This concert was the culmination of several days of workshops involving Wallis Giunta, Jordan de Souza and eighteen emerging artists; both singers and pianists. It’s a comparatively unusual opportunity to focus on contemporary repertoire for a while and the results were fun. As usual with these multi-participant efforts I’m not going to attempt to be exhaustive but just concentrate on my personal highlights.
There are a number of interesting concerts and performances this week. Tuesday sees the graduate students of the UoT Opera Division in cabaret at the Tranzac Club. It’s at 7.30pm and it’s free. The beer at the Tranzac is better than it used to be so should be a decent night out and if you don’t like it the NAGS are performing in the other room, alas without Neil Sorbie. Earlier in the day there’s a noon hour concert in the RBA featuring Bob Pomakov and the Gryphon Trio (also free). The program features works by Mozart and Heather Schmidt.
GGS and Ensemble Studio graduate Wallis Giunta will be returning to Toronto in early February for Tapestry Opera’s New Opera 101 program and the two concerts of Tapestry Songbook VI. Basically, she will be working with Jordan de Souza and a group of emerging artists on a three day series of workshops in contemporary opera which will include two concerts open to the public on February 5th and 6th. I spoke to her via Skype yesterday at her current digs in Leipzig.
Tap:Ex METALLURGY is the second experiment by Tapestry Artistic Director Michael Mori in engineering a collaboration between opera people and an alien musical form; in this case punk experimentalists Fucked Up. The program consistec of two pieces. Metallurgy A was written by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco to a dense libretto by Mike Haliechuk and David James Brock. In half an hour it tells the story of a mother and father trying, unsuccessfully, to come to terms with the death of their young daughter. Dramatically it’s quite clever. There’s dialogue and then the performers (the musicians are on stage with the singers) leave one by one until only the mother (Krisztina Szabó) and the violinist (Yoobin Ahn), representing the ghost of the daughter, are left on stage to play out a final duet.
Next week is a bit crazy. Tomorrow is the Elizabeth Krehm memorial concert in aid of St. Mike’s ICU. They are playing Mahler 2 and it’s PWYC with a tax receipt. 8pm at Metropolitan United Church. Tueday sees the opening of Philippe Boesmann’s Julie at 8pm at the Bluma Appel. It’s an important, if bleak, contemporary piece and for the first time here, in a Soundstreams/CanStage presentation, it will be sung in English. It runs until the 29th so plenty of chance to catch it.
Selfie is a work in progress by Chris Thornborrow and Julie Tepperman. It’s still incomplete and the performances over the last couple of days were workshops designed to elicit audience feedback. It had its genesis at the 2013 LibLab and it’s come a long way. The original sketch of two teenagers texting each other is turning into an hour long piece about cyberbullying. It’s a rather disturbing exploration of how technology allows teenagers to do all those things which teenagers do with even less “supervision” than ever. In this case a manipulative girl (Cindy played by Larissa Koniuk) tries to make up for her split from her rather feckless boyfriend (Devon played by Asitha Tennekoon) by engineering a split between her friend Mindy (Meher Pavri) and her bloke Tyler (Giovanni Spanu). The result is a massive on-line slut shaming campaign against the fifth character Heather who has no real identity or agency until the very last scene. Adults encountered along the way are portrayed as clueless, ineffective or bureaucratically indifferent.
There are a couple of biggies coming up next week. On October 7th and 8th the amazingly talented and apparently fearless Barbara Hannigan is singing with and conducting the TSO. For all I know she’ll be tap dancing and doing hand stands as well. It’s her conducting debut with this orchestra. The programme features works by Nono, Haydn, Mozart, Ligeti and Stravinsky. 8pm Roy Thomson Hall.
There’s a date change for the Tapestry workshops of Julie Tepperman and Chris Thornborrow’s Selfie. Dates are now October 8th at 7.30pm and October 9th at 2.30pm.
Not Michael Mori
I met with Michael Mori of Tapestry Opera on Friday ostensibly to talk about their upcoming season but, as these things tend to, we covered a lot more ground than that. As far as the season goes I have only a little to add to the previous piece I wrote on this subject. I can confirm that there will be no LibLab or Tapestry Shorts in 2015/16. Michael feels that the process has already produced enough composer/librettist connections to allow it to be scaled back to every other year which frees up more time/funds for other projects. This is clear from this season’s exciting line up with two fully staged chamber operas.
The competition to be the most interesting and innovative indie opera company in Toronto is fierce and Tapestry Opera’s season announcement definitely places them as one of the leading contenders. As well as the usual interesting line up of workshops etc there are two brand new fully staged works and a collaboration with a punk band. Details under the cut.
This year’s Tap:Ex is titled Metallurgy and features experimental punk band Fucked Up together with COC regulars Krisztina Szabó and David Pomeroy. This one runs November 19th to 21st at the Ernest Balmer Studio. Details here.
operaramblings 