Tag Archives: horst

UoT 2016/17

Posted on by
Reply

UoT Faculty of Music have just announced their 2016/17 season.  It’s the usual broad range of performances so I’ll highlight the opera and vocal music contributions.

UoT Opera is offering four shows.  The fall main production is Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld with new English dialogue and stage direction by Michael Patrick Albano.  Choreography i by Anna Theodosakis and Russell Braun makes his podium debut.  There are four performances November 24th to 27th.  Spring sees a Handel rarity; Imeneo.  Tim Albery directs and Daniel Taylor is in charge of the music.  This one runs March 16th to 19th.  Both shows are in the MacMillan Theatre.

machinestops

Last year’s student composed opera; The Machine Stops

Continue reading →

I am Way, I am Act

Posted on by
Reply

This spring’s main opera production from UoT Opera is Britten’s Paul Bunyan.  It is a really peculiar work.  The libretto is by WH Auden and is, well, weird.  It mixes up the (apparently) profound with the absurd and the downright silly.  There’s a Swedish lumberjack fish slapping dance, talking cats and dogs, trees that aspire to be product and a philosophical accountant (*).  There are also countless pronouncements from the off stage voice of Bunyan along the lines of the closing:

“Where the night becomes the day, Where the dream becomes the fact, I am the Eternal guest, I am Way, I am Act“

Walt Whitman meets Dr. Seuss meets a lot of drugs?  One of those 1970s English public schoolboy prog rock bands?

bunyan

Continue reading →

The Machine Stops

Posted on by
1

This year’s UoT Opera student composed opera sets a libretto by Michael Patrick Albano based on a 1909 story by EM Forster.  It’s a dystopian sci-fi story and OK as these things go though one suspects it felt a whole lot more original in 1909.  Basically, humanity is living underground in pods with limited face to face interaction.  Life is mediated by “The Machine” which increasingly has become an object of veneration as well as utility.  The principal characters are Vashti, a believer, and her rebellious son Kuno who is prone to make illegal excursions to the planet surface where, he realises, there are still people living.  It’s a bit like Logan’s Run but not as sexy.  The Relationship between the two breaks down over their belief systems until The Machine goes belly up at which point there is a reconciliation before everyone dies.  Along the way there’s a fair bit of heavy handed philosophising by the narrator and chorus.

machinestops

Continue reading →

The Telephone and The Medium

Posted on by
2

UoT Opera’s fall production opened last night at the MacMillan theatre.  It’s a double bill of Menotti works; The Telephone and The Medium.  The former was cleverly updated by Michael Patrick Albano to reflect the age of the smartphone.  It actually seems more relevant than ever and, slight as it is – an extended joke about a girl who won’t get off the phone long enough for her fiancé to propose – it was wryly amusing. The Medium I’m not so sure about.  It’s a contrived piece written in the 1940’s but set a few years earlier about a fake medium and her deluded clients.  It seems dated, not so much in the sense that seance attendance is pretty unusual today, but in the extent to which the characters are clichéd, cardboard cut outs even.  The medium herself is bad enough but her sidekicks are her rather dippy, if kind, daughter and a boy who is mute (k’ching), Gypsy (k’ching) and “found wandering the streets” (k’ching, k’ching) “of Budapest” (k’ching, k’ching, k’ching).  The first act in which the fake seancery goes on isn’t bad but then the medium gets a shock; a real or imagined cold hand on her throat (probably imagined as she is a raging alcoholic) and decides to go straight.  The second act is pure bathos.  I can see why it was a Broadway hit in the 1940s but I think tastes have moved on.  And who the heck calls their daughter “Doodly”?

medium Continue reading →

Diva, diva, diva

Posted on by
1
Danika Loren

Danika Loren

Today’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured the assembled students of UoT Opera in a staged programme called The Art of the Prima Donna.  It was a sequence of mostly ensemble numbers drawn from the core 19th century rep.  Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Donizetti, Bellini, Bizet and Rossini all featured with works made famous by the great divas of the era’ Patti, Pasta, Malibran etc.  Linking narrative, which skipped over who slept with Rossini, was provided by Michael Albano who directed the staging with Anna Theodosakis.  Sandra Horst headed up the musical side and accompanied with help from Sue Black, Kate Carver and Ivan Jovanovic. Continue reading →

A new program from the COC

Posted on by
Reply

MAO_0790aThis just in from frequent Operaramblings commenter and COC Adult Education Programs Manager Gianmarco Segato.  The COC is launching Opera Insights, a series of free adult education events linked to the productions of the 2015/16 season.  It’s a pretty broad range of programming ranging from scholarly discussions on reconstructing the score of Maometto II and the history of the ball gown to Traviata singalongs and Carmen themed dance lessons.  Participants include composers Barbara Monk-Feldman and Norbert Palej, conductors Johannes Debus, Harry Bicket and Sandra Horst and singers like Christine Goerke plus, inevitably, lots of academics (we love them really we do).  Looks like a lot of fun.  The events are all free but are ticketed.  Full details can be found here.

Our saucy ship’s a beauty

Posted on by
Reply

hms_pinaforeAnd so is Michael Albano’s new production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore which opened last night at the MacMillan Theatre.  It’s been a long time since the UoT Opera Division did G&S but it was worth the wait.  Fred Perruzza’s straight forward unit set was really brought to life by a fast paced and lively production.  From the very beginning of the overture we had members of the crew cavorting and dancing (Choreographer Anna Theodosakis) in a  manner perhaps owing more to Broadway than D’Oyly Carte and the better for it!  The set, a quarter deck with a gallery, provided cabin doors and traps in the deck for characters to come and go (including conductor Sandra Horst appearing from “below” to take her bow).  And of coming and going and dancing there was plenty.  There were some more than decent dancers in the chorus too.

Continue reading →

We sail the ocean blue

Posted on by
Reply

kwNext week the University of Toronto Opera Division will be staging HMS Pinafore; the first Gilbert and Sullivan at the MacMillan for 25 years.  There are four performances; at 7.30pm on the 27th, 28th and 29th and a 2.30pm matinée on the 30th.  Following UoT practice it is double cast.  The cast for the 27th and 29th includes Charles Sy, a finalist in the COC’s Centre Stage next week as well, and Karine White.  They are probably the two singers from UoT who have most impressed me this year and are definitely worth hearing.  Michael Albano directs and Sandra Horst conducts.  Tickets are $40 adult, $25 senior, $10 student.

Gleadow and Segal go nomadic

Posted on by
Reply
2014-10-23-COC-Gypsy-031

Lauren Segal performs in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. Photo: Chris Hutcheson

Today’s lunchtime concert in the RBA was given by mezzo-soprano Lauren Segal and bass-baritone Robert Gleadow with Sandra Horst at the piano.  The programme was titled Gypsy Songs, Travel Songs.  First up was Robert, who looks considerable less rakish without a beard, with three songs from Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel.  All three; The Roadside Fire, Bright is the Ring of Words and Whither Must I Wander are familiar recital fare but sung as well as this are a joy to hear.  Gleadow has a big, full sound with quite a range of colour but he can also float very beautiful high notes.  It was very impressive.

Lauren came next with Dvorák’s Cigánské melodie.  These songs cover a wide range of moods, all vividly captured by Segal.  Her voice is dark toned and very mezzo; no soprano 2 here!  Onewould think her perfectly suited for gloomy Slavic rep until, as she did later, she cut loose on de Falla’s Siete canciones populares Españolas.  Here she was every bit the dark eyed Spaniard singing with fiery passion of love and loss.  Both sets ended with fierce, bravura numbers brought off with panache.  The lady knows how to work a crowd!

Continue reading →