The Futures Market is a new on-line opera by Douglas Rodger (librettist) and Njo Kong Kie (composer) featuring Teiya Kasahara, Derek Kwan, Keith Lam and Wesley Hui. Some readers may remember Njo Kong Kie as the composer of the music for Mr Shi and His Lover a few years ago and probably just about all Toronto opera people will be familiar with the singers.
The latest short animation from the Canadian Art Song Project is extremely quirky and about as steeped in a certain kind of Canadian nostalgia as one could possibly get. It’s called The Piece Atop His Pate and appears to be about Bobby Hull losing his wig in a hockey fight although it may also be lamenting the NHL mandating helmets. I’m really not sure.. Why this is seen as a significant event in Canadian history also puzzles me but apparently it’s worth writing a song about.
The words are by Bill Richardson with rather percussive music by Jocelyn Mortlock. It’s performed with spirit by Keith Lam and Steven Philcox and it’s accompanied by rather cute Saturday morning cartoon style animation by OCAD students. Here’s the Youtube link. Perhaps it helps to watch it in your underwear while drinking a Molson Export.
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.
Woking Phoenix is a play developed and performed by Silk Bath Collective. It opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Thursday night. It deals with that perennial Canadian issue; the immigrant experience. In this case it’s essentially a single Chinese mother with three children running a Chinese restaurant in small town Ontario. So one has the usual dynamics of kids growing up coupled with being “different” in a very homogenous community. It’s a co-creation of Aaron Jan and Gloria Mok , who also co-directed, and Besse Cheng who appears in the play as the elder daughter.
Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell, premiered at Harbourfront last night. It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it. The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying. She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.
Soundstreams’ on-line concert, Lovesongs, recorded in Koerner Hall and streamed (access codes are PWYC, min $7) features three works; two by and one “in homage” to Claude Vivier with an intro by Lawrence Cherney and David Fallis who conducts on the first and third pieces.
The latest Arts Anyway webstream is up on Youtube. This edition features two varry varry posh dinosaurs introducing Alexander Hajek singing Fauré and Rebecca Cuddy singing two of Ian Cusson’s settings of texts by Marilyn Dumont. I think this is the kind of music and the kind of engagement that I miss most hunkered down here in the KittenKondo. I can live without Mozart or Wagner (just about) but artsong, especially artsong that speaks to what matters to us most today… not having that hurts. Keith Lam’s interviewee is also Rebecca Cuddy.
There were a few technical glitches with the first episode of Arts Anyway so if you went looking for it last night you were likely out of luck. It’s up now on YouTube though on channel Arts Anyway though you may have to check under “playlists” to find the video.
Yesterday I finally managed to do something bike related in conjunction with Bicycle Opera Project’s current tour of Sweat. I got an early train out to Aldershot, biked to Hamilton and joined up with the bike tour of historic Hamilton organised by the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre to complement the opera, before seeing the afternoon performance of Sweat at WAHC. I’ll add some bikey/historical observations at the end but since this is an opera blog let’s cut to the chase.
So the Toronto Summer Music Festival continued last night with a Shakespeare themed show called A Shakespeare Serenade. Curated and directed by Patrick Hansen of McGill it fell into two parts. Before the interval we got Shakespeare scenes acted out and then the equivalent scene from an operatic adaptation of the play. After the interval it was a mix of Sonnets and song settings in an overall staging that was perhaps riffing off The Decameron. Patrick Hansen and Michael Shannon alternated at the piano.
operaramblings 