Last night’s late, late concert at the Conservatory was basically a preview of Bicycle Opera Project’s 2015 season. It’s a bit hard to say what the final show will be like as we got mainly excerpts last night and it just feels really different to be in a formal concert hall compared with the usual venues for BOP. 
Last night I was at the Arts and Letters Club for the opening night of Opera 5’s Edgar Allan Poe themed show In Pace Requiescat. I had hoped that I had kicked the thing that has been afflicting me since Wednesday but I was over optimistic. I spent the first half of the show either in a coughing fit or trying desperately to avoid one and then had to leave at the interval thus missing Cecilia Livingston’s new piece The Masque of the Red Death.
What I did see; Daniel Pinkham’s The Cask of Amontillado and Debussy’s La Chute de la Maison Usher, was, as best I recall, pretty good. Staging and costumes are appropriately creepy and there was some very good singing from Adrian Kramer and a brief appearance from Lucia Cesaroni that made me want to see more. If I can shake this thing before the end of the run I’ll go back and do a proper review. There are further performances on Wednesday and Thursday.
Casting details for Opera 5’s Halloween themed show, Requiescat in Pace, have been announced. The singing line up is soprano Lucia Cesaroni, American baritone and recent Tanglewood fellow David Tinervia and, making a welcome return to Toronto, baritone Adrian Kramer.
Tapestry Briefs is the product of the Composer-Librettist Workshop run annually by Tapestry. Four composers and four librettists come up with sixteen ideas for a new opera and work up a scene from each. Last night twelve scenes from the most recent workshop were presented in a fully staged format with piano accompaniment in Ernest Balmer Studio and adjacent Distillery spaces. The quartet of singers for the evening was made up of some of Toronto’s top singer/actors; Carla Huhtanen, Krisztina Szabó, Keith Klassen and Peter McGillivray. Piano accompaniment was from Gregory Oh and Jennifer Tung.
