October/November 2024 containing our 30th annual presenter directory (25th under the Blue Pages name) is now available for viewing. Also first four instalments of ART OF THE ARC -- a concert curators' Q & A, with more to follow online and in print throughout the fall. Also View from Up Here parses the difference between a two lane highway and a two-way street; Choral Scene digs into singing and health; Music Theatre taps joy-fuelled offerings at London's Grand Theatre and elsewhere; In with the New looks at Letters to God; Classical and Beyond tackles a 212-listing 68 days; thirteen new recordings in our listening room and more.
ROUNDUP The Lute Legends
ROUNDUP The Lute Legends Collective, introducing their instruments at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Arts. EARLY MUSIC ROUNDUP The Butter Quartet and Lute Legends Collective “Stop the presses” is not something we have the clout to do at The WholeNote, but “Is it too late?” even at the last minute, is sometimes just as good. Which is what we did when lutenist Lucas Harris brought to our attention a fortuitous upcoming remount of a project developed for the prestigious Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale, the largest string quartet gathering in the world, and performed there to great acclaim this past January. The project in question is a collaboration between the Lute Legends Collective of which Harris is a member (an association of specialists in ancient plucked-string traditions – in this case lute/pipa/oud/sarod) and “a brilliant young Netherlandsbased period-instrument group called the Butter Quartet.” “It was years in the planning,” Harris says, “and it’s being remounted in Toronto for only a single performance – by luck there was a hole in the schedule of the Butter Quartet’s North American tour! We’re being presented on November 5 by Friends of Music at St. Thomas’s Church on their new series.” Luck indeed. Fall feast It’s a veritable banquet of Early Music around these parts. Tafelmusik: fresh off their late September all-Mozart seasonopening concerts at Koerner Hall under guest director Rachel Podger, they are back at it with two mainstage programs: Oct 18, 19, 20 (Feast for the Senses: Lalande & Rameau led by Amandine Beyer, violin); and Nov 22, 23, 24 (Bach Christmas Oratorio led by PIANO PIANO OPERA World-Class Artists, Live in Hamilton Tickets available at hcadancetheatre.com PASS PERFORMING ARTS SUNDAY SERIES 126 James Street South, Hamilton, Ontario | 905-528-4020 | @hcadancetheatre Ivars Taurins, conductor.) And in between (Oct 25 to Nov 5) the orchestra, under Podger makes a six-concert tour of South Korea. And that’s not all: Oct 5 they visit Brantford Music Club with works by Purcell, Muffat, and Bach; Oct 24, 26 and 27, those of the orchestras members not on tour in Korea will be backing Opera Atelier’s production of Acis and Galatea at the Elgin Theatre; and some of them will make a foray to the Don Wright Faculty of Music at University of Western Nov 8 and 9 for a Friday noon concert, and to work with students in the Western Early Music Studio. Royal Conservatory: The RCM has a couple of notable concerts featuring Baroque repertoire. Oct 11, Les Violons du Roy with Karina Gauvin & Marie-Nicole Lemieux offers up Handel arias and duets with Jonathan Cohen conducting. And then Nov 9 and 10 Leonidas Kavakos performs the complete Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. And there’s more: Oct 3, Trinity Bach Project’s 2024 campaign gets underway with the first of its new thematic programs for the season, titled Bach and Roses; additional performances are already scheduled for Oct 4, Nov 13, Nov 17. Oct 25, North Wind Concerts continues its fast start to the season with Pop-Up Pot-Pourri: An Evening of Eclectic Musical Performances and Conversations, followed Nov 9 by Encircling the World – Drums. Nov 10, U of T Faculty of Music has Schola Cantorum and the Theatre of Early Music presenting Historical Performance: One World United - Handel’s Dixit Dominus. Nov 17,Rezonance Baroque Ensemble’s The Galant Cello offers C. P. E. Bach, Boccherini, Dall’Abaco and other works, with guest cellist Elinor Frey added to their regular mix. And completing our dizzying ride from fall feast to holiday fare: Nov 30, London Symphonia and the Elora Singers present Handel’s Messiah; Dec 1, Magisterra Soloists present Magisterra Christmas Baroque; and Dec 7, Etobicoke Centennial Choir offers us a Baroque Noël. One more things to note Details of all of these concerts are in our daily listings; so if your fingers tire of flipping back and forth, you can generate detailed listings for everything here, and a whole lot more, by going to JUST ASK under the LISTINGS tab on our website and selecting Early/Baroque from the advanced options. Compiled by Wholenote staff OPERA ROUNDUP Opera Atelier’s triple threat mandate Opera Atelier’s website describes the company as “North America’s leading opera/ballet company dedicated to creating period productions realized as complete artistic statements – with equal attention given to music, dancing, acting, and design.” The first of two mainstage productions in their 2024/25 season lives up to the boast. Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Oct 24, 26 and 27, is a show ideally suited to showing off the “equal attention to music, dancing, and acting” aspect of how OA does things. Based on a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it’s a star-crossed-lovers tale, with a bit of a reverse twist; in this case (spoiler alert) it’s the young man, Acis, who achieves immortality by getting turned into a river after being bashed on the head with a rock. Part of the reason OA succeeds at what they do is the symbiotic way co-directors Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg bring their respective passions for drama and ballet to bear on core Baroque repertoire like this. Even more likely in this case because, of all Handel’s operatic works, this is the one where his penchant for “triple threat” showmanship is on full display. Another strength of OA as a company at this point is the number of Baroque operatic warhorses they now have in the stable, and that they have the sense not to trot them out too often. They 26 | October & November2024 thewholenote.com
Opera Atelier Co-Artistic Directors Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg and Marshall Pynkoski in Versailles. last staged Acis in 2010 – long enough ago that we will get not just a revival but a revisioning – both in Zingg’s choreography and Pynkoski’s direction. Another company strength is their enthusiasm for searching out new repertoire: operas lost in the fog of fashion or the mists of time; works that push the boundaries of of the Baroque; and repertoire that, while not opera in the strict sense, pushes their keen sense of the operatic. The company’s spring offering is the North American premiere of Marc Antoine Charpentier’s David and Jonathan a mere 356 years after its first performance – a perfect case of fog of fashion/ mist of time. It won’t be their first staging of the work, though. That was in the Royal Chapel in Versailles in 2017 – one of several successful sorties, starting with Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide the previous year, into the inner sanctum of the French Baroque. The ongoing Versailles relationship illustrates another key to OA’s resilience: deep loyalty to a core ensemble of players, supplemented by a keen instinct for how and when to bring in new blood. In this case, French tenors Antonin Rondepierre (Acis) and Blaise Rantoanina (Damon), came to OA via the Versailles relationship, and will team up with long-time OA audience favourite, soprano Meghan Lindsay, making a role debut as Galatea, and bass baritone Douglas Williams in the role of the lovesick, rockwielding cyclops, Polyphemus. Toronto City Opera (TCO) Under three different names, TCO has been around for 77 years, managing the difficult balancing act of staying true to a spirit of come-one-come-all community building while at the same time taking its art seriously enough. Giuseppe Macina saw that clearly in 1967, when he took Toronto’s oldest opera workshop, founded in 1947, and turned it into Toronto Opera Repertoire. And it is a spirit that continues to this day. Their 2024-25 season offers two mainstage productions (Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land) along with their annual Viva Voce Gala Fundraiser and the return of the Macina Voice Competition for a second year. Emerging artists are offered leading roles; and the community at large gets to participate enthusiastically as choristers in fully staged operas. “The community chorus is the heart of TCO, so I ensure there is ample chorus involvement in the operas we select,” says TCO Artistic Director Jennifer Tung. The season kicks off November 13,16, and 17 with Donizetti’s wonderfully comedic L’elisir d’amore at the Al Green Theatre at Bloor and Spadina. Tung conducts, with Ivan Estey Jovanovich at the piano, and Jessica Derventzis, directing the production. “I am thrilled to return to TCO,” Derventzis says. “L’elisir offers performers the opportunity for vocal brilliance and for stretching their acting and comedic muscles!” Copland’s The Tender Land (June 18, 21, and 22), also at the Al Green Theatre, is also an astute choice. Set on a family farm in 1930s Midwestern America, it revolves around the choices a young woman faces on the brink of graduation. “June is the perfect time to perform this work,” says Tung, “as many students are nearing graduation and facing pivotal choices in their lives.” The Macina Voice Competition showcases emerging artists competing for monetary prizes and future performance opportunities, and will be held on February 23, at Church of the Redeemer. Readers take note! Back in our listings section for the first time in many months, is a section, on page 49 titled Music Theatre Listings by Presenter. (Music Theatre by our definition is a “big tent” term encompassing opera, operettas, musicals and a fair bit of dance). So instead of replicating that list here, we encourage you to have a look at that section. Opera Roundup was compiled by David Perlman 2025 SEASON ACIS AND GALATEA Oct 24–27, 2024 Elgin Theatre On Sale Now! operaatelier.com G.F. HANDEL NEW VENUE Jeanne Lamon Hall Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre 427 Bloor St W, ALCESTE by Christoph Willibald Gluck Sunday, January 12, 2025 | 2:30 pm Suzy Smith, Music Director & Pianist LA RONDINE by Giacomo Puccini Thursday, March 20, 2025 | 8 pm Friday, March 21, 2025 | 8 pm Narmina Afandiyeva, Music Director & Pianist ROBERT LE DIABLE by Giacomo Meyerbeer Friday, April 25, 2025 | 8 pm Helen Becqué, Music Director & Pianist For ticket information: OPERAINCONCERT.COM thewholenote.com October & November2024| 27
