Parélios; music by Cecilia Livingston, words by Duncan McFarlane, opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Friday as part of Opera 5’s Toronto Opera Festival. It’s an intensely cerebral and very, very beautiful work but it’s unrelenting and quite dark. Basically a group of refugees; perhaps fleeing some environmental catastrophe, are on a journey to who knows where. They have survived the winter but the summer brings no real relief. It’s a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but vastly more intellectual and poetic.
This year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival runs from July 12th to August 4th and, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the end of WW1 is war themed, though to be honest it wears it pretty lightly. As always there is one big vocal star. This year it’s German tenor Christoph Prégardien. He has a recital at Walter Hall with Julius Drake at 7.30pm on July 17th. He also pops up on the 20th at the same time and place to sing Schubert’s Die Forelle with Stephen Philcox in a program that features chamber music by Schubert, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff. There’s no word on public masterclasses but he’s around for a few days so I suspect that something will emerge.
operaramblings 