Student recitals are another great opportunity to hear great music for free. On Sunday I attended soprano Leandra Dahm’s recital at Mazzoleni Hall. It was a caredfully curated programme lasting just over an hour and it was really good.
Opera 5’s interns for their Toronto Operas Festival gave a recital in the RBA on Monday. It was a varied mix f opera, song and musical theatre; from Mozart and Strauss to Camelot and Spamalot. Both the rep and the performances demonstrated the emphasis that the Schulich School; with which all the performers are affiliated, puts on musical theatre compared to some of its competitors.
Don Giovanni!
I wanted to give a shout out to a one off performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni coming up later this month as it’s in support of a good cause; the Redwood Women’s Shelter. Appropriately the show is at the Redwood Theatre on Gerrard East (an interesting space with an excellent bar if you haven’t been there before.) It’s on May 22nd at 8pm with a talk by Michael Jones of Opera Canada at 7.15pm.
It’s piano accompaniment (Brahm Goldhammer) and I suspect it’s basically arias with narration format but it’s an excellent cast headed up by Alex Hajek as the Don. Tickets start at $50 and are available at:
https://www.theredwoodtheatre.com/event-details/don-giovanni
And there’s early bird discount code DG2026 for 20% off tickets.
The full details including casting are in the linked document
Thursday’s noon hour concert at Metropolitan United featured soprano Teresa Tucci with pianist Ivan Jovanovic in a varied programme of opera arias, art song and musical theatre numbers.
The COC announcement of the 2026/27 season dropped this morning with zero fanfare; not even an embargoed presser in advamce. It’s pretty mixed and, rather to my surprise not far off what I predicted; at least in my more pessimistic version. So…
Thursday’s noon hour in the concert was a really great idea; combine the COC Ensemble Studio with the COC Orchestra for an all Mozart concert. Mozart’s Symphony No.35 in D major (Hafner) was split into into its four movements with pairs of arias inserted between the movements to create what Johannes Debus, conducting, described as an opéra imaginaire. It worked really well.
Last Tuesdays’s concert in the RBA featured four singers and two pianists from the Ensemble Studio in a concert of highly recognisable opera arias. I guess with Barber of Seville and Rigoletto coming p on the FSC stage that was a bit inevitable. It was though very well done with all four singers not only singing well but really conveying a sense of character.
In my review of Opera Atelier’s production of The Magic Flute I had this t say about Rainelle Krause’s Queen of the Night… “Her coloratura was powerful and pinpoint, and as the applause died down she reappeared and reprised the most spectacular section with additional stratospheric high notes.”
Now you can see the reprise for yourself on Instagram. I wasn’t kidding.
Opera Atelier opened a run of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (in English) at the Elgin on Wednesday evening. It’s basically the 1991 production (tweaked in 2013) and features a rather spectacular Queen of the Night. Full review at Opera Canada.
Photo: Bruce Zinger
Opera Atelier’s fall offering this year is a remount of the Magic Flute in essentially the version that first appeared in 1991. It’s sung in English and we got a preview in the RBA on Thursday. It was basically a working rehearsal of the opera’s opening plus a few other scenes with Chris Bagan at the piano.
operaramblings 