The Green Line takes two story lines set in Beirut a generation apart and weaves them into a fascinating, sometimes mesmerizing, poetic and sad story about two families torn apart by civil war. It’s written by Makram Ayache and translated by Hiba Sleiman. It opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a co-production with Factory Theatre and In Arms theatre Company directed by the author.
The latest Happenstancers gig, which took place at 918 Bathurst on Thursday evening, was an exploration of the death of Ophelia and related ideas with works for assorted chamber ensembles plus/minus voices. Ten composers; all of whom could at a stretch be considered “contemporary”, were featured in a programme that, with interval, lasted two and three quarter hours. That’s a feat of stamina for performers and audience alike as none of the music performed was “easy” and no notes or introductions were provided.
Each half of the programme started off with a piece by Linda Catlin Smith, who was in the audience. Stare at the River for piano, string bass, trumpet, clarinet, violin and percussion was quite sparse and open textured while The River was more obviously lyrical with guitar, cello and Danika Lorèn replacing piano, trumpet and bass.
The Glenn Gould School gave the first of two performances of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at Koerner Hall on Wednesday evening. The production is directed by Allison Grant and is pretty straightforward, though quite heavily cut. The “look” is maybe Miyazaki animation (costumes by Alex Amini) with a minimalist backdrop (Kim Sue Bartnik) which is enlivened by interesting projections by Nathan Bruce and quite striking lighting by Jason Hand. There’s a sort of dumb show during the overture that the Director’s Notes imply is something to do with the opera being about a dysfunctional family (what opera family isn’t?) but the idea isn’t developed at all.
Luxury! Two operatic concerts on consecutive lunchtimes in the RBA. On Thursday it was the turn of the Glenn Gould School’s Rebanks fellows with mentor Paul Groves to present a series of staged opera excerpts directed by Anna Theodosakis. Stéphane Mayer provided the excellent piano accompaniment throughout.
Chinatown; music by Alice Ho, words by Madeleine Thien and Paul Yee, is a multilingual opera about the Chinese immigrant experience in British Columbia. It ws commissioned by Vancouver City Opera where it played in 2022. It’s now been recorded for CD by the original cast.
Like some of Alice Ho’s previous work (The Monkiest King, The Lesson of Da JI) Chinatown is cross cultural in many ways. It combines Western and Chinese instruments, musical styles and vocal styles and in this case it uses three languages; Hoisan dialect, Cantonese and English. Unlike the previous two operas though this one isn’t based in myth and legend. Rather, it’s a gritty and moving story that doesn’t shy away from confronting the brutal institutional racism that Chinese people faced in BC well into the 20th century. Continue reading
Thursday night at the Four Seasons Centre saw the tenth iteration of the COC’s Centre Stage: Ensemble Studio Competition. It’s a competition for young singers for cash prizes and, more opaquely, potential places in the COC’s Ensemble Studio.
L-R: Duncan Stenhouse, Emily Rocha, Elisabeth St-Gelais
This was the seventh time I’ve seen Soundstream’s Electric Messiah. It’s different every time of course but some things stay, more or less, as features. The biggest change this year is the shift from the Drake Underground to Crow’s Theatre. It’s staged as a conventional proscenium arch type show with the audience sitting in tiered rows facing the stage rather than being set up night club style. There’s no bar in the actual performance space but you can still take a drink to your seat. The drinks are cheaper than at the Drake too!
The second set of reGENERATION concerts of the Topronto Summer Music Festival took place yesterday at Walter Hall. The song portion, unusually, consisted of 100% English language rep, mirroring the Griffey/Jones recital earlier in the wee. The first concert kicked off with tenor Eric Laine and pianist Scott Downing with five songs from Finzi’s setting of Thomas Hardy; A Young Man’s Exhortation. It was good. Laine has a nice sense of style and very good diction. The high notes are there though sometimes, especially at the end of a line, they don’t sound 100% secure. There was some quite delicate accompaniment from Downing too.
There were three reGENERATION concerts in Walter Hall yesterday at 1pm, 4pm and 7.30pm. It made for a long but interesting day. As last year, each concert was a mix of vocal and chamber music. The vocal program was not announced in advance so I’m working from notes and there could be the odd error. Pleasingly, there were surtitles for the songs. This is a huge improvement on a sheet of tiny print to be read in the dark! Continue reading
Last night’s Soundstreams Koerner Hall presentation; Magic Flutes was an interesting experience. Aside from interesting (mostly) contemporary flute pieces it was very much an experiment in different ways of staging a concert. I’m all for breaking down the conventions of Mahlerian solemnity and I think experimentation is great. It’s in the nature of taking risks though that some things don’t quite work.
operaramblings 