This year’s fall opera offering from the Glenn Gould School was a double bill of short chamber operas. It played at Mazzoleni Hall on Friday and Saturday evenings with Liza Balkan directing and Jennifer Tung conducting.
GGS double bill
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Julie Boulianne and friends
Last Wednesday’s concert in the RBA was a showcase for the collaborative pianists of the McGill-UdeM Piano Vocal Arts programme. Each of the five pianists on show got to accompany mezzo Julie Boulianne for a set of songs. Or put another way, Julie got to perform for an hour with five pianists.
Minimalist Magic Flute with a Japanese twist
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.
GGS Carmélites delivers
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is a very unusual opera. It breaks all the rules and yet, done well, is an immensely compelling piece of music theatre. There are no show stopper arias. The ensemble numbers are mainly drawn from Catholic liturgy. And yet it maintains a coherent and compelling narrative arc that builds steadily to an emotionally devastating conclusion. The Glenn Gould School’s current production at Koerner Hall directed by Stephen Carr gets all the elements right and makes for a memorable evening at the opera.
What Brings You In
What Brings You In is an album of music for violin and electronics that consists mostly of work that was composed for performance as part of an art installation or a site specific performance or as therapy rather than a conventional concert hall experience. It features violinist Leslie Ting and various collaborators on percussion and live electronics. It’s one of the most “experimental” records I’ve listened to. There are five tracks and I’m going to describe each piece as best I can. Conventional music vocabulary; melody, harmony, rhythm etc isn’t much help! Continue reading
Venus and Adonis
This year’s fall opera production from the Glenn Gould School is John Blow’s 1683(?) masque Venus and Adonis. For those not familiar with the genre the masque was a court entertainment combining music, dance, poetry and drama. Here the framing story is the brief love affair between Venus and handsome young Adonis who is unfortunately gored to death by a boar. The main sub plot concerns Venus giving sage advice to Cupid and his band of little cupids. In between there are hunting choruses, dance and extracts from Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A crazy week
It’s a bit of a crazy week coming up. On Monday at 8pm there’s the first in a series of young artists concerts presented by Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu and Yamaha Canada. This one features pianist Cindy Liu in an all Prokofiev program. It’s at Rosemarie’s atelier at 310 Davenport Road and tickets are $20 ($10 student).
Tuesday is a double header with Erin Wall performing at noon in the RBA in a program of Korngold, Debussy and Duparc. Then at 5.30pm at the Canadian Music Centre there’s a CD launch concert for Sing Me at Midnight; the latest recording from CASP featuring songs by John Greer. Both these events are free.
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