Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas. The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison. In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.
Robert Carsen’s production of Verdi’s Aida seen at Covent Garden in 2022 is a very good example of what Carsen can do. In this case it’s to strip out elements he considers non-essential and focus on the essentials of the drama. In the rather good “extra” feature on the video recording Carsen summarises it as focussing “on the story not the place”.
Back in 2017 Bicycle Opera Project toured the a cappella opera Sweat by Anna Chatterton and Juliet Palmer. I caught it in Hamilton and Toronto. In the intervening years it’s been turned into a film that premiered at the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles on Saturday night.
The second performance of Opera 5’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw on Thursday night was sung by the “apprentice” cast drawn from Opera McGill. Curiously, it was an all female cast with women singing both Miles and Peter Quint.
Iconic British countertenor James Bowman passed away last March. On Sunday night at Trinity-St. Pauls the Early Music folks at UoT presented a tribute to the man and his career. It was very well done. Music associated with Bowman; mostly Purcell and Britten, was interspersed with video and personal recollections/testimonials that fully reflected the considerable influence Bowman had on the English music scene and on the more widespread acceptance of the countertenor voice in the classical music world generally. Continue reading
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas has a long and dense history in the recording studio. The first recording dates back to 1935 and the vast stream of recordings since serve as a kind of barometer of the changes in style in performing 17th century music. I haven’t listened to every recording but I can look at four key moments in the discography and compare them. I’ve also listened or watched a fair number of fairly recent productions. The video review page has six entries for this work; all 1995 or later. There are also five reviews of live productions and reviews of several related shows. But for the purposes of this mini-project I’m going to look at four recordings that take us from the early 1950s to the mid 1990s. The four recordings are:
This post will deal with the first with subsequent posts on the others. Continue reading
No, not a pandemic piss-up at No.10 but a newly released recording of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov recorded at Covent Garden in 2016. Funnily enough I remember Bryn Terfel, who plays the Tsar, alluding to learning the role during his Koerner Hall recital in April of that year.
I don’t often get deeply emotionally affected by an opera video. Generally it’s less immersive than a live performance in a way that diminishes emotion. That wasn’t my experience though with the 2022 recording of Handel’s Theodora from the Royal Opera. Admittedly Theodora is an opera I can get very emotionally involved in but Katie Mitchell’s production really did get to me.
Oliver Mears’ production of Verdi’s Rigoletto recorded at Covent Garden in 2021 looks and feels like the work of a British theatre director. There’s nothing particularly weird about it. The Personenregie is careful and precise and the emphasis is on text and story telling. The opera house element perhaps comes into play in the rather impressive visuals including an extremely dramatic storm scene.
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 