operaramblings

Every year around this time Confluence Concerts work with a group of young artists to curate and present a concert at Heliconian Hall. This year’s took place on Thursday evening. There were twenty two pieces of music on the programme; some written or arranged by members of the group with composers ranging from Henry Purcell and Barbara Strozzi to Libby Larsen and Sting. There...

My last show of this year’s SummerWorks was perhaps the most unusual. Date of Performance; written and directed by Maryam Khalili and presented in The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni Theatre. It’s a lecture-performance documenting theatre and performance practices created inside Iranian prisons from 1954 to 2024. There is no-one on-stage; just recordings of telephone co...

For the last five years the COC has eld a week long intensive workshop/coaching session for a select group of early career singers and collaborative pianists. The week concludes with a “Showcase” concert in the Jackman Studio which happened this year early on Saturday evening. There were ten singers and two pianists with each singer giving us one aria.

GPO Box No.211; written and directed by Carmen Lee (also responsible for lighting) and performed by Chun Shing Au (also responsible for the model/mask/paper design), is a theatre/dance piece inspired by an exchange of letters with the creators’ friend Siu Ming (a pseudonym), who was incarcerated as a political prisoner for three years following the 2019 pro-democracy...

James Harley’s Wild Fruits was inspired by two texts; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau.  The five movements all involve combining extracts from the texts read by Jim Bartruff, Theresa Carson and Anne-Marie Donovan with sounds recorded in nature and, in some cases, worked over in the studio.  It was orig...