Tag Archives: kwon

Marriage of Figaro preview

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Today’s lunchtime concert in the RBA involved members of the cast of the Ensemble Studio performance of Marriage of Figaro in a semi-staged series of excerpts from the opera.  The Ensemble Studio annual stage performance is always worth seeing and this year I think it’s going to be a real treat.  Highlights today included Gordon Bintner’s Count.  The guy can sing but here there was a swagger that should be just perfect for the Guth production.  Jacquie Woodley’s Cherubino was utterly brilliant.  Aviva Fortunata nailed Porgi amor, so often a disappointment I find.  And I really liked Karine Boucher’s Susanna.  She’s not always been a favourite of mine but her slightly dark for a soprano tone seemed really well suited to this music and blended especially well with Aviva.  Ian MacNeil impressed too as Figaro, though it’s a role that’s a bit downplayed by this production, and I shall be curious to see what he does with it in the full version.  Megan Latham, Jean-Philippe Fortier-Lazure and Aaron Sheppard rounded out today’s cast with the indefatigable Hyejin Kwon on piano.  If you don’t yet have tickets for the performance on the 22nd I strongly suggest getting some.  They are only $22 or $55 for the best seats.  As Claire Morley said in her introduction this could be an event that’s talked of for years to come.

And so it begins

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Yesterday saw the first free concert of the season in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  It was a chance to see the 2015/16 Ensemble Studio; two new singers, one new pianist and six singers and a pianist from last year.  The format was one aria per singer with few surprises.  We also got to hear the core quartet casting for the Ensemble Studio performance of Le Nozze di Figaro later in the season.  No surprises there either; Il Conte – Gordon Bintner, Iain MacNeil – Figaro, La Contessa – Aviva Fortunata, Susanna – Karine Boucher.  That leaves four tenors for the other roles…

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Weint! Weint! Weint! Weint!

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Aribert Reimann’s Lear is a pretty good example of how to create a thoroughly modern opera within a thoroughly traditional framework.  It’s a classic story of course.  Here librettist Claus Henneberg has taken the classic German translationof the Shakespeare play and condensed it in a highly intelligent fashion; retaining all the emotional drama while sacrificing some fairly peripheral narrative.  Reimann’s score is modern though not strictly twelve tone.  He creates a distinct musical voice for each character; speech/Sprechstimme for the Fool, weird coloratura for General etc. This is reinforced by many of the characters having a tone row that serves as a sort of leitmotiv.  Atonality and quarter tones are used for varying effects from the violence of the Blasted Heath scene; apparently inspired by the composer’s experience, as a nine year old, of the bombing of Potsdam, to the shimmering, ethereal quarter tones of Lear’s final monologue.  For anyone with even a vague tolerance for “modern” music it’s a fascinating listen.

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Brush Up Your Shakespeare

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Charles Sy

Today’s free concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre was given by the University of Toronto’s Opera Program.  It was a semi staged assortment of songs and excerpts from operas, operettas and musicals based on the works of Shakespeare with a distinct leaning to the operetta/musical theatre side of things.  That’s understandable enough with young singers but it does make the game we all play (at least I do) of trying to guess who the next Jonas Kaufmann or Anna Netrebko is that much harder.  Not that I’m very good at it.  I’m far more able to predict what a newly bottled Bordeaux will taste like in ten years time than whether the young soprano I’m listening to might go on to sing Siegfried or Turandot at the Met!

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