Tag Archives: ivany

Uncle John

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Against the Grain Theatre opened their new show last night on the worst day of the winter so far.  Over 15cm of snow fell and the TTC was in utter chaos.  It’s becoming a habit.  Last year’s Messiah opened in weather almost as bad.  Uncle John is the latest modern, Toronto based, adaptation of the Mozart/da Ponte trilogy.  It follows on from last season’s smash hit Figaro’s Wedding and was created and produced with support from the COC and the Banff Centre.  It will be followed by A Little Too Cosy next season.  The formula is basically the same.  It;s ataged in a non traditional spave; in this case a rock concert venue on Queen West.  The libretto is in English and differs in detail from da Ponte while respecting the basic spirit of the original.  It’s also very Toronto and a little bit Toronto opera scene insiderish.  Much of the recitative is replaced by spoken dialogue.  There’s no chorus and accompaniment to the singers is provided by piano and string quartet.  It’s a musical solution I like.  It adds enough weight and colour that one hardly misses the full orchestra while being, of course, much more affordable.  It all works really well and if you can you should see it.  I’m putting my more detailed thoughts under the cut because they contain lots of spoilers which you may not want to read if you are going.

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The one we’ve all been waiting for

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unclejohnSo Toronto’s hottest indie opera company, Against the Grain Theatre, has finally announced a 14/15 season.  Not entirely unexpectedly they are bringing #UncleJohn; a transladaptation (©Lydia Perovic) of Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Toronto after it’s successful appearance in Banff this summer.  With a new English libretto by Joel Ivany, #UncleJohn will be staged at The Black Box Theatre at 1087 Queen St. West’s vintage rock venue, The Great Hall. .

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Pelléas et Mélisande in the Tanenbaum Courtyard Garden

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Hidden away up an alleyway behind the COC’s ioffice and rehearsal complex is a very beautiful garden.  I say hidden because I lived less than 200m away for 10 years before I discovered it.  Last night it made a rather magical setting for Against the Grain Theatre’s new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.  The piece is set in a gloomy castle and surrounding forest in Brittany.  The high, ivy covered walls and ironwork of the performance space, enhanced by Camelia Koo’s fractured flagstones forming patterns on the grass, evoked the essentially sunless world of Maeterlinck’s poem.  Costuming in the style of the period’s composition meshed nicely with the aesthetic of the roughly contemporary space.

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East o’the Sun and West o’the Moon

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Norbert Palej’s new piece East o’the Sun and West o’the Moon, commissioned by the Canadian Children’s Opera Company opened at the Enwave Theatre at Harbourfront last night.  It’s based on a Norwegian folk tale and tells the story of a girl, Rose, who does a deal with a magic white bear to feed her starving family.  The bear, of course, is really a prince who has been cursed by a witch.  Rose tricks the witch and marries the prince.  There are also trolls.  Lots of them.

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Opera in June

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icarus-concert-imageThere are a few operatic events coming up in June although, as usual things are slowing down a bit.

On June 1st at 7pm, Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky has a recital at Koerner Hall singing works by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Medtner and Liszt. Ivari Ilja will accompany on piano.

Brian Current’s new opera Airline Icarus will open at 8pm on June 3rd at Ada Slaight Hall in the Daniels Spectrum complex.  The piece stars Krisztina Szabó and Alexander Dobson, among others.  Tim Albery directs.  The show runs until June 8th. Tickets are $20-$75 and are available here.

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Talking bears

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Joel IvanyToronto Wunderkind director Joel Ivany is directing the premier of Norbert Palej’s EAST o’ the SUN and WEST o’ the MOON for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company.  Operaramblings took the opportunity to ask Joel a few questions about his motivation for doing the piece and how directing young people differed (or didn’t) from his other directorial endeavours.  Here’s what we got: Continue reading →

Albert Herring fifty years on

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It was quite a party at the MacMillan Theatre this afternoon.  The MacMillan opened fifty years ago with a production of Britten’s Albert Herring and this afternoon marked the final performance of a new production to celebrate the occasion.  Directed by Joel Ivany, it was a straightforward but lively and very well characterised interpretation that brought out many of the very specific and quirky elements of the local culture while taking it mysteriously up market in some ways. (*).  Coupled with very good singing by any standard, and this was a student production, it made for a most enjoyable afternoon.

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Young artists

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The prizewinnersThe Canadian Opera Company has announced the addition of three singers and a pianist to the Ensemble Studio for next season.  The singers, unsurprisingly, are the three prize winners from November’s Centre Stage; Soprano Karine Boucher, tenor Jean-Philippe Fortier-Lazure and bass-baritone Iain MacNeil,  The pianist is Jennifer Szeto.  The COC also announced the setting up of an orchestral equivalent of the Ensemble Studio in which a number of young musicians will work with Johannes Debus and the COC Orchestra.  Names were announced on Wedneday night but I can’t find them in any of the press releases. Continue reading →

AtG’s Messiah

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Expectations could hardly have been higher for last night’s first performance of Against the Grain’s new production of Handel’s Messiah.  By and large they were met.  It’s become quite the thing to stage Handel’s oratorios and, for the most part, that’s fine.  They are really operas in disguise and work well when liberated from the concert setting.  Messiah is trickier.  Rather than a linear narrative there are a series of Biblical texts selected by librettist Charles Jennens to promote a literal and conservative evangelical Christianity.  There is no obvious staging solution.  One possibility is to invent a narrative and spin the story around it as Claus Guth did at Theater an der Wien in 2009.  AtG’s Joel Ivany’s solution is to stage it as a choreographed performance and use movement to bring depth to the words.  Here he is aided and abetted by choreographer Jennifer Nichols who has created a movement language tailored to the abilities and limitations of the singers.

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Korngold’s Silent Serenade at the Glenn Gould School

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Joel Ivany

Joel Ivany

Korngold’s Silent Serenade is, to put it mildly, odd.  The plot could have been taken from Dario Fo and the only possible excuse for the schmaltzy music is that Korngold initiated many of the saccharine clichés he relies on.  Last night the students of the Glenn Gould School under the direction of Joel Ivany and the musical leadership of Pieter Tiefenbach bravely tried to rescue it from well deserved obscurity.

The plot concerns a dressmaker who is accused of breaking into the bedroom of, and trying to abduct, one of his clients; an actress who happens to be engaged to the Prime Minister.  In Naples this is a hanging offence.  Meanwhile someone has made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the unpopular Prime Minister with a bomb.  The king is dying and, we learn from his confessor, wishes to make a great act of mercy before he finally snuffs it.  He wishes to pardon the bomber.  Unfortunately the police don’t have a suspect.  The solution is obvious.  The dressmaker must confess to both crimes so that he can be pardoned and hanged for neither.  Unfortunately the king dies before signing the pardon and so the dressmaker must hang.  Following this so far?  Fortunately for him the unpopular Prime Minister is killed in a popular uprising and he is installed in his stead much to the annoyance of the anarchist who did plant the bomb.  They agree that the dressmaker will return to his salon and the actress, who has now fallen in love with him and is, conveniently, no longer engaged.  There’s also a subplot concerning a newspaper reporter and an aspiring actress.

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