Saturday night at the new performance space at 877 Yonge Street saw a concert inaugurating Cultureland’s residency at Tapestry Opera. The performance consisted mainly of excerpts from Cultureland’s recent and “in progress” operas accompanied on piano by Carolyn Maule and directed by Renée Salewski.
Echoes of Bi-Sotoon is a new opera by Cultureland Opera Collective. It’s in nine scenes based on the legends and the iconography of the Bi-Sotoon mountain; an important cultural site and transportation route in Khermanshah province in present day Iran. It includes music by seven BIPOC composers[1] co-ordinated by artistic director Afarin Mansouri. It premiered at Arrayspace on Thursday evening.
Dancing with Love is a new CD of music by Afarin Mansouri on the theme of “love” in its many variants from the erotic to the transcendent. Eleven of the twelve tracks set Persian/Farsi poetry, from the 12th century CE to the present. The twelfth is a lament for solo flute. The musical style varies a lot with traditional Persian influences combining with modern Western compositional techniques in different ways. It leads to interesting results. Just to pick a few tracks, “Unattainable” for mezzo-soprano and piano sounds rather like a French chanson whereas a track like “Pain (Sorrow)” for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, piano, tar, cello and udu sounds much more like traditional Persian music. Other tracks incorporate electronics or jazz elements. One thing almost all the tracks have in common is that there’s a lot of melodic invention which makes it a very easy, as well as a very varied, listening experience.
My review of Afarin Mansouri’s Zuleykha at Toronto Summer Music is now up on Opera Canada.
Photo credit: Toronto Summer Music
I’m late to the party on this one. I had set aside time on Sunday to watch Russell Braun, Carolyn Maule and Miriam Khalil’s recital from Koerner Hall (one of the Mazzoleni Songmasters series) when first broadcast. For whatever reason I couldn’t get it to mirror onto the big screen in a watchable way so I ended up watching it on my laptop yesterday. So it goes.
Tapestry’s new experimental show opened last night at the Ernest Balmer Studio. It’s a “mash up” of Persian classical music and hip hop around the theme of The Child and The Stranger, who turns out to be Lucifer. Lucifer seeks to show the child that authority and rules serve only to allow the powerful to abuse and punish others. This is explicated in six short scenes using the various musical resources and styles available.
Afarin Mansouri
Tapestry’s upcoming show TapEx: Forbidden features music by Iranian-born composer Afarin Mansouri with a libretto by Afro-Caribbean hip hop artist Donna-Michelle St. Bernard. Four vocalists are featured; Neema Bickersteth, soprano; Shirin Eskandani, mezzo-soprano; Alexander Hajek, baritone; and Saye Sky, Farsi rapper and spoken-word artist. I have a long standing interest in blending western classical music with other cultures and genres, partly at least because I get to hear a lot of North Indian music, and I’ve been intrigued by other “fusion”projects such as Alice Ping Yee Ho’s The Lesson of Da Ji and some of the cross-cultural experimentations in dance such as Esmerelda Enrique and Joanna Das’ collaborations. All of this is a long intro to saying that before Christmas I got the chance to put some questions to Afarin Mansouri about the upcoming show. Her responses are enlightening and intriguing. So here’s the exchange:
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The current Tapestry Briefs show presents work from the 2016 LibLab. It’s all new and, inevitably, very mixed. It started very strongly with a scene, The Call of the Light (Imam Habibi/Bobby Theodore) based on the 1984 attack on the Quebec National Assembly. The combination of an assault rifle carrying camo clad Alex Dobson , the rest of the cast (Jacquie Woodley, Keith Klassen, Erica Iris) writhing on the floor and dissonant extended piano from Michael Shannon was genuinely disturbing. Having a gun pointed straight at you from a few feet away doesn’t happen often at the opera.
Keith Klassen and Jacqueline Woodley
Yesterday saw the first of this season’s free concerts in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. As has become the norm it featured the singers of the COC’s Ensemble Studio. This year it was dedicated to the memory of the late Lotfi Mansouri and included a couple of short tributes to him.
Six of the Ensemble’s singers are new this year, as is the sole pianist, so these were mostly singers I haven’t heard a lot of. I’ve also observed how much members of the Ensemble Studio develop in the programme and last year we had a solid group of third years with a few new entrants. The balance has shifted to the other extreme and so no surprise that yesterday we heard more potential than polish.
Front (l – r): Clarence Frazer, Sasha Djihanian, Danielle MacMillan, Michael Shannon
Middle (l – r): Gordon Bintner, Aviva Fortunata, Claire de Sévigné, Cameron McPhail
Back (l – r): Andrew Haji, Charlotte Burrage, Owen McCausland
Photographer: Karen Reeves
So two “obituaries” on the trot. Now Lotfi Mansouri is gone. He was an interesting, larger than life, character. Arguably he was born in the wrong age. He would have been perfect in the days of entrepreneurial opera company owner/directors. 17th century Venice, London in Handel’s day or the US of the turn of the century would all have been natural homes. His ability to cut a deal, to charm money out of the rich, to persuade legendary singers to perform in opera backwaters and to create spectacle while counting the pennies were amazing. Was he so well suited for an age of complex artistic cultural politics and changing trends in opera production? Perhaps not.
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