Here’s what’s coming up next month as best I know.
My review of Voicebox:Opera in Concert’s production of Puccini’s La Rondine at the weekend is now up at Opera Canada.
So what looks fun in March?
Sunday afternoon saw VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert’s first performance in their new home; Trinity St. Paul’s. The offering was Gluck’s Alceste in the French language 1776 Paris version. Lauren Margison sang the title role with Colin Ainsworth as Admète. Guillermo Silva-Marin directed.
Trinity St. Paul’s has advantages and (perhaps) disadvantages over the Jane Mallett. It’s significantly better acoustically but much harder to do much in the way of staging. It’s a church and it looks like one with lots of carved wood and stained glass! I’m not sure that this is a disadvantage though. Rudimentary blocking with entrances and exits for the principals and concert wear is fine with me given that in either venue full staging wasn’t/isn’t very practical. The value proposition is more around getting to hear operas live that no-one else in Toronto is likely to do. I’m fine with that. Continue reading
The Toronto Symphony’s 2024/25 season is the usual mix of mainstream symphony/concerto rep, Pops, film music, kids’ concerts etc. My sense is that it has got more “popular” since the pandemic and that therefore there’s been less that’s caught my eye. That’s my story anyway!
There are some concerts of interest to me though in the 2024/24 season though; curiously mostly in November. The four that caught my eye were the following: Continue reading
Verdi’s 1849 opera La battaglia di Legnano is loosely based on a battle that took place in 1176 between the forces of Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Lombard League; just one episode in the interminable struggle between Guelfs and Ghibellines. By Verdi’s time the battle had been appropriated by Italian nationalists (at least in northern Italy) as symbolic of the Italians struggle against the Austrian occupiers and that’s pretty much where Verdi is at.
First some additional February shows
Opera
Belle Cao
VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert opened their 50th anniversary season at the Jane Mallett Theatre with the first of three Verdi rarities. Un giorno di regno was Verdi’s second opera and it premiered at La Scala in 1840 to no great acclaim. It’s a curiously old fashioned piece for its time. Perhaps the fact that it sets a libretto written over twenty years earlier accounts for some of that. It’s very much a bel canto work. It’s sort of a comedy though it’s not actually all that funny; being largely concerned with machinations about who marries whom played around a somewhat implausible impersonation of the King of Poland by a minor French aristocrat. It’s no sillier than many Donizetti operas but perhaps by 1840 that formula was wearing rather thin. Continue reading
Here’s what I’m looking forward to in a busy November.
VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert announced their 2023/24 season. It’s quite interesting; three Verdi rarities:
And for something completely different, Alice Ho’s The Phantom Bird of Han, performed by Symphony Nova Scotia, is now available on Youtube. Definitely worth a listen!
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