Dvořák’s Rusalka seems to be a favourite for directors to give the “high concept” treatment. That’s certainly the case with Philipp Stölzl and Philipp M. Krenn’s production for Dutch National Opera recorded in Amsterdam in 2023.
The season starts to ramp up a bit…
Concerts and Opera
Ulrich Rasche’s production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, staged in the Großesfestspielhaus at the Salzburg Festival in 2025, is austere and interesting. As most people know, the libretto, based oin a play by Schiller, is not at all historically accurate and invents a relationship between Robert Dudleigh, Earl of Leicester, and Mary Stuart that never existed but turns the opera into a love triangle in which the two queens are vying for Leicester’s attention! Rasche’s production runs with this angle and what little sense of actual political events there is n the opera is pushed into the background.
Every year around this time Confluence Concerts work with a group of young artists to curate and present a concert at Heliconian Hall. This year’s took place on Thursday evening. There were twenty two pieces of music on the programme; some written or arranged by members of the group with composers ranging from Henry Purcell and Barbara Strozzi to Libby Larsen and Sting. There was classical vocal and instrumental from the baroque to yesterday, jazz, fado and genre defying pieces. I’m just going to single out a few (to me at least) highlights.
My last show of this year’s SummerWorks was perhaps the most unusual. Date of Performance; written and directed by Maryam Khalili and presented in The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni Theatre. It’s a lecture-performance documenting theatre and performance practices created inside Iranian prisons from 1954 to 2024. There is no-one on-stage; just recordings of telephone conversations and some voice overs; all in Farsi with English subtitles.
For the last five years the COC has eld a week long intensive workshop/coaching session for a select group of early career singers and collaborative pianists. The week concludes with a “Showcase” concert in the Jackman Studio which happened this year early on Saturday evening. There were ten singers and two pianists with each singer giving us one aria.
GPO Box No.211; written and directed by Carmen Lee (also responsible for lighting) and performed by Chun Shing Au (also responsible for the model/mask/paper design), is a theatre/dance piece inspired by an exchange of letters with the creators’ friend Siu Ming (a pseudonym), who was incarcerated as a political prisoner for three years following the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. It’s presented by Theatre du Poulet at A Space Gallery as part of SummerWorks.
James Harley’s Wild Fruits was inspired by two texts; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau. The five movements all involve combining extracts from the texts read by Jim Bartruff, Theresa Carson and Anne-Marie Donovan with sounds recorded in nature and, in some cases, worked over in the studio. It was originally conceived as an eight channel surround sound experience but the commercial release has been remixed for stereo and Dolby ATMOS. Obviously some of the spatialization is lost and I’d be curious to hear the ATMOS mix. As it is I’m going to write about the 48kHz/24bit stereo version which I listened to on headphones because I find that’s closer to the immersive experience than speakers.
Our Other Ogan is a one man show (almost) written and performed by Boaz Barkan. It was originally designed specifically for the old anatomy theatre at the medical school in Copenhagen. For the performance at SummerWorks we have to imagine the black box of the Incubator as an amphitheatre with busts of Galen and Hippocrates looking down at the anatomist and his subject.
Blood Brothers, written by Brianna Russell and directed by Catie Thorne, is loosely inspired by the assassination of Julius Caesar but here a similar story of conspiracy, betrayal and death is set in the UoT’s Delta Upsilon Fraternity which is also the performance space for the play.
operaramblings 