Tag Archives: naccarato

Darknet

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Great idea.  Create a sort of spooky, short opera program in a funky location and use it as a fundraiser for your next major project.  That was Darknet at Mây last night.  Jennifer Krabbe, singing Berlioz, rounded us up in the bar and ushered us downstairs into an installation created by Alessia Naccarato and Noah Grove.  It was dark.  It was eerie.  We were offered masks.  Cairan Ryan sang The Cold Song from Purcell’s King Arthur while writhing on the floor.  Jonathan MacArthur sort of emerged from some sort of primeval goo singing Aria by John Cage and Beth Hagerman gave us one of Lulu’s arias.  Then we were rounded up and ejected into the light again.  Loved it.

jma

Postcard from Morocco

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Dominick Argento’s 1971 work Postcard from Morocco is unusual.  It’s opera meets Ionesco meets acid rock.  It’s a weird and wonderful kaleidoscope of scenes and music “about” a group of characters who seem to have nothing in common except that they have showed up at a railway station in Morocco c. 1914.  Michael Cavanagh’s production for UoT Opera plays it straight veering to OTT which seems about right.  This piece doesn’t need directorial “interpretation” but it does need careful organisation and lots of energy.  Cavanagh’s approach provided plenty of both.

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Brush Up Your Shakespeare

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Charles Sy

Today’s free concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre was given by the University of Toronto’s Opera Program.  It was a semi staged assortment of songs and excerpts from operas, operettas and musicals based on the works of Shakespeare with a distinct leaning to the operetta/musical theatre side of things.  That’s understandable enough with young singers but it does make the game we all play (at least I do) of trying to guess who the next Jonas Kaufmann or Anna Netrebko is that much harder.  Not that I’m very good at it.  I’m far more able to predict what a newly bottled Bordeaux will taste like in ten years time than whether the young soprano I’m listening to might go on to sing Siegfried or Turandot at the Met!

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