Yesterday I saw the second of two performances by Venezuelan male soprano Samuel Mariño with Tafelmusik at Trinity St. Paul’s. The programme was a mixture of virtuoso baroque arias by various composers interspersed with relatively short instrumental pieces.
Samuel Mariño with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Photo by Dahlia Katz.
Things happening next month…
But first this month… on April 27th to 29th male soprano Samuel Mariño is appearing with
Tafelmusik in a programme titled Higher Love: Virtuoso Arias. Details here.
Crow’s Theatre has a couple of shows. True Crime opens on the 2nd. It’s a short run. Preview on the 1st then closes on the 7th. It’s basically a one man, semi-improvised show about an imprisoned con man. The Chinese Lady, which runs 5th to 21st (previews 2nd to 4th) in the smaller Studio Theatre tells the story of the first Chinese woman in the USA. Written by Lloyd Suh and directed by Marjorie Chan it should be interesting. There’s also Boom X. Rick Miller plays over a hundred characters to narrate events from 1969 t0 1995. It runs from the 10th to the 28th. More details at crowstheatre.com.
Ahead of Opera Atelier’s upcoming production of Handel’s The Resurrection (La resurrezione) at Koerner Hall next week (6th to 9th April) there was a lunchtime preview in the RBA on Tuesday. Later that day I sat down with director Marshall Pynkoski to find out more about the work, OA’s relationship to it and its rather tortuous journey to the Koerner Hall stage.
The National Ballet has announced a season that includes two world premieres, two Noorth American premieres and two Canadian premieres. It makes me wonder whether this isn’t part of why ballet isn’t suffering the same long term audience decline as opera. Worth thinking about.
Anyway the first of the world firsts is a new piece based on Flaubert’s Emma Bovary with a score by Peter Salem and choreography by Emma Pickett. The other is The other is a yet to be announced short work by choreographer William Yong.
So what’s on as we move into the holiday season?
Closing out November there’s Opera Revue at Castro’s this afternoon at 3pm and a couple of concerts on Wednesday. At lunchtime Wirth Prize winner Elisabeth Saint-Gelais and collaborative pianist Louise Pelletier present an intriguing looking programme in the RBA then at 7.30pm at Mazzoleni Hall the RCM’s Rebanks fellows are performing. Both are free but the Mazzoleni concert is ticketed and may be sold out.
The annus horribilis of 2021 seems to be going out with a whimper rather than a bang; at least musically in Toronto. Much of the streamed content on offer consists of repeats which is, I suppose, a holiday tradition. In this category we could include Against the Grain’s Messiah:Complex showing on Youtube and at TIFF and Essential Opera’s December. There’s still some new stuff appearing. Opera Revue have a rather good short piece about the exorbitant cost of aviaries in Toronto on Youtube. (They also have a live show coming up this weekend at the Emmett Ray. The COC have a show I(n Winter coming up this weekend on the COC web site featuring music by, among others, Vivaldi and Ian Cusson. There are also a couple of very short concerts from the RBA on the COC’s Youtube channel. Also, this year the annual Krehm memorial concert in aid of St. Mike’s ICU is on Youtube at 5.30pm on Boxing Day. Rachel Krehm is singing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen in the Schoenberg arrangement and that will be followed by a chamber reduction of Beethovens Symphony No.7. Evan Mitchell conducts the Canzona Chamber Players. For live, Tafelmusik have a sort of Christmas “greatest hits” concert and the TSO have a much shortened Messiah. Apart from that the holiday season is looking like booze and booster shots.
Opera Atelier’s new film Angel premiered last night. It consists of six scenes which, we are told, can be performed as a sequence or individually. There’s a basic theme of “angels” and the texts are drawn from Milton and Rilke (in translation). The score is by Edwin Huizinga and Christopher Bagan with some of the dance music being actual baroque works.
Opera Atelier’s webstream of Handel’s The Resurrection premiered on Thursday evening and will be available until this coming Thursday. It’s ticketed and you can buy an access code from the RCM box office. It’s the first Opera Atelier show conceived for webstreaming as opposed to filming a stage performance. The action was filmed in St. Lawrence Hall and the music was recorded at Koerner.
There a couple more on-line events coming up.
Opera Atelier’s fall show Something Rich and Strange was originally conceived as a show that could be given before a (limited) live audience as well as via web stream. That’s obviously constraining compared to a show that is created without a fourth wall and can include location filming. All the other constraints of these strange times had also to be observed. Despite this there was much to like in a show that presented a number of scenes from the 17th and 18th century repertoire plus a couple of “neo-baroque” pieces composed by Edwin Huizinga.
operaramblings 