Tag Archives: mozart

Coming Up

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There are a couple of interesting concerts coming up in the last week of the Toronto Summer Music Festival.  On the 24th at 7.30pm in Walter Hall you can see Collectìf in a “spooky” programme.  Collectìf is a group started by Danika Lorèn and friends.  They do shows that incorporate staging, art song and video and they are never boring.  (They also do adult cabaret but that’s another story!).  Wednesday’s show is called Beyond Perception: What Haunts Us Now and features three sections.  The first is built around the theme of La Dame Blanche, the second features Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and the last deals with the myth of Daphne and Apollo.  Recommended.  And as an added incentive for operaramblings readers there’s a discount code OR10 which will get you $10 tickets.  Tickets from the Royal Conservatory Box Office online, in person or by phone.

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Toronto Summer Music opener

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Last night saw the first concert of this year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival.  The theme was “Beyond Borders” with most of the works presented; a mixture of piano, violin and vocal, having been influenced by other cultures/places or written in exile.

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Reimagined Zauberflöte

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The 2018 Salzburg Festival production of Die Zauberflöte really pushes the envelope of reenvisioning the piece.  Is there anything to say about this piece that hasn’t already been said?  Lydia Steier thinks so and goes some considerable way tp making her point.  So what’s the big idea here?  Essentially the kicking off points are that it’s about (in a sense) a dysfunctional family and it’s a fairy tale.  So we open on the dining room of a rather depressing bourgeois Austrian family in the mid 1930s sitting down to dinner.  There’s the mother, the father, the grandfather and three boys; all rather formally dressed.  A portrait of a bride hangs behind the table.  The father has a hissy fit and storms out.  The mother, who appears to drink, starts breaking things.  The grandfather takes the boys off to the nursery to read them a bedtime story.

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A brace of baritones

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Last night Thomas Hampson, his son in law Luca Pisaroni and pianist Vlad Intifca appeared at Koerner Hall.  It was a curious program.  The first half was made up of opera arias and excerpts.  There was a sequence of Conte/Figaro and Leporello/Don G numbers.  They were, of course, very well sung.  Both singers are noted exponents of these roles but I really didn’t see the point.  They were pieces I’m sure pretty much every audience member has seen with orchestra, on stage, multiple times.  With piano accompaniment it all seemed a bit pointless.  There followed two longish scenes; the Riccardo/Giorgio confrontation from I Puritani and the scene from Don Carlo where Posa pleads with the king for a change in policy in the Netherlands.  These worked better; perhaps because they are less familiar but more likely the fact that each featured Pisaroni in a genuine bass role.  This allowed for more variation of timbre and colour than the Mozart pieces.

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The Magic Flute at the GGS

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I went into last night’s Glenn Gould School performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at Koerner Hall with all kinds of questions buzzing around in my head; partly because of an earlier conversation with director Joel Ivany and partly, well, Magic Flute – that most enigmatic of operas.  If only one could go back (more than forty years) to seeing it for the first time!

Photo: Nicola Betts

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UoT’s La finta giardiniera

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I don’t think I’m ever going to love Mozart’s La finta giardiniera.  It has some pleasing music, though oddly the two principal characters don’t get much of it, but the plot is ridiculous and it really outstays its welcome.  That said, Michael Patrick Albano’s production for UoT Opera in the MacMillan Theatre at least makes the complexity clear.  We never lose sight of who is who; even if the other characters do, and what logic there is in the plot comes through clearly enough.  Albano sets it entirely realistically in 18th century dress with set elements efficiently dropped in from the fly loft or carried around by a small band of liveried servants.  There’s a fair bit of “park and bark” but then there’s a lot of prosy explaining going on.

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Joel Ivany’s Magic Flute

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nikpix_joelmiriam_01I sat down a couple of days ago with Joel Ivany to discuss his upcoming production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the Royal Conservatory.  Here are some of the things we talked about.

What’s Die Zauberflöte “about”?

This opera has had whole books written about it but no-one seems to agree on what’s at the core of it.  Is it a simple fairy tale?  Is it an allegory of Reason versus The Church?  Is it a Coming of Age story?  Unsurprisingly we didn’t come to firm conclusions here but it’s clear that Joel wants to particularly explore some of the aspects of gender raised by the piece; especially the apparent misogyny of the piece.  There’s potentially more to Pamina than being the bait to trap Tamino or, alternatively, his completion.  What is her roles in the Trials?  What happens to either of them if they fail?  If Tamino needs to be “completed” what are we to make of the unpartnered Sarastro?  But, if Pamina has strength what kind of agency does she have?  The other female character are equally problematic.  How does one humanize the Queen of the Night?  Who, or what, is Papagena?  Neither of us think there are easy answers here and I’m looking forward to seeing how Joel’s take pans out.  What we could agree on is that even if the simple equation of male = good/rational and female = irrational/disposable worked in 1791 (if, indeed, it did), it won’t work in 2019.

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Not Sam

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Off I went to the Four Seasons Centre to see Samuel Chan and Stéphane Mayer perform some Schubert.  Sadly Sam was indisposed so what we got was a hastily, but very well, constructed program featuring some of the other singers in the Ensemble Studio.

Things kicked off with the increasingly impressive Anne-Sophie Neher in an accomplished rendering of Mozart’s “show off” piece Exsultate jubilate, in which she showed very decent control in the rather fiendish runs.  She was back later with “The Presentation of the Rose” from Der Rosenkavalier which sounded suitably Straussian and sufficiently girlish at the same time.  Nicely done. She made a third appearance with one of Adèles’s arias from Le comte Ory.  This didn’t quite do it for me but it was fun to hear Stéphane playing around with the very Rossiniesque accompaniment.

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Egoyan’s Così – brunette edition

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The COC season continued last night with Atom Egoyan’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, first seen in January 2014.  There are some changes from the previous outing but most of what I had to say about the production holds good still.  This time there have been cuts.  The show now runs as two ninety minute acts plus an interval and it feels tighter and doesn’t drag so much in the second act.  In the process some of the heavy handed symbolism has been discarded; fewer pinned butterflies.  I think the physical comedy may have ratcheted up just a touch but maybe that’s me misremembering.  And the girls are brunettes, rather than redheads, but still well matched enough to look like sisters.  Musically, I think it’s been lightened up somewhat.  Bernard Labadie, something of a period specialist, conducts and Michael Shannon accompanies the recits on a fortepiano.  But, still, fundamentally the same show.

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Opera Atelier 2019/20

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Opera Atelier has announced its 2019/20 season.  As usual there are two main stage shows.  The first is a revival of their 2011 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  It runs from October 31st to November 9th, 2019, in the Ed Mirvish Theatre.  It’s a production that plays up the comedy and the elements of the commedia dell’arte in the piece while pretty much eschewing anything deeper or darker.  The cast includes Douglas Williams as the Don with Stephen Hegedus as Leporello, Colin Ainsworth, as Don Ottavio, Meghan Lindsay as Donna Anna, Carla Huhtanen as Donna Elvira, Mireille Asselin as Zerlina, Olivier Laquerre as Masetto, and Gustav Andreassen as Commendatore. beautiful Ed Mirvish Theatre.  David Fallis conducts.

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