This year’s offering from the Artists’ Studio of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company was Judith Weir’s The Black Spider. One doesn’t get many opportunities to see a Weir opera, let alone one composed for young performers, so this was very welcome. That it’s a very funny mash up of several gothic/horror tropes is a definite bonus. Throw in a lively production with whole hearted and skilful performances and it makes for a great show.
Coming up… music etc
This year’s Canadian Children’s Opera Company main show is a new production of Alice Ho and Marjorie Chan’s The Monkiest King which the company previously performed in 2018. This time it was at Harbourfront Centre Theatre which offered some additional opportunities and some challenges with its multi level configuration but also some sight line issues.
Here are my top picks for May.
This week the Young Artists Studio at the Canadian Children’s Opera Company gave two performances of Purcell’s classic Dido and Aeneas. The YAS is a new initiative designed to give young singers (16-19) additional opportunities to the CCOC’s usual fare and maybe provide a pathway to serious professional study.
The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary. The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices. It’s clever. It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral. Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc. There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum. This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.
Here’s an events listing for June as it currently stands:
Sometimes the Canadian Opera Company gets it right and the current production of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen is a good example. It’s got all the things that might help boost a flagging audience. It’s not over familiar. Nobody is going to be complaining that they have seen the same old boring production five times already. It’s a brilliant score. The production is intelligent with enough for those who want more than a costume drama while not doing anything to shock the pearl clutchers. It’s well sung; with a goodly quantity of local talent, and the orchestral playing and conducting is exemplary. What more could one ask for? One could I suppose add that it’s an opera one could happily take children to.
Last night’s concert at Koerner Hall was a celebration of the life and work of Armenian composer and song collector Komitas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Unsurprisingly Koerner was packed with members of Toronto’s Armenian community. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable at events like this; unable to really appreciate what the music means in its home culture, but last night what I felt was joy and inclusion. It was an extremely well curated concert of rather beautiful music extremely well performed.
So it looks like January is finally over and that means we can look ahead to next month. Things are definitely winding down. There’s the last Opera Pub of the season on the 3rd at the Amsterdam Bicycle Club. The Vancouver Symphony is appearing with Bramwell Tovey at Roy Thomson Hall on the 26th with the highlight being Marion Newman singing Ancestral Voices; a piece Tovey wrote for her. Also that evening the Canadian Children’s Opera opens a two performance run of Alice Ping Yee Ho’s new piece The Monkiest King. That’s at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.
operaramblings 