Coming up at Toronto Summer Music – MISSING

I’ve been following the development of MISSING; an opera with text by Marie Clements and music by Brian Current since early 2017. There’s an article principally about the project in the Summer 2017 edition of Opera Canada. But I’ve yet to see the opera on stage. It’s had multiple productions in Western Canada but this July will see it’s first performance east of the Lakehead when Toronto Summer Music present it in concert format. That’s at Koerner Hall on July 24th.

Marion Newman in MISSING at Pacific Opera Victoria – Photo: Dean Kalyan

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A cunning Turn of the Screw

It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why Britten’s chamber operas are not done more often by smaller opera companies.  They use a modest orchestra (13 players for The Turn of the Screw), have equally modest sized casts, no chorus and they are in English.  They offer the chance to perform a work as written at much lower cost than grand opera and without the compromises inherent in downscaling works written on a larger scale.

Opera 5, The Turn of the Screw, Emily Ding Photography (Asitha Tennekoon_ Peter Quint_Prologue)

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Angel’s Bone

Angel’s Bone; music by Du Yun, libretto by Royce Vavrek, is an interesting concept.  It deals with human trafficking through the medium of two angels who fall to earth and find themselves in the hands of a couple; one of them a formerly trafficked person, who exploit them for sexual/commercial purposes.  It’s dramatically quite effective, well constructed and the libretto has a certain poetry to it.  It played at Harbourfront Theatre this last weekend in a co-pro by Sound the Alarm Music Theatre, Loose Tea Music Theatre and Array Music.

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Opera 5 are turning the screw

Those who know me are probably fed up of hearing me lament how slow the indie opera scene in Toronto has been to recover post plague.  Well here’s some good news on that front.  Opera 5 will be mounting a fully staged version of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw with the proper thirteen piece chamber orchestra at Theatre Passe Muraille in June next year.  Yea!

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Rocking again

Seven years ago Tapestry Opera premiered Gareth Williams and Anna Chatterton’s Rocking Horse Winner at the Berkeley Street Theatre.  Last night they opened an eight show re-run at Crow’s Theatre, once again directed by Michael Mori.  There are lots of similarities and a some differences between the productions and I’m going to concentrate on the latter so if you aren’t familiar with the piece you might want to read my 2016 review.

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Haydn’s Orfeo at the MacMillan Theatre

orfeoposterLast night saw the first of two performances of Haydn’s rarely performed 1791 work Orfeo: L’anima del filosofo.  I know how much effort and indeed passion went into creating this production and the singing is pretty good.  I wish I could say I enjoyed it but I can’t.  There were just too many issues.

Let’s start with the opera itself.  Maybe it was never completely finished as it was shut down by the authorities during rehearsals in London.  Maybe that’s why it feels horribly unbalanced.  The first half (two acts) tell us of Eurydice being betrothed, against her will, to her father, King Creonte’s, rival Arideo.  She runs off into the forest where she is about to be devoured by beasts when the news is brought to Orfeo who then sings at length before “rushing” off to rescue Euridice.

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Haydn’s Orfeo

Orfeo (_icon)On May 26th and 27th in the MacMillan Theatre there’s a chance to see Haydn’s rarely performed Orfeo: L’anima del filosofo. It was composed for London in 1791 but was shut down during rehearsals because the Lord Chamberlain’s office thought it subversively supportive of enlightenment values at a time when Pitt’s government was cracking down brutally on pro French Revolutionary sentiment in the UK.

It finally made it to the stage in 1951 in Florence with Maria Callas as Euridice.  It’s had a few runs in Europe since, including Cecilia Bartoli’s Covent Garden debut, but can scarcely be called a “staple of the repertoire”.  Now it’s being given its North American  premiere by a collaboration between the music schools at University of Toronto and McGill University led by Dr. Caryl Clarke. Continue reading

New on the web

Here are a few things I’ve noticed on the web recently:

There’s a workshop from the Isabel Bader Centre at Queens called Echo:Memories of the World which looks at cultural memory and cultural transmission from both a Western and an Indigenous perspective.  It features Marion Newman and the Gryphon Trio among others. It’s fascinating but I found parts of it quite triggering.  I don’t know how ong this is going to be available.  For now it’s free.  Note that while the Vimeo version of the performance works the Youtube doesn’t.

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The Domoney Artists Youtube channel has new Opera Breaks from Natalya Gennadi and Asitha Tennekoon.

Also on Youtube there’s a new piece from Opera Revue which may be even dafter than their previous efforts, which set a pretty high bar for daftness.

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More online goodies

The most substantial offering I’ve seen this week is a concert from Toronto Summer Music that aired last night.  It was a song recital by four of the Toronto’s better known young singers with Steven Philcox on piano.  Simona Genga sang some Mahler and some interesting songs by the Basque composer Jésus Gurudi (new to me!).  Clarence Frazer gave us excerpts from Die Schöne Müllerin plus three songs by Butterworth.  No prizes for guessing which three but they were well done.  Jamie Groote sang a set of Jake Heggie songs plus Strauss’ Beim Schlafengehen.  Always excellent to hear Strauss sung well.  Asitha Tennekoon rounded things off with a set from Wolff’s Mörike Lieder and songs by Holman (Fair Daffodils; obligatory CanCon), Gurney and Finzi.  It’s all high class stuff and there’s about 90 minutes of singing.  The platform is Vimeo and it looks and sounds good.  It’s free and available here.

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