On February 5, Toronto’s Voicebox: Opera in Concert (OIC) made its digital debut with a fascinating double bill: The Human Voice and La Voix Humaine. This choice of material—an English-language version of Jean Cocteau’s 1928 play, paired with the 1958 Poulenc opera inspired by it—was in part, according to OIC general director Guillermo Silva Marin, in tribute to OIC founder, the late Stuart Hamilton, who first programmed these two pieces together in 1975. It also, however, makes for a perfect entry into digital pandemic programming. That both are solo pieces is ideal for working in a state of safety from infection—and also creates a great opportunity to showcase top talent and virtuosity, in this case the outstanding Chilina Kennedy and Miriam Khalil.

Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine (1928) and Francis Poulenc’s 1958 opera of the same name, inspired by the play, tell the story of a nameless woman (“She” or “Elle”) in torment at the end of a love affair, longing and waiting for a phone call from her lost lover. That phone call, after several wrong numbers, makes up the whole of the play/opera. A woman alone in her apartment, her only connection with the outside world her phone, feels like an uncanny parallel to the lives so many of us are living now, prohibited from spending time with anyone outside our “bubbles.” When you have a bubble of one, the loneliness can be unbearable. This is the case with “She” in The Human Voice, alone on her end of the phone call and doing everything to win her lover back while knowing she has lost him forever.

According to biographies of Cocteau, the actors in his company had been complaining of coming second to directorial and design concepts in his productions. Taking up the challenge,  Cocteau created this one-woman play that needs, even demands, a bare staging, so that the audience’s attention is clearly focused on the story and the virtuosity of the performer. In the OIC-streamed production, both play and opera take place in the same setting, a living space delineated by starkly white furniture arranged around the familiar confines of OIC’s Edward Jackman Studio. The setting is simple while also giving opportunity for movement and levels of action, and highlights the differences between the spoken and sung versions of the story as we watch both in the same space.

In December 2020, nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Ontario was placed under lockdown for a second time, further limiting the already restrictive measures taken to control the spread of this virus. With firm (though somewhat inconsistent) restrictions making large-scale concert performances all but impossible, arts organizations across the city faced a demanding creative challenge—one that required equally creative responses.

On February 18, 2021, Toronto-based early music presenter Tafelmusik released Il Seicento, a virtual concert recorded at Jeanne Lamon Hall, featuring innovative music by trendsetting Italian composers from the 1600s. The concert title, “Il Seicento,” is a term that refers specifically to Italian history and culture during the 17th century, marking the end of the Renaissance movement in Italy and the beginning of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque era. While many of these names will be unfamiliar to all but connoisseurs, a few, such as Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger and Domenico Gabrielli, are recognizable as significant figures who straddled the Renaissance and Baroque eras, ushering in the new Baroque style and paving a way for the later generation, which included such household names as Corelli and Vivaldi.

Described by Tafelmusik music director Elisa Citterio as “a contrast between light and dark” inspired by the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s paintings, Il Seicento strives to bring light into a world that is currently shrouded in darkness, and it is strikingly successful in this regard. Indeed, with over a dozen individual works on the program, there are too many sublime moments to describe in such a brief review, but a few particularly remarkable instances deserve special mention.

I still remember my first Messiah: seated in the rather uncomfortable pews at St. Paul’s Basilica in Toronto, gazing up at the church’s ceiling instead of following along with the text in the program, and only drifting back into attentiveness for “All we like sheep have gone astray,” the lyrics of which I found most amusing at age eight. My appreciation for long-form classical music and my attention span have both, thankfully, matured since then, such that I can more properly enjoy and be challenged by a work such as Soundstreams’ Electric Messiah: a lively, free-spirited adaptation of Handel’s oratorio, performed with unbounded joy and more than a few electronics.

The Toronto-based music group Soundstreams usually produces Electric Messiah as a cabaret-style event at the Drake Underground, bringing together a vocal quartet with instrumentalists both classical and modern to rethink the melodies of Handel’s original. This year, Electric Messiah has moved online, taking the form of an hour-long music video paying homage not only to Handel’s timeless work, but also to the city of Toronto and its own artists. The YouTube premiere on Thursday, December 17 was no lagging live-streamed event: Electric Messiah is a highly-polished affair, a delight to both eye and ear, and available for multiple rewatches until the end of December 2020. 

This year’s X Avant festival at the Music Gallery, now in its 15th year, was of a different sort. Stretched over three weeks, and by necessity entirely streamed online, this year’s edition was curated by Music Gallery Artistic Associates Pratishtha Kohli and Olivia Shortt. It explored the theme of Transmissions—how artistic knowledge and creative vision are passed along to the audience and from one generation to the next. On October 15, the Aga Khan Museum, in collaboration with X Avant, presented the online release of music/spoken word/poetry duo Kaie Kellough and Jason Sharp's new work UBGNLSWRE, recorded on-site in the museum space. 

Sharp is a saxophonist, composer and electronic artist, while Kellough brings his work in the literary world as a poet and fiction writer into his collaboration with Sharp. The third voice in the collaboration was Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, who created visual projections by combining different typesettings of words and phrases from Kellough’s text with a wide assortment of images.

The text appeared as various words and phrases that were broken-up and reshaped in a vast array of different fonts, colours and sizes. In a pre-concert online interview with the Music Gallery's David Dacks, Kellough stated that these projections can be read or not read and can be seen as a way to broaden the conversation.