This year’s fall opera offering from the Glenn Gould School is a double bill; Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. Both of these were written in the 1950s and satirise bourgeois marriage of the time. Opera goers are absolutely used to seeing the marriage customs of, say, the 1850s or 1790s sent up in opera but some how the 1950s seem weirdly exotic. Director Mario Pacheco seems to have thought so too and sets both works in Dr. Pritchett’s Clinic for Matrimonial Memory Erasure. So the quartet in the Barber are nurses in scrubs; three of whom also form the trio for the Bernstein where Dinah and Sam are played as patients. It actually works pretty well.
The final programme of Confluence Concerts season took place at Heliconian Hall on Wednesday night. It was billed as The Confluence Songbook and, if there was a theme, it was about doing live versions of music that had been streamed during the Plague. But really by the time we saw it it had outgrown that. For, in addition to the full line up of Confluence artistic associates there was a raft of guests which resulted in a fairly lengthy and very eclectic programme. 
Serious Cabaret is an album by singer Mary Carewe and pianist Philip Mayers who is also responsible for the arrangements. It’s an eclectic mix of cabaret material from the 1920s to the 1970s. There’s classic material from the Weimar Republic, including songs by Hollaender (“Oh just suppose”) and Spoliansky (“Maskulinum/Femininum”, “It’s All a Swindle”) and one I hadn’t heard before; Zemlinsky’s “Herr Bombardil” about a man who eats until he explodes. 
My review
Mélodies Passagères is a new CD from Montreal based duo soprano Marianne Lambert and pianist Julien LeBlanc. Toronto folks may remember the latter as the music director/pianist for Against the Grain’s 
