Volume 8 Issue 6 - March 2003

BEHEDKITE Sunday, Mmh

BEHEDKITE Sunday, Mmh 30, 1003 - 7:00 PM Luuu WHITING - Music Director ENs£MBL£ TAYP hen featuring CArHUIHE Tm, Sqprm hwuo haHKo, Tenor . RouND fo, Baritone Trinity Preibyterian Church zm Bayview Amue (One block south of the 401) Tickets IZO and m Call 416 763-1066 or email info@tryptych.org lRYPlYCH Canada's Passionate Advocate of the Vocal Arts Announces: The Boqs from Sqracuse {sUMMER MUSIC THEATRE WORKSHOP) Der Correqidor by Hugo Wolf foPERA IH COHCERT) ·Tom Thumb the Great (A HEW OPERA BY GERALD 8ER6) The ffierrq Wives of Windsor . (WIHTER WORKSHOP PRODUCTIOH) Das Rheinyold (OPERA IH CONCERT) PtEASE CALL ~16 763-5066 OR EMAll INfO@TRYPTY!H.ORG TO BOOK AH AUDITl9H SPOT~IGHT MUSIC THEATRE by Sarah B. Hood Carnival Rhythm to Cannibalism What a mixed bag of music theatre offerings! Perhaps appropriately for a month whose personality runs the gamut from lion to lamb, March offers ,us Victorian melodrama, Daliesque surrealism, madness, badness and bacchanal. m;:ike for ;:in THIS BARBER'S NOT FROM SEVILLE Perhaps the ·biggest story of the month is the CanStage production of Stephen Sondheim's macabre and ' gruesomely funny musical Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It's taken just about 20 years for this Broadway · classic to make its way from New York to a professional Toronto stage, and some might say that it's been a few years too long. Based on a popular Victorian urban· legend, Sweeney Todd tells of the wicked barber who chops his customers up and sells them.as pies (the irony being, of course, that London's citizens find no other comestibles quite so tasty and good.) With a sophisticated, dissonant score arid wicke'

