Theatre Gargantua’s Dissonant Species opened at Factory Theatre on Friday night. It’s written by Heather Marie Annis and Michael Gordon Spence and directed by Jacquie P.A Thomas. It’s a multi-disciplinary exploration of the idea that “everything is sound” and it also explores other ideas about waves; vibration, the notion that two people can be (metaphorically) on different wavelengths and it flirts with the idea that everything is “vibration” which is sort of true in a QFT way.
Miecysłav Weinberg’s The Idiot, based on the Dostoevsky novel, was composed in 1986/7 but didn’t get a full premiere until 2013 in Mannheim. The neglect of Weinberg’s music in USSR/Russia is probably explained by him being a Polish Jew but why he’s so little known elsewhere is a bit of a mystery as The Idiot shows that The Passenger wasn’t a fluke. Anyway, The Idiot got a second outing at Salzburg in 2024 in a rather complex production by Krysztof Warlikowski.
Ambroise Thomas’ Psyché is yet another more or less forgotten French opera rescued from obscurity by the Bru Zane label. Canadian Hélène Guilmette sings the title role. Full review at Opera Canada.
Tuesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured soprano Teresa Tucci and baritone James Coole-Stevenson; both Rebanks fellows at the Conservatory, and pianist Vlad Soloviev. It was a carefully curated concert with a thematic line and featured far more duets than one usually gets in such a show.
It’s been 73 years since the first performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting. The play though has become an established icon of experimental 20th century theatre and millions of words have been written about it. It’s currently running at Coal Mine Theatre in a production directed by Kelli Fox. As far as I remember (and it’s been fifty years since I read the play) this production plays it straight and pretty much entirely according to the stage directions in the script. The set is a tree and a bunch of dirt. Nobody sits in a dust bin. So everything turns on subtlety and timing which is quite a challenge.
On Friday night the COC presented a one-off concert style performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Concert style, in this case, meaning the orchestra on stage with the chorus behind them and the soloists singing from music stands at the front of the stage. There were some projections behind the stage.
Iconic British countertenor James Bowman passed away last March. On Sunday night at Trinity-St. Pauls the Early Music folks at UoT presented a tribute to the man and his career. It was very well done. Music associated with Bowman; mostly Purcell and Britten, was interspersed with video and personal recollections/testimonials that fully reflected the considerable influence Bowman had on the English music scene and on the more widespread acceptance of the countertenor voice in the classical music world generally. Continue reading
And so we come to the third in our historical sequence of recordings of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. We are talking about Andrew Parrott’s recording with the Taverner Players and Choir recorded at Rosslyn Hill Chapel in 1981. It’s a record that I bought when it first came out and has been a point of reference for me ever since.
It’s a consciously academic affair in some ways. It was produced in conjunction with an Open University course ; “Seventeenth Century England: A Changing Culture”. It’s also musicologically rooted in scholarship. The album booklet even lists the provenance of the instruments used; mostly modern copies of 17th century models and we are told that the work is performed at pitch A=403. The band and chorus are realistically sized; six violins, two violas, bass violin with bass viol, archlute and harpsichord continuo. A guitar is used in some of the dance numbers. The chorus is six sopranos; some of whom do double duty as witches, the Sailor and the Spirit, four tenors and two basses.
Last night saw the first of two performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Trinity-St. Paul’s. It was a collaboration between the UoT Schola Cantorum and the Theatre of Early Music though where one starts and the other ends I’m none too sure! Before the Purcell we got a fine performance of an early solo violin piece; Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Passacaglia in G Minor played by Adrian Butterfield.
To 918 Bathurst last night to hear the Happenstancers’ latest offering Hypersuite. The concept was to take movements from Bach suites and partitas for solo instrument and combine them into sets with (mostly) contemporary music of like form. The one exception was some Telemann but we’ll come to that.
So the first set consisted of cellist Sarah Gans playing Ana Sokolovic’s vez before a brief segue brought in Katya Poplanskaya on violin for the adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata BWV 1005. It’s really interesting as, although the Sokolovic piece uses a fair amount of extended technique there’s a definite sense that they belong to the same soundworld. Both are spare and spiky and eschew anything that might conventionally be called melody.
The second set had a lot in common with it. Brad Cherwin on clarinet played Augusta R. Thomas’ d(i)agon(als) followed by the sarabande from Bach’s Partita BWV 1013 (usually played on flute). This segued into Telemann’s fantasie 8 played on English horn by Aleh Remezau. Completely different from the first set; more melodic and dance like, these three pieces also had much in common.
The second half kicked off with The allemande from BWV 1013 on clarinet, followed by Sokolovic’s cinq danze, II on violin and the gigue from from BWV 1008 on cello. Here there is more contrast with the Sokolovic exploring a more complex sound world though still with clear affinities to the Bach. This was followed by Elliott Carter’s a 6 letter letter on English horn. It’s a quite long and complex piece which clearly places serious physical demands on the player. Continue reading
operaramblings 