Tag Archives: jane mallett theatre

with you and without you

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Every year Soundstreams has a competition to find a young artist to curate a main stage concert.  This year’s lucky winner is Brad Cherwin, who will need little introduction to readers of this blog, and the concert took place at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Saturday night.

It was, in many ways, a typical Cherwin programme.  Some works were played in their entirety while others had their individual movements spread through the programme.  The overall theme was “Love and Death” and the programme was divided into four cycles with somewhat enigmatic titles.  Twelve instrumentalists, plus soprano Danika Lorèn and conductor Gregory Oh were used in various combinations.

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Countess Maritza

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This year’s New Year offering from Toronto Operetta Theatre is Imre Kálmán’s 1924 work Countess Maritza presented in Nigel Douglas’ English language version.  It’s a pretty typical TOT offering.  The work itself is a rather silly love story full of just about every cliché about central Europe bar vampires but it’s tuneful and the ten piece orchestra conducted by Derek Bate provides colour and volume enough for the Jane Mallett Theatre.147

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Invocations

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invocationsThursday night at the Jane Mallett Theatre Soundstreams and Music Toronto presented a concert featuring the Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon – violin, Roman Borys – cello, Jamie Parker – piano) and others.  Also two world premières.

First up was the première of  Vivian Fung’s Prayer; a short piece for violin (Lara St.John) and piano.  It’s a rather beautiful short piece with a melismatic beginning that gets more dramatic and then morphs to a kind of searching quality.  It was followed by Amy Beach’s Invocation for violin and piano, Op. 55 of 1904.  It’s a competent, melodic piece in the Romantic tradition.  Pleasant enough. Continue reading →

La battaglia di Legnano

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Verdi’s 1849 opera La battaglia di Legnano is loosely based on a battle that took place in 1176 between the forces of Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Lombard League; just one episode in the interminable struggle between Guelfs and Ghibellines.  By Verdi’s time the battle had been appropriated by Italian nationalists (at least in northern Italy) as symbolic of the Italians struggle against the Austrian occupiers and that’s pretty much where Verdi is at.

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Lively Pirates at TOT

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Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a run of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at the Jane Mallett Theatre last night.I think it’s got everything one could expect from a modest budget G&S production and maybe a bit more.  Bill Silva-Marin’s production is energetic with a lot of stomping, marching and mincing going on which makes the small stage (even smaller than usual as the band is on stage) look lively and busy.  The chorus is good and sings idiomatically.  The principals also appear to understand the genre and there’s some good acting and good, at times excellent, singing.

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Perchance to Dream

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Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream opened in London in April 1945.  It’s fluffy, romantic and nostalgic.  It has a ridiculous plot, some great tunes (A Woman’s Heart, We’ll Gather Lilacs etc) and lots of eye candy.  It’s probably exactly what people needed after nearly six years of an exceptionally weary, dreary war.  It ran for a thousand performances.  Approached in the right frame of mind it’s still a very enjoyable, escapist way of spending a couple of hours.

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Hockey Noir

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Hockey Noir; music by André Ristic, words by graphic novelist Cecil Castellucci, is a piece presented by Montreal based ECM+ and brought to Toronto in collaboration with Continuum and The Toronto Comic Arts Festival.  It’s described as a “graphic opera” which I suppose is OK as far as it goes.  I saw it as a theatre piece incorporating, and sometimes parodying, opera, musical theatre, film noir, the graphic novel and animation.  It’s set in the 1950s and riffs off the old tropes of Montreal/Toronto hockey rivalry and the entanglement of local government and organised crime in Montreal.

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Land of Smiles

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Lehár’s Das Land des Lächelns must have seemed old fashioned even when it opened in 1929 in a Berlin that had already seen Wozzeck and Die Dreigroschenoper.  With its waltzes and gentle chinoiserie it looks back rather than forward musically and makes few demands on its listeners.  Similarly, the plot; a bittersweet romance between an Austrian aristocrat and a Chinese prince had nothing in it to disturb contemporaries though modern audiences might find the cultural appropriation a bit hard to take.  However, if Turandot doesn’t bother you this likely won’t either.

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