Duo Oriana consists of soprano Sinéad White and lutenist Jonathan Stuchbery. They gave a lunchtime concert in the RBA on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly most of their repertoire consists of lute songs from the 16th and 17th (and even 18th) century but they have recently branched out with the Toronto Book of Ayres which sets verse by contemporary Toronto poets. We got to hear that for the first time on Tuesday.
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.
Wednesday evening’s early evening shuffle concert at Heliconian Hall featured Karine White and Hyejin Kwon in Love Letter to Toronto. It was a compilation of opera arias, art song and more popular fare; sometimes altered a bit, evoking those things we love and don’t about Toronto. Summer nights, love and loss, wildlife and, inevitably, traffic and the TTC featured prominently. oomposers featured ranged from Mozart to Heisler and Goldrich via Puccini, Bernstein, Menotti and more. All in all, a varied and nicely constructed programme.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Karine White and I think when I last did it was in something classically operatic like Purcell. What she revealed on Wednesday, besides some very fine singing, was a really engaging stage personality. She’s just fun to watch and listen too and she has the knack of making everything sound personal. Seductive or struck dumb by love; nervous or brash, She can do it all convincingly. Hyejin’s contribution was fun too. It’s not just her top notch pianism but she played off well as Karine’s “straight woman” rather as David Eliakis did in Teiya Kasahara’s first iteration of The Queen in Me. It was a fun way to spend an hour that could only have been improved by adding raccoons.
The final concert of this year’s Toronto Bach Festival took place at Eastminster United Church yesterday afternoon. It offered two of the cantatas Bach wrote in Leipzig in 1723; Die Elenden sollen essen and Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes Each is written in two parts which, originally would have bookended a sermon (mercifully absent yesterday). Each begins with a choral setting of a biblical verse and proceeds via recits on arias on related texts. The second half of each starts with a Sinfonia and finishes with a chorale based on a Lutheran hymn.
Last night Confluence Concerts streamed their latest offering; a tribute to Henry Purcell, preceded by a pre-show interview between Larry Beckwith and Andrew Parrott. There was beautifully played instrumental music from Victoria Baroque, songs from Lawrence Williford and Lucas Harris recorded at the Elora Festival and a couple of interesting takes on If Music Be the Food of Love plus Two Daughters of this Aged Stream featuring Daniel Taylor, Rebecca Genge and Sinéad White plus instrumentalists from the UoT Faculty of Music Historical Performance Department. I was less taken with Duo Serenissima (Elizabeth Hetherington, soprano and David Mackor, theorbo). I can’t tell whether it was the recording acoustic or a diction issue but the words were pretty much unintelligible which is a big problem with Purcell!.
I’m always a bit surprised that there aren’t more sci-fi themed operas. It seems like a natural fit for the medium. I’ve seen a couple. A few years ago the UoT composer collective opera was an EM Forster based piece called The Machine Stops. There’s also Aaron Gervais’ The Harvester which I’ve seen twice in workshop and which may one day see the light. Now another has come to my attention but, alas, it’s in London, England so I wont be able to go. It sounds interesting though. It’s by Alastair White, it’s called Wear and it’s about fashion and the apocalypse.
The publicity material describes it as “A sci-fi fashion opera at the wild, impossible edges of contemporary art music: Waiting for Godot meets Lulu for the post-truth generation.”
Mark Berry (whose opinion I generally find reliable and insightful) reviewing an earlier incarnation said “spellbinding…an opera of rare imagination – and success”.
It’s getting it’s first fully staged outing next month directed by Gemma Williams. It will run for two nights at the Bridewell Theatre on the 23rd and 24th of August with special post-show events, as part of the festival ‘Opera in the City.’
If anyone can go and would like to review I’ll happily guest blog it.
Cavalli’s Il Giasone is a bit of a rarity but perhaps, like the rest of his opus, it’s getting more attention than it used to. The latest video recording of it was made at the Grand Theâte Genève in 2017. There’s a summary of the rather convoluted plot in my review of an earlier version from Vlaamse Opera. Oddly in this version Isifile’s final aria omits the weird section about her cold dead breasts.
Alban Berg’s Wozzeck seems to attract just about every possible treatment from directors other than a straightforwardly literal one. Krzysof Warlikowski’s approach, seen at Dutch National Opera in 2017, is to go back to the original story on which the Büchner play, in its turn the source for the opera, is based. Wrapped around that are several interesting ideas which I can’t fully unpack but which make for a rather creepy but compelling production. Alas, the disk package has nothing to say about the production so, interpretively, one is on one’s own.
Last night’s Whose Opera is it Anyway? from LooseTEA Theatre featured Alana Viau MCing, Natasha Fransblow on keyboards, Rachel Krehm, Michael York, Gillian Grossman and Amanda Kogan improvving and a thirteen year old kid called Alex (or possibly Alice) stealing the show. The format was the usual. Games where the audience supplies some key element e.g. a place – a launderette and designated cast members turn it into a sketch. Best of the night I think was the “breakfast food” sketch with Michael and Amanda which went from a surprisingly filthy “left over pizza” to “left over pizza backwards” to “left over pizza in the Dark Ages”, mostly in Pig Latin. There was also a very creepy “execution” sketch where Rachel gleefully cut body parts off a recumbent Michael. Do not upset this chick!
There was lots more and of course it’s very silly. That’s the point! But it’s good fun and worth a look. The next edition is at Bad Dog Theatre at 8pm on December 20th.
Yesterday we got the second recital by the song fellows of the Toronto Summer Music Festival. In the week since the first concert they have been working with mentor Soile Isokoski and it showed in the programming. There was quite a bit of Strauss and more Finnish and Swedish music than I have ever heard in such a recital. Among other things this highlighted just how difficult Strauss songs are to sing well. They are exceedingly tricky yet have to sound absolutely effortless. Three of the four sopranos on show tried. None of them succeeded completely(*). So it goes. And so to the details.
operaramblings 