Tapestry Opera are currently presenting a production of Sanctuary Song (music by Abigail Richardson-Schulte, words by Marjorie Chan). It’s a piece that premiered in 2008 and this revival, directed by Michae Mori, represents Tapestry’s first major production in the new Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre.
Tapestry Opera and Nightwood Theatre’s new digs at 877 Yonge Street are now officially open. I was unable to attend Saturday nignt’s opening gig and party but I did get to attend the free concert for the local community in the afternoon and get a tour of the premises.
The eighth iteration of Soundstreams’ Electric Messiah opened last night at Theatre Passe Muraille. Like last year at Crow’s it’s staged fairly conventionally with the players facing the audience though some use was made of the galleries at TPM. I do kind of miss the club atmosphere of the earliest versions but it still has lots to offer.
Slow Rise Music (Tristan Zaba and McKenzie Warriner) presented a concert called here be sirens on Saturday night at the Tranzac. Apparently it’s their third concert but they are new to me and I’m really happy to find a new collaboration of young musicians putting on quite experimental shows of the kind I saw last night. It’s something that was common enough before the plague but has been slow making a comeback.
Seven years ago Tapestry Opera premiered Gareth Williams and Anna Chatterton’s Rocking Horse Winner at the Berkeley Street Theatre. Last night they opened an eight show re-run at Crow’s Theatre, once again directed by Michael Mori. There are lots of similarities and a some differences between the productions and I’m going to concentrate on the latter so if you aren’t familiar with the piece you might want to read my 2016 review.
It’s that time of year when departing members of the COC Ensemble Studio give their farewell recitals in the RBA. On Tuesday it was the turn of Midori Marsh and Alex Halliday and they did it in style. The programme was interesting and the music making excellent. Although they alternated sets it’s probably easy to deal with each singer in turn.
Last evening saw the first post-plague edition of the Christina and Louis Quilico Awards competed for by the singers of the COC Ensemble Studio. Six of Ensemble’s seven singers competed with Vladimir Soloviev and Brian Cho providing piano accompaniment. It wasn’t the most thrilling Quilico Awards ever. The judges; Perryn Leech, Carolyn Sproule and Steven Philcox probably had a pretty easy time of it. So herewith how it came out.
Here’s what I’m looking forward to in February plus a few gigs I can’t make:
Yesterday the Ensemble Studio put on a really nicely curated tribute to Pauline Viardot. Viardot was a singer, pianist, composer and muse who was enormously influential in music circles in paris in the middle years of the 19th century. She came from a famous musical family and was the younger sister of Maria Malibran. Her own work is little performed today although the Royal Conservatory did her Cendrillon in 2016.
In another nod to normality the COC’s free concert series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre kicked off with the traditional concert with the members of the Ensemble Studio. It was reasonably well attended, which is good news. But unlike previous years one didn’t need to be there an hour early to get a seat. Which is not so good news. I’m really curious to see when and if we start to get back to pre-plague audiences.
For me in previous years, this concert has been about taking stock; an opportunity to reflect on which members of the ES have progressed and how. Yesterday was much harder as I’ve seen little of any of them (live at least) for two and a half years. Some things though stood out. Midori Marsh, who kicked off the show with “Caro nome” has matured quite a lot. She’s always had a terrific voice but here she showed as a much more polished and poised performer. Alex Hetherington is also something of a known quality with her excellent 2021 Norcop Prize recital one of the better streamed events of the pandemic. She gets bonus points for singing “Lord, to Thee Each Night” from Handel’s Theodora. It’s a highly charged and technically awkward piece that demonstrated her technique and artistic sensibility nicely. Continue reading
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