Opera Atelier’s fall offering this year is a remount of the Magic Flute in essentially the version that first appeared in 1991. It’s sung in English and we got a preview in the RBA on Thursday. It was basically a working rehearsal of the opera’s opening plus a few other scenes with Chris Bagan at the piano.
Thr RBA concert on Tuesday lunchtime was a preview of Opera Atelier’s upcoming production of Charpentier’s David and Jonathan. Besides the usual Opera Atelier chat there was some useful information on the piece and the production and some excerpts.
Friday evening at Heliconian Hall saw the second of two performances of Confluence Concerts’ Sighs Too Deep For Words: A Canadian Valentine. It was an all Canadian concert featuring songs and spoken word including two world premieres and a performance of Omar Daniel’s 2005 piece Neruda Canzones.
The spoken word pieces, read beautifully by Alison Beckwith, ranged from Lucy Maud Montgomery to Margaret Atwood. Some pieces straightforwardly celebrated romantic love and others came at it a bit sideways! Songs by Canadian composers were well represented With Derek Holman, Jeffrey Ryan and John Beckwith all represented. Anaïs Kelsey-Verdecchia performed (with Christopher Bagan) her own setting of “The Lark in the Clear Air” and Patricia O’Callaghan gave us her setting of “Some by Fire” with Chris again at the pianio, Andrew Downing on bass and a backing group. So many styles! No-one could say that Canadian music is samey or boring. Continue reading
All is Love, which opened Thursday night at Koerner Hall, is a remount of the 2022 Opera Atelier show which, for various reasons, nobody much saw. It’s a staged series of quite eclectic (mosly) opera and ballet excerpts around the theme of “love”; which means pretty much anything goes.
Tuesday’s lunchtime performance in the RBA was a preview of the upcoming Opera Atelier show All is Love which is essentially a remount of the February 2022 show that nobody much saw because it happened during a blizzard with most of downtown closed due to “trucker” activity.
Opera Atelier have announced the line up for their 2024/25 season. As with other recent seasons there’s one show at the Elgin Theatre and one at Koerner Hall.
The first show, October 24th – 27th, 2024, is Handel’s Acis and Galatea at the Elgin. I’m not going to complain about more English language Handel! Bring it on. This show is indicative of the growing relationship between OA and Versailles with French tenor Antonin Rondepierre in the role of Acis and Blaise Rantoanina singing the role of Damon. The cast is completed by Meghan Lindsey as Galatea (yea!) and Douglas Williams as Polyphemus. Christopher Bagan conducts which is also nice to see. Continue reading
It’s officially summer and Market Street is pedestrian only again. That means it’s possible to stage music performances there and yesterday Opera Atelier had the noon to two spot. I arrived a few minutes late so missed Maeve Palmer’s first aria but it did mean I walked in on the opening of my all time favourite Handel aria; “As with rosy steps the morn”, sung quite beautifully by Anna Sharpe. There were three sets and it was pretty varied; Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, Monteverdi, Rossini Purcell and Delibes, that I remember. Besides Maeve and Anna we got baritone Chris Dunham and countertenor Ryan McDonald accompanied by Chris Bagan on keyboards, Felix Deak on cello and Arlan Vriens on violin.
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.
So to Eastminster United last night for the opening concert of the Toronto Bach Festival. We got three concerti bookended by (I think) a sinfonia from one of the cantatas; an excuse to show off the trumpets and timpani recruited for Sunday’s oratorios, and an arrangement of the Air on the G String. Festival director John Abberger contributed a scholarly programme note on the general issue of Bach concerti. Bottom line, there aren’t very many of them but they can be rearranged for a pretty wide range of instrumental options. Last night we got the Concerto for Oboe BWV1056, Concerto for Flute, Violin and Harpsichord BWV 1044 and the much better known Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 BWV 1046.
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.
operaramblings 