Tag Archives: mori

This looks interesting

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Here’s the blurb for a new piece being presented in Toronto this Thursday…

CoyoteinacanoeIn 1885 Louis Riel proclaimed, “My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” And so we bring you Voice of a Nation, an interdisciplinary concert featuring dance, orchestra, and theatre. Presented by Ontario’s première touring ensemble, the Toronto Concert Orchestra led by Kerry Stratton, in recognition of Canada’s 150th year, concert highlights include a new orchestral song-cycle based on the Métis poet Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl, composed by Métis composer Ian Cusson, directed by Michael Mori, and sung by Métis Mezzo-Soprano Rebecca Cuddy; a reimagining of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire de Soldat by First Nations choreographer Aria Evans featuring the shapeshifting Trickster; and Perspectives, a new text by the Scarborough youth collective Couronne du Canada also composed by Cusson.

It’s at Grace Toronto Church on Jarvis at 7.30pm.  Ticket details here here.

Bandits in the Valley

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Bandits in the Valley opened yesterday at Todmorden Mills.  It’s a site specific comic opera with words by Julie Tepperman and music by Benton Roark.  The time is 1880.  Sir George Taylor is the owner of the most productive paper mill in the British Empire but he wants more.  Specifically he wants to convert the entire Don Valley to paper thus depriving the pesky bandits thereof of cover.  He also wants Lily Pollard, the comely soprano lead of the travelling company he has engaged to stage The Pirates of Penzance as part of the mill’s 25th anniversary celebrations.  He’s not the only one after Lily.  She’s also the target of the female head of the troupe, Henri, and of Jeremiah, the bandit chief who is trying to obtain his inheritance.  He in turn is pursued by the house maid (and his cousin) Birgitta and, in a purely brotherly way of course, another bandit, Freddy.  In proper comic opera fashion a birthmark, naturally enough on Jeremiah’s buttock, is involved.  Mayhem ensues.

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Naomi’s Road

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Naomi’s Road; music by Ramona Luengen, lbretto by Anne Hodges, has been around as an opera for ten years or so and it got its Toronto premier last night at St. David’s Anglican Church in a production directed by Michael Mori for Tapestry Opera.  It’s based on Joy Kogawa’s novel for children of the same name which tells the story of Naomi and her brother Stephen; Japanese-Canadian children torn from a comfortable middle class Vancouver home by the WW2 era Canadian government’s policy of interning Canadians of Japanese descent as “enemy aliens”.  It’s a shameful story and one that Canadians need to know about in an era when fear of the “other” is being stoked on all sides.  Perhaps we like to look down our noses at the antics of our neighbours to the south but our own history has its dark side and we need to remember.

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There must be more money

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Rocking Horse Winner; music by Gareth Williams and libretto by Anna Chatterton, opened last night at the Berkeley Street Theatre.  It’s based on the short story by DH Lawrence and is a co-commission of Tapestry Opera and Scottish Opera.  There are some changes from the original story.  Here Paul is a developmentally challenged adult (on the autism spectrum) rather than a child.  The gardener is replaced by his personal care worker who moonlights as a caller at the local racetrack.  This has a couple of advantages.  It provides something of a rationale for Paul hearing the “voice” of the house and for his apparently inexplicable intuition about race winners and it also means that Paul can be cast as a tenor rather than having to make an awkward choice between a boy soprano or a pants role.  As Paul is one of, perhaps the main, character, this simplifies casting considerably.  The work is also gently updated.  So gently in fact that it’s barely perceptible.

RHW-L to R, top to bottom Keith Klassen as Oscar, Peter McGillivray as Bassett, Asitha Tennekoon,, Stephane Mayer, Aaron Durand, Sean Clark, Elaina Moreau, Erica Iris

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Rocking Horse Winner

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Tapestry Opera’s upcoming show is a new opera based on DH Lawrence’s short story Rocking Horse Winner.  The music is by Gareth Williams and the libretto by Anna Chatterton.  It’s co-commissioned with Scottish Opera but this time, unlike The Devil Inside, seen earlier this season, it’s a Canadian production with a Canadian cast.  I spoke with director Michael Mori and librettist Anna Chatterton to find out what it was all about.

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The Devil Inside

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I met with Tapestry Artistic Director Michael Mori earlier today to talk about the upcoming co-production with Scottish Opera of Stuart MacRae and Louise Welsh’s new opera The Devil Inside.  I’m not familiar with the work of either composer or librettist but each are well regarded in their own spheres; Welsh having made a name for herself with a number of psychological crime novels.  And that seems like a good background for adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp on which the opera is loosely based. The story itself is extremely creepy.  Right up there in fact with, say, James’ The Turn of the Screw, which got turned into a pretty decent opera!

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This in my picture, I would fain convey – Turner at the AGO

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tombThe AGO has a new initiative; AGO Friday Nights.  For the price of admission to the gallery one also gets to hear a one hour concert of music programmed by Tapestry’s Michael Mori to reflect something going on at the the gallery.  Right now the big exhibition is JMW Turner: Painting Set Free.  It’s a decent sized exhibition of works mainly drawn from the later stages of Turner’s career and it’s well worth seeing.  The music; half piano, half works for mezzo and piano reflects aspects of the exhibition.

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In which the dogs don’t really get let out

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Tap:Ex METALLURGY is the second experiment by Tapestry Artistic Director Michael Mori in engineering a collaboration between  opera people and an alien musical form; in this case punk experimentalists Fucked Up.  The program consistec of two pieces.  Metallurgy A was written by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco to a dense libretto by Mike Haliechuk and David James Brock.  In half an hour it tells the story of a mother and father trying, unsuccessfully, to come to terms with the death of their young daughter.  Dramatically it’s quite clever.  There’s dialogue and then the performers (the musicians are on stage with the singers) leave one by one until only the mother (Krisztina Szabó) and the violinist (Yoobin Ahn), representing the ghost of the daughter, are left on stage to play out a final duet.

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Weaving a Tapestry

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Not Michael Mori

I met with Michael Mori of Tapestry Opera on Friday ostensibly to talk about their upcoming season but, as these things tend to, we covered a lot more ground than that.  As far as the season goes I have only a little to add to the previous piece I wrote on this subject.  I can confirm that there will be no LibLab or Tapestry Shorts in 2015/16.  Michael feels that the process has already produced enough composer/librettist connections to allow it to be scaled back to every other year which frees up more time/funds for other projects.  This is clear from this season’s exciting line up with two fully staged chamber operas.

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This week

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MLebel Color Portrait1I think it’s about time I started doing a weekly preview of upcoming Toronto events.  I’m going to try and make this in a regular slot, probably Sunday, so this is a bit late.  The main event this week is the opening of Tafelmusik’s season with a concert featuring mezzo Mireille Lebel.  It’s a pretty mixed line up.  Lebel will perform arias from Vivaldi’s Il Farnace, and Handel’s Alcina, Ariodante, and Rinaldo. Dominic Teresi performs Vivaldi’s Bassoon Concerto in F Major, RV 485, and Rodolfo Richter performs his own violin transcription of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052.  The opening bash is tomorrow night at 7pm with repeats at 8pm on Friday and Saturday and a matinée on Sunday.  Trinity St. Paul’s of course.

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