Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places and Things opened last night at Coal Mine Theatre. It premiered in London in 2015 and has now been adapted to relocate the setting to Toronto and to customize the movement elements to the small, intimate space at Coal Mine. It’s a play about addiction, addiction treatment, theatre and how we construct and cope with “reality” (whatever that is). It’s long, intense, disturbing and, ultimately, very thought provoking.
Crow’s Theatre opened the season last night with a production of Ibsen’s Romersholm in an adaptation by Duncan Macmillan directed by Chris Abraham. It’s not perhaps Ibsen’s best known play but it’s powerful and somewhat topically relevant and the production at Crow’s is excellent in every way.
All is Love, which opened Thursday night at Koerner Hall, is a remount of the 2022 Opera Atelier show which, for various reasons, nobody much saw. It’s a staged series of quite eclectic (mosly) opera and ballet excerpts around the theme of “love”; which means pretty much anything goes.
Tuesday’s lunchtime performance in the RBA was a preview of the upcoming Opera Atelier show All is Love which is essentially a remount of the February 2022 show that nobody much saw because it happened during a blizzard with most of downtown closed due to “trucker” activity.
The first half of the 20th century was a sort of golden age for British art song unparalleled since the days of Purcell and Blow. There are works by, inter alia, Finzi, Britten Vaughan Williams and Butterworth that are still staples of the repertoire. After the second world war though it starts to tail off and I’m hard pressed to think of songs/song cycles from the last two or three decades of the century that have become at all popular. In fact, it seems to me, the most popular art song like works from this period are stage works which are based on a cycle of songs like Maxwell Davies’ Miss. Donnithorne’s Maggot. I was interested then to come across a 1999 CD of (actual) songs for voice and piano written since 1970. The CD is Peripheral Visions by soprano Alison Grant and pianist Katherine Durran.
I sat down yesterday with Danielle MacMillan who will sing Agni in Against the Grain’s upcoming production of Claude Vivier’s Kopernikus. Kopernikus is subtitled A Ritual Opera for the Dead and concerns the experience of transitioning from life to death as experienced by Agni. I had many questions:
And a few more things that bubbled up as we talked. So here’s a summary.
I was at a really rather nicely programmed recital at Rosedale Presbyterian yesterday afternoon. Rachel Andrist, who played piano throughout, had lined up a really interesting selection of singers. Some were known to me, some were new. Some were fresh out of college and some had quite a bit of experience. The programme was in two halves. In the first half each of the six singers got to do two or three songs while in part two there were some opera numbers and some seasonal stuff arranged for various combinations of voices.
Three Portraits (music: Kieren MacMillan, words: Dana Giola) got his premiere performance yesterday in the RBA. The performers were the Haven Trio (Lindsay Kesselman, soprano; Kimberly Cole Luevano, clarinet; Midori Koga, piano). I have to be honest this just isn’t my kind of piece. The texts are quite interesting but most of the the setting is in that sort of Neo-Broadway flirts with Minimalism space that so much of the vocal music I get sent from the US lies in. To be fair, the third song; The Country Wife got a rather more sophisticated treatment but still very much in the same sound universe. The performance was very decent though and it was a clever move to use the staircase in the RBA to match the words of the first song.
Last night ten singers who had taken part in an intensive class/coaching with Sondra Radvanovsky showed us what they could do. The program was organised and presented by the International Resource Centre for Performing Artists at the Alliance Française. It says quite a lot about the current state of supply and demand in the opera world that nine of the ten singers were female and seven were sopranos. We were given one aria per singer and a lot, inevitably I suppose, of Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini with one aria apiece for Verdi and Puccini.
Soundstreams, Toronto’s contemporary music specialists, have pointed out that one can use their “Pick 3” subscription package to get a discount on all three of their vocal offerings in 2015/16. The three shows are:
Subscription packages start at $135 and are available at soundstreams.ca
operaramblings 