Empire of Wild; music by Ian Cusson, libretto by Cherie Dimaline, is based on the latter’s novel of the same name and will feature as part of the COC’s main stage season in May 2027. Last Wednesday the COC orchestra with soloists performed five excerpts from the opera in the RBA. The summary version is that it’s most unusual. It’s very grand, it’s tonal, it has numbers yet there is something very modern about it. I suppose one could just say it’s very Ian Cusson!
Tuesday was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the COC programmed Innu soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais, with pianist Louise Pelletier, for the lunchtime concert series. They began very appropriately with Ian Cusson’s Le Récital des Anges; settings of two elegiac poems by Émile Nelligan about death and childhood. They are very beautiful and deeply sad songs that seemed just right for the occasion.
Tuesday night’s Toronto Summer Music concert in Walter Hall featured Quebec soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais with Louise Pelletier on piano. The first part of the concert consisted of songs by Brahms and Strauss. I’m not a huge fan of Brahm’s Zigeunerlieder, Op.103 which are very much an example of Germans misunderstanding just about everything about Hungarian folk music let alone gypsies. The texts are cliché ridden and the music isn’t much better. Ms. St-Gelais sang then with a full pleasant tone and some attention to the text but she really needs to work on her German diction.
Thursday night at the Four Seasons Centre saw the tenth iteration of the COC’s Centre Stage: Ensemble Studio Competition. It’s a competition for young singers for cash prizes and, more opaquely, potential places in the COC’s Ensemble Studio.
L-R: Duncan Stenhouse, Emily Rocha, Elisabeth St-Gelais
operaramblings 