Come Closer; libretto by Rachel Krehm, music by Ryan Trew, is a two act chamber opera about Rachel’s relationship with her younger sister Elizabeth who died as a consequence of heroin addiction. Some of it is based on Rachel’s memories and much on the writing and drawings that Elizabeth left. It premiered on Friday night and is currently playing in an Opera 5 production at Factory Theatre.
Come Closer is a new opera with music by Ryan Trew and text by Rachel Krehm. It’s scheduled to premiere at Factory Theatre on June 13th but last Wednesday in the RBA we got a preview of some extracts. Come Closer deals with Rachel Krehm’s relationship with her younger sister Elizabeth who died in 2012. It started out as a song cycle setting seven of Elizabeth’s poems and now has narrative added to create a stage work. Yesterday we heard four extracts with Rachel playing herself and Jacqueline Woodley (who I hadn’t seen for far too long) as Elizabeth. Accompaniment was piano trio with Evan Mitchell conducting.
The Glenn Gould School gave the first of two performances of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at Koerner Hall on Wednesday evening. The production is directed by Allison Grant and is pretty straightforward, though quite heavily cut. The “look” is maybe Miyazaki animation (costumes by Alex Amini) with a minimalist backdrop (Kim Sue Bartnik) which is enlivened by interesting projections by Nathan Bruce and quite striking lighting by Jason Hand. There’s a sort of dumb show during the overture that the Director’s Notes imply is something to do with the opera being about a dysfunctional family (what opera family isn’t?) but the idea isn’t developed at all.
The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary. The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices. It’s clever. It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral. Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc. There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum. This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a production of Frank Lehár’s A Merry Widow at the Jane Mallet Theatre last night. It’s in some ways very much the TOT package one expects; English translation with a few gently updated jokes, a small pit orchestra, lots of movement and a cast of young, up and coming singers (for the most part). There were no real surprises. It was just done rather well.
The Glenn Gould School’s Fall Chamber Opera offering this year was four short pieces from Tapestry Opera’s back catalogue. First up was Ice Time by Ka Nin Chan and Mark Brownell. It’s the story of a has been ice skater and her futile attempts to get her daughter, who wants to be a civil engineer, to follow in her footsteps (or icy equivalent). The music is in much the same vein as other works by this composer such as Dragon’s Tale. It’s a pretty light hearted piece and it got a lively and credible account from Emma Pennell as the daughter and Alexa Frankian as the mother. As with the other pieces direction was by Dana Fradkin with accompaniment by chamber ensemble conducted by Peter Tiefenbach.
operaramblings 