AMPLIFY 1.0 from Toronto-based Amplified Opera was a series of three shows on aspects of “toxicity” in opera. There were three performances, with two of the three shows performed at each. The venue was Jeffrey Gibson’s installation I AM YOUR RELATIVE at the Museum of...
Songbook XI on the evening of Mar. 11 marked Toronto-based Tapestry Opera’s first performance in front of a live audience since Jacqueline in January 2020. It was the usual Songbook format. Fifteen singers, rather remarkably including two countertenors, and three...
Ana Sokolović’s Svadba was premiered by (now defunct) Queen of Puddings Music Theatre in Toronto in 2011. It then toured various European and US cities and has been revived subsequently in cities as far apart as Montreal and Perm, Russia. It might just be the most...
Director Tim Albery has a track record of staging shows built around song. One thinks of Last Days staged at Toronto’s Hart House in 2014 or, more recently, Hell’s Fury with Russell Braun as Hans Eisler. His latest in the genre is Garden of Vanished Pleasures which...
Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur has an implausible and convoluted plot and a performance history as a vehicle for superstar sopranos and tenors. As such, it might seem an odd choice for a company such as VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert (OIC) but their recently released (June...
This spring, in lieu of its usual run of a fully staged opera given four performances with different casts, UofT Opera offered “Opera in Miniature: A Festival of One Act Operas.” There were five performances over four days with one show repeated with a second cast. Of...
This piece was originally published in our Spring 2021 issue; for this and the rest of our exclusive content, peruse our subscription options. Due to the COVID pandemic there have been, for some time in Canada at least, no truly live, in-person performances, so we’ve...
Love Songs-A Saxophony is a collaboration between Tapestry Opera and New Music Concerts; a staged and filmed version of Ana Sokolović’s Love Songs for soprano and saxophone created in the Ernest Balmer Studio. The show aired on Youtube Live Nov. 28th but is it an...
The Vast Variety of Toronto The Toronto opera scene is quite large and extremely varied; from Canadian Opera Company through multiple medium sized companies to an ever-changing array of smaller companies. One might expect this to lead to an equally varied set of...
In Opera Canada‘s latest Q&A series, our arts writers across the country weigh in on how the Canadian opera industry is handling the prolonged pandemic environment. Next up: John Gilks. What are your feelings on the types of programming being offered, mostly in...
These are troubling times and Tapestry Opera’s decision to go ahead with a live stream version of its Songbook X program on Mar. 21st was a welcome diversion. Traditionally, the Songbook concert is the culmination of a week in which a group of young singers work with...
Toronto Operetta Theatre’s (TOT) The Gypsy Baron by Johann Strauss II (seen Dec. 28th) is about as silly as one might expect from a Viennese operetta of the period. It’s a tale of righted wrongs, tangled love affairs, heroism, hidden treasure and pigs. Also, hot...