Volume 27 Issue 4 - February 2022
Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.
Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.
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BACK IN<br />
FOCUS<br />
Worth weighing in on<br />
Previously covered in<br />
The WholeNote,<br />
and topical again<br />
Compiled and edited by David Perlman<br />
The renewed Joseph Burr Tyrrell Park<br />
Joseph Burr Tyrrell has his own Canadian Heritage minute (or,<br />
spoiler alert, just google “Albertosaurus” to find him doing what<br />
he loved best.) He also has at least one school and a Toronto park,<br />
on Brunswick Avenue, named after him. Well, more like a parkette<br />
aspiring to be a park, actually. One of a dozen or so “don’t blink<br />
or you’ll-miss-it” strips of green along the Line 2 subway right-ofway,<br />
between the backs of the north-side Bloor St. buildings, and the<br />
adjacent neighbourhoods (in this case the Annex).<br />
For a parkette, aspiring to parkhood is a good thing, by the way. The<br />
city is dotted with gems of the genre: right-sized, community-defined,<br />
and neighbourhood-enhancing – healthy common ground. Typically,<br />
at some point enough neighbours are enthusiastic enough about park<br />
revitalization for the city to get involved, and city and neighbourhood<br />
stakeholders thrash out a plan for renewal. As reported by Joshua<br />
Chong, (Toronto Star, January 24), the renewed Joseph Burr Tyrrell<br />
Park, unveiled in December, included in its new and improved play<br />
area, wonder of wonders, an octave set of colour-coded tubular bells,<br />
with beautifully satisfying hammer handles for any neighbourhood<br />
child wanting to whale away at the bells. Musical pennies from heaven!<br />
Until “one neighbour complained,” and the bells were gone within<br />
days. ‘Right idea but wrong location” tends to carry a lot of weight<br />
when rate-payers (a.k.a. voters) get irate.<br />
Richard Marsella, executive director of<br />
Regent Park Music School, wrote a wideranging<br />
March 2021 WholeNote article on<br />
the whole idea of “Musical Playgrounds,<br />
Virtual and Real”, and how and where<br />
to implement them. “With community<br />
music models out there such as Luke<br />
Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours project<br />
(which has seen over 2,000 street pianos One of the pianos from the<br />
installed in 65 cities) and others that<br />
Play Me, I’m Yours project<br />
allow public access to musical experience, the notion of noise in a<br />
public space cannot simply be ignored”, he acknowledges.<br />
“[But]” he continues, “on this particular topic, I have always<br />
supported the concept of choosing, even helping shape, the noise<br />
and sonic landscape of one’s community. I can think of a lot less<br />
constructive soundscapes in a city or neighbourhood than a<br />
musical playground.”<br />
Amen to that.<br />
Tale of Two<br />
Butterflies<br />
It was shaping up to be an<br />
intriguing study in contrasts.<br />
On the one hand was the<br />
Canadian Opera Company’s<br />
Madama Butterfly scheduled<br />
to run from <strong>February</strong> 4 to<br />
26, to be conducted by rising<br />
Canadian conductor Keri-<br />
Lynn Wilson, and featuring<br />
the COC directing debut of<br />
Aria Umezawa, co-founder of<br />
Toronto-based, experimental<br />
Amplified Opera. With lots<br />
of mutterings all round about<br />
the COC resorting to warhorse<br />
repertoire for their<br />
safety-first relaunch, and<br />
Aria Umezawa<br />
amid more general rumblings<br />
about the outdated premises of the opera itself, it was going to<br />
be very interesting to see what kind of contemporary rabbits the<br />
artistic team was going to be able to pull out of the hat. Outright<br />
cancellation of the run unfortunately means we won’t get to find<br />
out first hand.<br />
The COC cancellation is all the more disappointing because<br />
<strong>February</strong> 11, a week into the run, their Butterfly was on an<br />
eagerly anticipated collision course with a Confluence Concerts<br />
online-only presentation titled Butterfly Project: The Ballad of<br />
Chō-Chō San, described as a “meditation on the ongoing controversies<br />
surrounding Puccini’s Madama Butterfly [and] the problematic<br />
nature of this opera in today’s environment of growing<br />
cultural awareness.” The presentation features Teiya Kasahara, who<br />
describes themself as “a queer, trans/non-binary, multi and interdisciplinary<br />
creator-performer based in Tkarón:to.” Most interesting<br />
in this context, perhaps, Kasahara is co-founder, with Aria<br />
Umezawa, of Amplified Opera. So maybe we will get some hints<br />
after all, in the Confluence show, regarding the trajectory the<br />
COC’s cancelled Butterfly was on. So I’d say double underline<br />
Confluence’s <strong>February</strong> 11 show, rather than crossing it off your list.<br />
And, before that, for some interesting insights into what<br />
motivates Amplified Opera and its founders, take a look at Sara<br />
Constant’s “Deep and Slow Thought: Amplified Opera’s artistfirst<br />
mandate” in the July 2020 WholeNote.<br />
Teiya Kasahara<br />
62 | <strong>February</strong> <strong>2022</strong> thewholenote.com