Tuesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured soprano Teresa Tucci and baritone James Coole-Stevenson; both Rebanks fellows at the Conservatory, and pianist Vlad Soloviev. It was a carefully curated concert with a thematic line and featured far more duets than one usually gets in such a show.
Il cappello di paglia di Firenze is a farce by Nino Rota, probably better known as a composer of film music particularly associated with Fellini. It’s playing right now at UoT Opera in a production directed by Jennifer Tarver. It’s an ambitious show. There’s a clever two level set, designed by Michelle Tracey,; indoors on an upper level and outdoors at stage level, and clearly a lot of thought and work has gone into both sets and costumes. The direction and choreography (Anna Theodosakis) is involved and makes use of the full space of the MacMillan Theatre with comings and goings all over the place energetically executed by quite a large cast. Continue reading
UoT Opera Division’s production of Arthur Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities, currently playing at the MacMillan Theatre, is really rather good. Its partly the work itself which surely deserves to be better known. It’s a 1950 work to a libretto by Cedric Cliffe. It was written for the Festival of Britain and was considered a success at the time. It is in many ways typical of mid 20th century English opera (though Benjamin was a peripatetic Australian rather than a Brit). It’s colourful and uses a large orchestra with lots of brass and percussion and combines lyricism with some fairly heavy dissonance. It also includes a few good arias, notably one for Lucie Manette, the romantic female interest.
Dr. Manette (Burak Yaman), Lucie Manette (Emily Rocha)
This year’s fall offering from UoT Opera is three short comic operas presented at the MacMillan Theatre in productions by Michael Patrick Albano. The first is Paul Hindemith’s Hin und Züruck; a twelve minute musical joke which manages to send up a lot of operatic conventions in a very short time. It’s a musical and dramatic palindrome. A man discovers his wife has a lover and shoots her. The paramedics arrive and attempt to revive her. In this staging this includes a giant syringe and no prizes for guessing where that goes. The remorseful husband shoots himself. An angel (Ben Done) appears and explains that the usual laws of physics don’t apply in opera and the entire plot and score is replayed backwards. It was played effectively deadpan by Cassandra Amorim and Lyndon Ladeur while Jordana Goddard, as the elderly deaf aunt, sat through the whole thing entirely oblivious. Good fun.
operaramblings 