My review of the Canadian premier of Rene Orth and Hannah Moscovitch’s 10 Days in a Madhouse is now published at bachtrack.com.
TL:DR It’s musically and dramatically innovative and excellent with some very strong performances.
Photo credit: Eric Forget Photography. #bachtrack
My review of Sandra Radvanovsky’s recent Puccini Heroines CD is now up at La Scena Musicale. Every “heroine” from Lauretta to Turandot!
Catalogue information: Pentatone PTC5187491
Parélios; music by Cecilia Livingston, words by Duncan McFarlane, opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Friday as part of Opera 5’s Toronto Opera Festival. It’s an intensely cerebral and very, very beautiful work but it’s unrelenting and quite dark. Basically a group of refugees; perhaps fleeing some environmental catastrophe, are on a journey to who knows where. They have survived the winter but the summer brings no real relief. It’s a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but vastly more intellectual and poetic.
My review of Thursday night’s performance at Roy Thomson Hall of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Gustavo Gimeno with soloists, the TSO and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is now up at Bachtrack. It’s Beethoven in the grand manner and very enjoyable. It’s playingg again Friday, Saturday, Sunday with a singalong livestream at Sankofa Square on Friday.
Photo credit: Alan Cabral… courtesy of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
#bachtrack
By the Word Productions premiered Franca Miraglia’s American Devotion in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre on Thursday. The playwright imagines what might have happened if Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe had invited Norman Mailer and his wife over for dinner or drinks at their Connecticut farmhouse.
In American Devotion Mailer shows up at the Millers having engineered a drinks invitation but leaving his wife behind. He has a cunning plan to use Miller’s upcoming appearance before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to their mutual advantage; Miller will be spared jail and Mailer will get the publicity his flagging career desperately needs. If Marilyn can be persuaded to cooperate.
Continue readingOpera 5 opened the Toronto Opera festival on Wednesday at Theatre Passe Muraille with a Puccini double bill; the rarely seen Suor Angelica and perennial crowd pleaser Gianni Schicchi. Both were presented fully staged in productions by Jessica Derventzis with accompaniment by a chamber ensemble (string quartet, bass, harp, piano) conducted by Evan Mitchell.
Tiger Bride; which opened at Soulpepper on Tuesday is an adaptation of one of the stories in Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber. All of the stories take traditional folk tales but twist them to give the female protagonist a great deal more agency than in the original. The Tiger’s Bride, on which Tiger Bride is based, is in its turn a version of Beauty and the Beast and the adaptation, by Frank Cox-O’Connell (who also directs), Hailey Gillis and Andrew Penner has turned it into a sort of eclectic rock musical.
Primary Trust by Eboni Booth opened at Crow’s Theatre on Friday night. The protagonist is Kenneth; a thirty eight year old African-American living in a suburb of Rochester, NY. Orphaned at ten, Kenneth has worked in the same second hand bookstore since he was eighteen and spends his leisure time drinking mai tais at Wally’s; a tiki bar. He’s accompanied by his friend Bert; who no-one else can see, who was his social worker in the first days after he was discovered with his dead mother in a kitchen cabinet and then dropped out of his life.
I’m not generally a huge fan of Broadway style musicals though when they have more than average dramatic and musical depth I can be up for it. Cabaret and Candide are favourites for example; combining fairly sophisticated music with social content. I’m also, as regular readers may have noticed, intrigued by Yiddish music and Yiddish culture generally. So, I was really quite intrigued to experience Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish which opened at the Elgin Theatre on Thursday evening.
The final concert of this year’s Toronto Bach Festival was Voices Lifted; a presentation of four of Bach’s chorale cantatas at Eastminster United. These pieces typically use the classic Lutheran chorale text sung quite simply to bookend material reworked from biblical sources into a mixture of arias, recitatives and duets. The chorale parts were sung here with two singers to each part. Accompaniment was a small period instrument ensemble anchored by Christopher Bagan on organ and conducted by John Abberger.
operaramblings 