Beat Columns (Live Music)

Highlands Opera’s inaugural - Vanda Treiser Opera Competition

The “Highlands” in this story’s title is the Haliburton Highlands, about a two and a half hour drive north of Toronto. It is home, among many other attractions to a Sculpture Forest and the 60,000-acre Haliburton Forest & Wildlife Reserve, long associated with R. Murray Schafer’s monumental 12-part Patria “co-opera” cycle, and that endeavour’s offshoot, The Wolf Project.

It has also been home, for twenty summers, to Valerie Kuinka’s and Richard Margison’s Highlands Opera Studio, which offers a four-week advanced summer professional training program for emerging operatic artists “making the transition into the professional world,” and a Highlands Opera Community School, serving the general amateur community of Haliburton County.

This fall adds another string to the Highlands Opera Studio bow – the inaugural edition of their Vanda Treiser Opera Competition, with multiple prizes totalling $13,500. Kuinka and Margison received 86 applications. This time the two-and-a-half hour drive is in the other direction. The live event, featuring ten finalists selected by Margison and Kuinka, takes place in Toronto.

“Applications came from singers across the country as well as quite a number of Canadians who are living abroad” Kuinka says. “We had originally intended to have eight finalists, but because the level of the applicants is so high and we are only holding one live round this year, we have expanded it to ten.” That live final round takes place October 11 in Toronto, so GTA audiences need not worry about fickle fall weather.

Ten furlongs to glory: Dancer, the musical

At the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2023 a new Canadian musical playing at the Al Green Theatre sold out its entire run on the morning of the second day. Dancer: A Musical in Ten Furlongs written by Canadian musical theatre veterans Jim Betts (book & lyrics) and Marek Norman (music) is the story of Northern Dancer, the “horse nobody wanted” — the too-small, too-ungainly, too-willful thoroughbred who, in 1964, overcame doubt, injury and history to become the first Canadian-bred horse to win the Kentucky Derby and capture the heart of a nation.

I still remember the chagrin so many of us Fringe-goers felt at not getting to see this show that everyone was raving about, so when I heard that Dancer was going to make its MainStage debut in October at Toronto’s Terminal Theatre (formerly the Premiere Dance Theatre) I reached out to the creators to find out more about the show and their journey to the Fringe and beyond.

SOUNDING CULTURAL DIALOGUES

One thread running through many of this fall’s new music events is the way artists are engaging with the larger social and historical realities around them. Questions of war and peace, cultural identity, gender, ancestry and whose voices are heard emerge in programs that also cross geographical and artistic boundaries, including the formats they are presented in.

Livestream is one such format – one we became accustomed to during the pandemic, and now becoming entrenched as a way of extending geographic boundaries far beyond the location where the actual production is taking place. A couple of examples of this caught my eye.

NURTURING THE NEW

The new theatre season is about to get started in September and October with some wonderful premieres and new stages of evolving Canadian productions.

Well worth exploring, indoors and out

For this summer stroll, I’ll take you on a reader’s tour of musical events that seem well worth exploring, starting outdoors in Toronto, cycling through several festivals, and returning to Toronto for the Labour Day weekend.

Summer Music in the Garden: I’ll begin with three outdoor performances that caught my eye in Harbourfront’s Summer Music in the Garden series, once again co-curated by Gregory Oh and Rebecca Cuddy. The series runs most Thursdays and Sundays all summer, including several concerts with premieres of works commissioned by HarbourfronT for the series.

Summer’s bounty

A burgeoning spring of non-stop creation and reinvention is leading into what looks like being an equally flourishing summer season across Ontario.

New creation will be continuing at the Toronto Fringe Festival with the Alliance for Canadian Musicals taking over Theatre Passe Muraille once again for a slate of eight Canadian musicals, with at least 12 more musical and dance shows around the Fringe including CAMP! at Soulpepper from Ben Kopp and Margot Greve, the team behind last year’s hit Iris (says goodbye), and an interactive musical mystery meets scavenger hunt Many Happy Returns at Society Clubhouse. June 30-July 12. www.fringetoronto.com. More new musicals and more will follow by the Hamilton Fringe later in July https://hftco.ca/.

Lamentations - War and the music of Anna Pidgorna

May 9 is Soundstreams’ final concert of their season, titled In Terra Pax (Peace on Earth) – described as a powerful and timely reflection on war, loss and resilience, curated by Vancouver-based Ukrainian-Canadian composer, vocalist and multi-media artist, Anna Pidgorna (winner of Soundstreams’ New Voices Curator Mentorship Program).

Joyful Resistance

Changing of the guard at Echo: I have been back and forth by e-mail over the course of April, with Alan Gasser, who has been part of Toronto’s choral scene for as long as The WholeNote has been around. In fact, back in our very first season, when we were still called Pulse and not afraid of being tongue-in-cheeky, he shows up in an April 1996 cover story by “Viola Jones” toasting the birth of TaxiCabaret, a seven-member cab service which will “combine singing ability with skill at piloting a taxi around town, serenading their customers on the fly.”

Toronto Bach Festival Takes Roots In Its Surroundings

Over the years, a tried-and-true pattern has emerged (except in special anniversary years, which this one is not) for the Toronto Bach Festival under the aegis of founding artistic director oboist John Abberger. The festival takes place as close as possible to the last weekend in May without running head-to-head with the Victoria Day long weekend. This year, it runs from May 22 to May 24.

It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken “Beyond the Jukebox”

The “jukebox musical,” for those not familiar with the term, builds a story around the music of some iconic band or artist. – Abba’s music in Mamma Mia, for example. So when I first found out that a new musical, soon to receive its world premiere, was being built around the songs of iconic Canadian band The Tragically Hip, I knew I had to know more.

New Creations & Happy Returns

The musical Piaf/Dietrich is about to open in a new production at the Grand Theatre in London (Ontario). It was a hit in Europe in 2013 when it was first produced (performed in German). The original book by Daniel Große Boymann and Thomas Kahry was subsequently adapted in 2018 for Montreal’s Segal Centre by decorated Canadian playwright Erin Shields, whose new play You, Always is currently wowing audiences at Canadian Stage.