Tag Archives: britten

Coming up

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letravail_365sqIt’s getting a bit busier again.  This afternoon there are a couple of concerts.  At 2pm in Mazzoleni Hall you can catch Mireille Asselin and Brett Polegato with Peter Tiefenbach and Rachel Andrist in a painting themed program of lieder, artsongs and chansons called Le travail du peintre.  At 4.30pm at Metropolitan United Church Bach’s Mass in B Minor meets German film maker Bastian Clevé’s film The Sound of Eternity.  The soloists are Marjorie Maltais, Geoff Sirett, Jennifer Krabbe and Charles Sy plus the Orpheus Choir, Chorus Niagara and the Talisker Players.  I suppose it would just about be possible to do both…

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News from MY Opera

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applinTwo announcements from MY Opera at their fundraiser yesterday.  First, they have rebranded from Metro Youth Opera to MY Opera.  I guess everybody is getting a little older!  More exciting, their spring 2016 production will be Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia which is a definite departure into much darker territory for this company and a chance to see a work that isn’t performed too often.  Dates and casting TBA.

The fundraiser itself was fun with some fine singing from, among others, Stephanie Tritchew, Lyndsay Promane, Asitha Tennekoon and Kelsey Vicary with Natasha Fransblow on keyboards.  There was beer and silly hats and a vast quantity of rather good chicken wings.  There was also a raffle and a photo booth thingy.  And did I remember to mention the chicken wings.

The Diary of The One Who Didn’t Disappear

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The on/off saga of the Ensemble Studio’s promised Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared came to an apparent conclusion yesterday.  It had been postponed at least once and even this morning the COC website is advertising a complete performance with two soloists and a small chorus.

cocIt didn’t happen.  What we got was a recital by Owen McAusland singing some excerpts from the Janáček plus Vaughan William’s The House of Life and Britten’s Les Illuminations.  It was his last performance as a member of the Ensemble Studio during which time, among many other things, he sang several main stage performances as Tito covering for a sick Michael Schade.

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History’s worst fifty years in song

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tumblr_m3nd5oo7XK1qjsaf0o1_400I guess it’s a good thing when one’s emotional and intellectual reactions to a program threaten to overwhelm one’s ability to listen analytically and evaluate.  That’s what art is for isn’t it?  Anyway that’s pretty much what happened to me today listening to a program called Songs of Love and War in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  The songs were all pieces more or less inspired by the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century; the wars, the rise of Nazi power, the occupation of France.  These are all events that have many layers of meaning for me.  I have studied them and the music and literature they generated for decades.  I have known, often well, people who played roles in these events.  I have deeply held views.  You have been warned!

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Daniel Cabena and Stephen Runge at Hart House

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cabenarungeI was at a bit of a loose end yesterday so I made a very last minute decision to catch countertenor Daniel Cabena and pianist Stephen Runge in recital in the Great Hall at Hart House.  It was a free concert and I hadn’t seen a program listing so I was pleasantly surprised to find a rather varied mix of early 20th century Canadian and English art song as well as piano pieces by York Bowen.  I guess I was expecting baroque and earlier material since that’s what countertenors do!

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Filming Gloriana

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Phyllida Lloyd’s 2000 BBC film of Britten’s Gloriana, based on her production for Opera North, is quite fascinating.  The bonus interviews reveal the utter disdain for films/videos of stage opera productions held by pretty much everyone involved in the project.  It’s an interesting perspective to hear in a world where Cinema and streaming HD broadcasts are increasingly common and where Blu-ray/DVD has clearly overtaken CD as the preferred medium for opera recordings.  In some ways, of course, it’s because the technology has improved enormously.  DVD was still relatively new in 2000 and widescreen, flat screen TVs were yet to come.  In any event, this attitude led to the creation of a rather interesting film.

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Roots

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durhamcathedralI was talking to Leslie Barcza of barczablog at a concert yesterday.  He asked me what I was most looking forward to in the upcoming season and I was a bit stumped for an answer because there’s lots of good stuff in Toronto this season but nothing that really sets my pulse racing.  Finally I answered with the TSO’s Dream of Gerontius, which, it turns out, is not exactly high on Lesley’s bucket list.  This led to a brief discussion about how origins affect our reactions; that is until the actual concert interrupted our talk.

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TSMF begins

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Emerson-Quartet-300x200The Toronto Summer Music Festival kicked off last night with a concert by the venerable and renowned Emerson Quartet.  The theme for the festival is “The Modern Age”; explained to us by the festival director as meaning the many threads and styles that emerged in the opening years of the 20th century.  It might seem a bit odd then that the Emersons chose a programme of Beethoven, Britten and Schubert but in fact the rest of the programming doesn’t seem much closer to the tree with Bach, Haydn and Brahms all featured in upcoming concerts.

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Death, in Venice

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If I have a beef with Britten’s Death in Venice it’s that it’s a bit cerebral and bloodless, at least as it has come down in the Aldeburgh-Glyndebourne-ENO performing tradition.  I think it’s fair to say that in its bloodlessness it mirrors the Thomas Mann novella (and indeed a lot of Mann’s other writing) but, for me, it’s a challenge to engage with the piece and, especially, with Gustav von Aschenbach.  So, it was with surprise and growing pleasure that I watched Pier Luigi Pizzi’s production for, appropriately enough, Venice’s La Fenice.  His take is bold and seems to centre less on Aschenbach’s relationshsip with the Polish boy, Tadziu, and more on the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian ways of thinking and doing and I think it’s clear that Pizzi is a Dionysian.

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