bar the occasional twist, classic Opera Atelier.  They presented two French baroque operas in their distinctive style with a little humour and none of the excesses that have sometimes crept in.

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Burlesque meets baroque

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Against the Grain Theatre’s Orphée+; a burlesque inflected version of Gluck’s Orphée, opened a three show run last night at the Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront.  There are many, many things I want to say about this show and the challenge is going to be to present them in some kind of orderly sequence.  First off there are expectations for an AtG show in Toronto that probably weren’t present when it opened in Columbus (It’s a co-pro with Opera Columbus and the Banff Centre).  We have come to associate AtG with various kinds of “doing differently”; transladaptations, site specific stagings, staged art song and so on.  In that context this is a rather conservative show.  It’s a production of a canonic opera in a conventional theatre.  It’s not a traditional production and would likely shock at the Met or the Lyric but would probably raise only half an eyebrow in Berlin or Barcelona.  So I’m inclined to treat it as if I had seen it in Europe.

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Darryl Block Photography
Mireille Asselin (Eurydice)

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