Haunted secrets and brutal insights beyond the Four Seasons Centre. Shattering madness on the COC mainstage.
Troubling programming in a troubled year.
The Turn of the Screw
Diving deep into a churning vortex of trauma and distress, Toronto’s intrepid Opera 5 — tragically one of the last indie companies still theatrically active on the notably dimmed local post pandemic opera scene — movingly, eloquently redefined composer Benjamin Britten’s harrowing portrait of fear and the unknown with great flair and sensitivity. Vividly recalling all but forgotten rituals and beliefs rooted in historically referenced antique folk traditions, director Amanda Smith partnered by a first-rate troupe of singers and creatives compellingly de-demonized librettist Myfanwy Piper’s ambiguous gothic tale, rendering Victorian ghost story as mortal psycho-social combat, a pair of impressionable childhood souls the prize. Shimmering, uplifted, more than occasionally rhapsodic, an exceptionally flexible 13-player ensemble, led by resident music director Evan Mitchell, proved an added source of spine-chilling thrills. “The ceremony of innocence” illuminated, darkness and the paranormal eerily intact.
Angel’s Bone
Searing, relentlessly intense, Angel’s Bone, a blistering 90-minute chamber opera via West Coast-based re:Naissance Opera and Sound the Alarm: Music/Theatre in collaboration with Toronto’s now sadly dormant Loose Tea Music Theatre, startled and stunned, a jarring allegorical journey to the monstrous centre of human trafficking and enslavement. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music, original score by Shanghai-born Du Yun, libretto by Against the Grain Theatre’s newly appointed ongoing artistic director, Royce Vavrek, the bitter, highly venturesome Harbourfront offering resonated deep in the emotions. Two beautiful young angels fallen to earth, captured, ruthlessly shorn of their wings, pitilessly sexually exploited, being and metaphor graphically intertwined. Punk rock; opera, bel canto to Wagner; electronica; show tunes; Eastern figures, Romantic era motifs — contrasting musical genres and styles swarmed and swirled in an insistent expression of sinewy atonality, orchestra and voices twisting in pain, singer-actors tearing at our humanity. A hugely disquieting undertaking, angry, savage, heartbreaking.
Medea
Singing with blazing passion, a ferocious sense of explosive theatricality underscoring her every phrase and gesture, world soprano Sondra Radvanovsly made history at the FSC, launching the Canadian Opera Company’s 2023/24 curtain closer on a scorching high note with a single, one and only performance, so towering, so timeless, so supreme in its command of character and scena there could only ever be a thereafter. A co-production of The Metropolitan Opera, Greek National Opera, COC and Lyric Opera of Chicago, director Sir David McVicar’s dazzling, excruciatingly tragic rendering of late 18th century composer Luigi Cherubini’s myth made mortal utterly overwhelmed — an unsettling colossal mirrored panorama of a desperate, closed society in turmoil. A time of looming death and destruction. Echoes of the Revolution. Skewed reason severing sanity from mercy. To witness Radvanovsky’s soaring, supercharged Medea, however limited the opportunity, was to experience greatness of generational proportions.