dance (0 a couple) begins at 7 p.m. Fornioredetails, call 416-531- 7778. JOB'S STILL HOPPING It's still not too late to catch the beat of Job: The Hip-Hop Musical, running to March 9 at Tarragon Extra Space. The production is being works to Harbourfront from England, Japan, Denmark, Cuba, Australia and Germany, including Shuji Terayama's operetta Educating Mad Persons, presented by Japan's Ryuzanji & Company. For more information, call 416-583-4339 or visit www .madnessandarts.com. touted as an outrageous departure . SOUTH ASIAN SATURATION from the norm, but really it's just The 6th Kalanidhi International smart, funny theatre. In fact Jerome Dance Festival runs from March 5 Saibil, one-half of Job's writing/ to 9 at the du Maurier Theatre performing duo, ~s it as belonging Centre at Harbourfront Centre. The within the same framework as the annual event is a unique opportunity musical comedy or Eli7.abethan verse for immersion into the world of drama. "It used to be cool to rhyme classical Indian dance, and this year's on stage, and then it went out of version encompasses 16 hours of fashion, and we're doing it again," public performances and 14 hours he says. He also compares it to Baz of workshops, demonstrations and Luhrmann's Moulin R,ouge, where, discussions. More than 80 artists - says Saibil, "the focus is not on the including Novi,t Bhattacharya, narrativebutonthenewwayoftelling Natasha Bakht, Lata Pada and it." PERFECT FOR MARCH HARES If the theme of madness strikes you as an odd one for an arts festival, remember how many different types of maladies fall under the category, and how many artists have been afflicted with them. From March 21 to 30 the Madness and Arts Z003 World Festival brings international · Menaka Thakkar - showcase four different traditional dance styles (sorry, no Bollywood dancing, though!) For further information call Sudha Khandwani at 416-229-0369 or visit www .kalanidhifinearts.org. Watch for Sarah B. Hood's upcoming book Toronto: The Unknown City, cowritten with Howard Akler, to be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2003. OPERA DVD WATCH: "As different as different~ be" sums up the two worthy DVD versions of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Taken together, Petr Weigl's classic film of this seminal Russian work, and the inaugural Onegin for the European Union Opera in 1998, provide a crash course in contrasting philosophies of representing opera on screen. Each unfolds under the baton of a great opera conductor: Georg Solti in the Universal-Decca's typically impxcable rema&ering ofWeigl's 1988 film; Gennadi Rozhdestvensky in the case ofKultur's EUO DVD. by Philip Ehrensaft Two Winning Onegins mother and nurse respectively sing contrasting visions oflove, excises the opera's base.' Instead, we get a cinematically supexb silent shot of the Russian countryside, with a procession of singing peasants-more Mussorgsky than Tchaiko~sky. RozHDESrVENSKY GIVES us Onegin au complet, 149 minutes compared to Weigl's 119, withfilmingofthis live Baden-Baden production handled by Derek Bailey, ore of thebest translators of stage into screen. The pan-European cast is first-rate, though sometimes the singers don't quite fit their characters: WEIGL's ONEGIN was masterfully filmed Ireke Vlogtman' s Madame Larina, for on location - one of the all-time lush example_. is awfully young. But with silver screen representations of opera. singing like this, so what. Attractive Czech actors lip-sync, more The Euro-staging of this Onegin smoothly than usual, sound tracks by · goes right back tO Wieland Wagner's the not-so-svelte singers on Solti's abstractsymbolism. Afewcharacters landmark recording for Decca. Alas, are modem, the rest in traditional garb. Weigl has the chutzpah to excise one- (At least we don't get motorcycle fifth of Tchaikovsky's score in order jackets.)Thesymbolistscererydoesn't to get things down to feature length. overly distract from fire performances In the hands of such a fine director and Nikolaus Lehnhoff's tasteful and whose love foropera is palpable, this engaging direction of the singers. Such works better than one might expect. staging inaugurating the EUO with a But still: cutting out Scene One of Act newly composed work ratb,er than just One, where the young sisters Tatyana being clever with a classic, would be and Olga and their older-but-wiser ·even more impressive. • (]?ff~ TORONTO 2003-04 SEASON + CHAMBER MUSIC DOWNTOWN QUARTETS Oct. 16 Nov. 6 Nov. 20 Jan. 15 Feb. 5 Mar. 18 Apr. 1 Apr. 15 PIANO Oct. 14 Nov. 25 De·c. 9 Jan. 20 Mar. 2 THURSDAYS Kodaly Quartet Brentano Quartet · Zehetmair Quartet St. Lawrence Quartet Berlin Philharmonic Quartet Vogler Quartet . with pianist Angela Cheng Petersc:n Quartet Tokyo Quartet Richard Goode Claire-Marie LeGuay Marc-Andre Hamelin Duo Turgeon Simon Trpceski TUESDAYS ENSEMBLES-IN-RESIDENCE TUESDAYS Oct. 21 Music TORONTO Chamber Society Dec. 2 G1yphon Trio Feb. 17 Music TORONTO Chamber Society Mar. 23 Gryphon Trio DISCOVERY Jan. 29 Feb. 12 Mar. 11 THURSDAYS. Barbara Hannigan, soprano Lara St. John, violinist Berenika Zakrzewski, pianist CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS Nov. 6 Brentano String Ql!ar!et Jan. 20 Duo Turgeon . Jan. 29 Barbara Hannigan, doprano Mar. 23 , G1yphon Trio \ J AFFORDABLE + ACCESSIBLE + INTIMATE + EXHILARATING GREAT CLASSICAL MUSIC IN A PERFECT SMALL CONCERT HALL DOWNTOWN SUBSCRIPTIONS FROM March 1 - April 7 2003 www.thewholenote.com 31