Unbridled Theatre Collective, a new outfit, opened a run of Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera at Video Cabaret on Thursday evening. It’s in an updated version created for The National Theatre by Simon Stephens in 2016 and it’s so updated it might well be retitled The 1.25p Opera. It’s raunchy and contains sexually explicit language and action (including some rather disturbing sexual violence) that would never have made it past the censors back in the day.
Thursday night at the Jane Mallett Theatre Soundstreams and Music Toronto presented a concert featuring the Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon – violin, Roman Borys – cello, Jamie Parker – piano) and others. Also two world premières.
First up was the première of Vivian Fung’s Prayer; a short piece for violin (Lara St.John) and piano. It’s a rather beautiful short piece with a melismatic beginning that gets more dramatic and then morphs to a kind of searching quality. It was followed by Amy Beach’s Invocation for violin and piano, Op. 55 of 1904. It’s a competent, melodic piece in the Romantic tradition. Pleasant enough. Continue reading
This year’s Toronto Summer Music; theme “Metamorphosis”, kicked off on Thursday evening in a packed Koerner Hall. It was TSM at its best; the concept a bit odd, even a bit mad, the execution brilliant and the result exciting and very enjoyable. Basically take two seriously virtuosic pianists and as the late, lamented Humphrey Lyttleton might have said “given then silly things to do”. Well they weren’t really silly, just a bit unusual.
Confluence Concerts’ show last night at Heliconian Hall was titled A Woman’s Voice. It was, after a fashion, a CD release concert in two halves. The first half featured music by Alice Ping Yee Ho from the album A Woman’s Voice and featuring the same performers; Vania Chan, Katy Clark, Alex Hetherington, Maeve Palmer and Jialiang Zhu. I’ve already reviewed the album and I don’t think last night changed my opinion much so I’ll not do a detailed rundown. What I can say is that last night it was mostly opera excerpts; Lesson of Da Ji, Chinatown, The Imp of the Perverse, and a live concert gave an opportunity for a bit of staging which was definitely an enhancement, especially in The Imp of the Perverse scene. “Café Chit Chat” and “Black” also benefitted from visual interaction between the singers. I like the CD a lot. Getting a chance to see some of the music live was great. Continue reading
The Gryphon Trio pulled out of Wednesday night’s Toronto Summer Music concert for, one supposes, the usual reason. This forced a reorganisation of the concert. Elliot Britton’s new piece was cut and instead we got an extended set from the Nordic Voices as the first part of the concert. Actually the first piece was for a very extended Nordic Voices. Andrew Balfour’s Omaa Bindig supplemented the vocal sextet with Marion Newman and Jamie Parker (piano) plus a number of string players and voices lined up down the sides of Walter Hall. It’s one of those soundscape works that envelops you in a variety of sounds and techniques. I wish I could find the text but I can’t (surtitles used last night as they have been all through TSM… yay!)
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.
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess has a really interesting history. It was always intended as a “grand opera”; pretty much the first American one. It was written for the Metropolitan Opera but not performed there until 1985 and between it’s Boston debut in 1935 and a production in Houston in 1976 it was virtually always performed in a much cut edition designed for Broadway. In fact by the time of the Houston production it was being done much at all; being seen as dated and dealing with issues of race that were particularly highly charged in Civil Rights Era America. It took a bold, young Deneral Manager, David Gockley, and a Gershwin enthusiast, John DeMain, to recreate an opera rather than a musical. It’s been following them round ever since and so, not very surprisingly, Gockley, now in charge in San Francisco, chose to stage it there last year in a new production by Francesca Zambello with DeMain conducting.
Yesterday’s lunch time concert featured bass Robert Pomakov accompanied by members of the Gryphom Trio. The programme kicked off with two songs by Glinka with Bob accompanied by Roman Borys on cello and Jamie Parker on piano. The first piece was called Lullaby but it’s hard to imagine anyone sleeping through Bob’s powerful rendering. The second piece, Doubt, showcased some lovely playing by Borys.
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, published in 2010, is an interesting and, occasionally, perplexing read. It looks at developments largely from a musicological perspective only rarely straying into political context and even morer rarely dealing with sociological factors surrounding opera although there is an interesting short section on French grand opéra that deals with the extent to which French opera of various kinds was subsidised and how the odd social habits of the audience shaped the works themselves.
operaramblings 