What the Festival is Toronto’s annual weekend of clowns, drag and puppets so it’s a bit niche. This year it took place at the relatively new arts hub Youngplace (that disused school at Shaw and Argyle) which is now surprisingly spiffy. I saw two of the four shows offered; Drag Me to the Opera, and Two.2.Mango’s Hansal and Greteel.
Continue readingThis time last year Toronto’s Diapente(1) and Montreal’s Comtessa(2) performed together at St. Thomas’ Anglican. On Saturday afternoon they were together again in the same venue for a programme of music by Guillaume de Machaut. Considering it was works by one composer the programme was really very varied.
Erin Shields’ To a Flame opened at the Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre on Friday evening. It’s a co-production of 1s1 Theatre and Nightwood Theatre directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo and it’s designed for Deaf and hearing audiences; the dialogue being in English and ASL. I had pretty mixed feelings about it. It’s brimming with ideas and invention, it’s busy, there’s loads of action and visual interest but in the final analysis it just doesn’t seem to come together or have anything terribly original to say. I have to say some of my previous experience with Erin Shields’ work has felt that way as well.
Wednesday saw the first lunchtime concert of the season in the RBA. And, of course, it was the COC’s Ensemble Studio performing. Angelo Moretti was away singing in Quebec so there were six singers and two pianists with an aria for each singer.
Wine in the Wilderness is a 1969 play by Alice Childress set in Harlem during the 1964 riots. It’s currently playing at Canadian Stage Berkeley Street in a production directed by Jordan Laffrenier (who also directed Slave Play). It’s a deceptively complex and nuanced analysis of the intersection of race, class and gender in the African-American community at a time of considerable change. The Civil Rights Movement is under way. Educational opportunities have opened up enough to allow the emergence of an aspirational African-American middle class. But this is still a deeply racist USA with police brutality a common occurrence and plenty of people left behind in an increasingly polarized African-American community.
I don’t often listen to CDs released on Australian jazz labels but I did come across tripudiis sonis variis from the Melbourne trio Hyperbaroq and was quite intrigued. It’s a set of performances of, mainly, Italian baroque music. Composers such as Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Strozzi feature but there are also a couple of earlier pieces in Latin and Galician and two English songs; one by Henry Purcell and a Robert Johnson setting of Ben Jonson.
This is not your typical HIP baroque performance. Hyperbaroq’s style is highly improvisatory and incorporates a lot of atypical instruments as well as pre-recorded electronics. The results are interesting but the dominant style seems to be a kind of cool jazz sound. This is very evident in their version of Scarlatti’s O Cessate Di Piagarmi; which features saxophone and electric guitar along with vocals. Some other tracks are rather different though. Monteverdi’s Lamento Della Ninfa gets a much more experimental feeling treatment with lots of electronics and the 13th century Galician Ay Ondas Que Eu Vim Veer makes interesting use of nature sounds and electronic effects. There’s also a weirdly boppy but rather enjoyable version of Purcell’s Music for a While. It’s pretty varied though I think I could have used more up tempo, high energy material as it mostly feels pretty relaxed.
Continue readingMy review of the COC’s revival of Verdi’s La traviata is now available at bachtrack.com.
The Deeps Have Music is a new record from mezzo Beth Taylor; a Cardiff Singer of the World finalist in 2023, and pianist Hamish Brown. It’s distinctly sea themed with songs predominantly in English with a few French and German numbers for variety.
It starts off with Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of My Lagan Love which is a rather lovely introduction to Taylor’s flexible but generally fairly dark mezzo. She is very versatile though as the next set; Hedwige Chretien’s Petits Poèmes du bord de L’Eau, demonstrates. These six short songs show that Taylor has a considerable palette of colours and moods. There’s some nice precise piano playing from Brown here too.
Continue readingPaolo Santalucia’s first production as Artistic Director of Soulpepper is a pretty bold choice. It’s Frank Wedekind’s 1891 drama Spring Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen) and it’s presented in English in Santalucia’s adaptation; not in the form of the Broadway musical adaptation which is probably better known in the anglosphere.
The Way Appears is a CD by cellist duo Leah Plave and India Gailey. It consists of seven commissioned pieces by young(ish) Canadian composers who were asked to create pieces in which the two instruments function as equal partners rather than, say, as soloist and continuo. It’s a really varied and interesting collection providing a little over forty minutes of music.
Right up front there’s an interesting contrast between Emily Kennedy’s conversational but rather busy Triptych and Adam Vincent Clarke’s Voix Lointaines which is much more elegiac with some vocalisation thrown in.
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