As I sat listening to a dress rehearsal early this evening of George Frideric Handel’s great Italian opera from 1735, Alcina, it stuck me that we are living through a golden moment in Toronto’s operatic history. There are now so many excellent singers in our midst that it is actually possible for a group of them to sit down over coffee, decide wouldn’t it be nice to climb one of the peaks of Baroque opera — and pull it off. Fledgling Essential Opera is a gang of young Toronto-based singers with no big patron and no mandate beyond choosing works they want to sing and doing it whenever and wherever they can. Their latest project — the second and last one this season — is ... Continue reading →
Camellia Koo’s atmospheric design for Against the Grain Theatre’s Turn of the Screw. Opera director Joel Ivany and his gang of bright young things at Against the Grain Theatre walk the knife edge between the conventional and unconventional in their upcoming production of Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera, The Turn of the Screw. It opens on Thursday for a four-performance run at University of Toronto’s Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse. The fledgling company’s claim to fame is a production of La Bohème set at the Tranzac Club, one of the bumsprung, ramshackle hubs of Toronto’s fringerati. By mixing professional talent with a truly bohemian modern-day setting, Ivany & Co. showed that opera can be not only relevant but perfectly satisfying beyond the bounds of a traditional stage. ... Continue reading →
The new Coventry Cathedral sits next to the ruins of the old, destroyed by German bombs during World War II. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was premiered at the completion of the new building, 50 years ago next week. Antonin Dvorák’s setting of the Stabat Mater is to Good Friday what Giusepe Verdi’s Requiem is to the funeral Mass. Big, public, cathartic, it is an exercise in collective soul cleansing through the sheer, collective power of a couple of hundred instrumentalists and singers. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is a monumental expression of people’s collective hope that the horrors of two world wars would never be repeated. The 50th anniversary of its Coventry Cathedral premiere is coming up on Wednesday. Dvorák uses the nothing-exceeds-like-excess means of the ... Continue reading →
Warning: Stop here if you don’t like knowing what’s behind the lip gloss and tooth whitener. A big thanks to Nico Muhly for sharing this peek down the hard-working larynxes of Kaya, an Australian pop vocal quartet, made by Buffalo-based filmmaker John Fink: Like this:Be the first to like this post. Posted in Music, Neat stuff, On the Web, Science, Singer, Voice Tagged Glottal Opera, John Fink, Kaya, larynx, Video May·24 Continue reading →
Last week's Spring for Music festival set out to celebrate the most creative and original programming among North American orchestras. Along the way, the festival, which WQXR broadcast live, featured several rare and neglected pieces. Here are four new recordings that should deliver yet more discoveries. If you like: Dmitri Shostakovich, Serge Prokofiev Then try this composer instead: The Polish-born Soviet composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) is often described as one of the best-kept secrets of 20th-century Russian music. Weinberg led an exceptionally eventful life, first being the only member of his immediate family to survive the Nazi Holocaust, and then landing on Stalin’s bad side for a period in the 1950s. Highly prolific (he wrote 22 symphonies), his work has come into greater light since ... Continue reading →
Alisa Weilerstein performs Shostakovich with the Toronto Symphony on Thursday and Saturday. Alisa Weilerstein doesn’t play the cello; she makes love to it. It seems like a silly, clichéd way to describe an impassioned classical musician, but the 30-year-old American is proof why clichés come to be. The cellist is back in Toronto this week, to perform two concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra — a 2 p.m. matinée on Thursday and a repeat performance at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday. Her contribution to the programme is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. The conductor is Dane Thomas Dausgaard, promising potent musicmaking at Roy Thomson Hall. Weilerstein has been performing the Shostakovich concerto since her late teens, which means she already has years of experience and ... Continue reading →
Workshop Performance June 11th & 12th, 2012 at 8pm Ernest Balmer Studio at Tapestry Tickets: $25 (416) 537-6066 ext. 243 After a thrilling workshop presentation of the first Act of Oksana G. last winter, is the next stage of this electrifying new opera by the Governor General’s Award winning playwright, Colleen Murphy and SOCAN award-winning composer, Aaron Gervais. Click here to purchase tickets Workshop Performance June 11th & 12th, 2012 at 8pm Ernest Balmer Studio at Tapestry Tickets: $25 (416) 537-6066 ext. 243 After a thrilling workshop presentation of the first Act of Oksana G. last winter, is the next stage of this electrifying new opera by the Governor General’s Award winning playwright, Colleen Murphy and SOCAN award-winning composer, Aaron Gervais. On January 27 and ... Continue reading →
