Tag Archives: sirett

Toronto Masque Theatre 2016/17

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apollodaphneToronto Masque Theatre have announced their 2016/17 season.  There are two main stage productions and three salon concerts.  First of the main stage shows is a double bill of  Handel’s dramatic cantata Apollo and Daphne with Jacqueline Woodley and Geoffrey Sirett and dancer Stéphaie Brochard, directed and choreographed by Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière paired with Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden based on the epic poem by Tennyson, performed by actor Derek Boyes and pianist Angela Park.  This one is at 8:00 pm on November 17th, 18th and 19th with a pre-show event at 7:15 pm each evening at the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse.

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UoT 2016/17

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UoT Faculty of Music have just announced their 2016/17 season.  It’s the usual broad range of performances so I’ll highlight the opera and vocal music contributions.

UoT Opera is offering four shows.  The fall main production is Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld with new English dialogue and stage direction by Michael Patrick Albano.  Choreography i by Anna Theodosakis and Russell Braun makes his podium debut.  There are four performances November 24th to 27th.  Spring sees a Handel rarity; Imeneo.  Tim Albery directs and Daniel Taylor is in charge of the music.  This one runs March 16th to 19th.  Both shows are in the MacMillan Theatre.

machinestops

Last year’s student composed opera; The Machine Stops

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Guidebook of Decadence

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Coleman, Lemieux et Compagnie’s Against Nature presented last night at The Citadel, is another show combining vocal music and dance.  It combines two baritones; Geoff Sirett and Alexander Dobson with a dancer, Laurence Lemieux, playing a female servant.  Funny how things tend to coevolve in the arts world.  Combining vocal music with dance, once not so common, is now almost ubiquitous with productions from the likes of CASP, Against the Grain and FAWN among others.

an4

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Travelogue

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Last night was the one of only two chances to see Bicycle Opera Project in Toronto this year.  (The other is tonight).  It was a show in collaboration with Toy Piano Composers’ Collective called Travelogue and featuring four new works around the broad them of travel. The show was run without an interval but with each composer introducing their own work by reading, e.g., post cards from their travels or, hilariously, in the case of the absent Tobin Stokes, recordings of the voicemails he left apologising for not having finished the piece yet.  Staging was, in the BOP way, minimalist but effective.

BicycleOpera-web-9990

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Fashion first at the COC

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neefbeard

Intellectual and Germanic

Observers of the Toronto opera scene will have noted the creeping influence of facial hair in the industry locally.  Perhaps it didn’t start with COC General Director Alexander Neef’s intellectually Germanic goatee but who could deny that it had a profound impact.  Earlier this week the four tenors of the Ensemble Studio appeared together sporting face rugs in varying stages of development and the scene is replete with other notable beardies.  Geoff Sirett, Robert Gleadow, Greg Finney and Alexander Dobson come to mind.  It’s almost compulsory, it seems, for baritones.   Continue reading →

Coming up

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letravail_365sqIt’s getting a bit busier again.  This afternoon there are a couple of concerts.  At 2pm in Mazzoleni Hall you can catch Mireille Asselin and Brett Polegato with Peter Tiefenbach and Rachel Andrist in a painting themed program of lieder, artsongs and chansons called Le travail du peintre.  At 4.30pm at Metropolitan United Church Bach’s Mass in B Minor meets German film maker Bastian Clevé’s film The Sound of Eternity.  The soloists are Marjorie Maltais, Geoff Sirett, Jennifer Krabbe and Charles Sy plus the Orpheus Choir, Chorus Niagara and the Talisker Players.  I suppose it would just about be possible to do both…

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Russia Cast Adrift

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The opening concert of Off Centre Music Salon’s season was a programme of Russian romantic and post romantic works, songs and piano pieces, entitled Russia Cast Adrift.  The first half of the afternoon was devoted to the sort of songs that explain why “smert” is one of about six Russian words that I recognize.  It kicked off with a Rachmaninoff prelude played with vigour by William Leathers before going into a series of songs by Sviridov, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Glière, Arensky and Mussorgsky.  The singing was shared by soprano Nathalie Paulin, mezzo Emilia Boteva, tenor Ernesto Ramirez and baritone Geoffrey Sirett with Boris Zarankin and Inna Perkis at the piano.

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The week in prospect

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paulinThis afternoon at 3pm, at Trinity St. Paul’s, Off Centre kick off their season,  Geoff Sirett, Nathalie Paulin and others offer an all Russian programme.

Super Tuesday is a ridiculously busy day.  At noon in the RBA Array Music is presenting Love Shards, a program of music by contemporary women composers.  The full programme is here.  In the evening Adrianne Pieczonka and Kristina Szabó are singing works by Crumb and Berio at Koerner Hall.  There’s also a fundraiser for Opera 5 at The Extension Room.  I’m sorry to be missing that one as the last couple have been a blast.  Definitely worth going to if you are not going to Koerner.

Thursday there is a PWYC show by UoT Opera at The Black Box Theatre at 7.30pm.  Tim Albery and David Fallis, creators of last season’s evocative Last Days, have created The Fatal Gaze, an exploration of the dangers of looking too long or too closely, inspired by the Baroque repertoire.  Last days was really good so I have high expectations for this one.  It’s also on on Friday.

A bicycle opera in a bicycle shop

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I was back last night to see Bicycle Opera Project’s Shadowbox again.  This time it was in the more intimate, and highly appropriate, setting of a bicycle shop; Curbside Cycle on Bloor Street.  Minus the high roof of the Davenport-Perth Community Centre it was much easier to understand the sung text which is pretty important with this show. The show is an interesting concept.  It’s still a series of scenes by different composers and librettists but they are linked thematically by the common idea of memory and dramatically by the auction of objects that set up each scene  The auctioneer is rather brilliantly played by Chris Enns who, curiously, seemed quite sinister at Davenport-Perth (like something out of a German Expressionist movie perhaps) but seemed quite avuncular close up.

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Running a little late here

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Back in January I saw Opera 5’s show Modern (Family) Opera at the Arts and Letters Club. I didn’t review it here because I was covering it for Opera Canada.  It seems that there was some breakdown in communication, probably the dodgy email connection at our temporary digs last winter, and it never made it to the mag and so wasn’t printed.  It’s a pity as it was a good show and so, belatedly, I’m sticking the review here, for the record, instead.

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