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Volume 28 Issue 1 | September 20 - November 8, 2022

Our 28th season in print! “And Now, Back to Live Action”; a symphonic-sized listings section, compared to last season; clubs “On the move” ; FuturesStops Festival and Nuit Blanche; “Pianistic high-wire acts”; Season announcements include full-sized choral works like Mendelssohn’s Elijah; “Icons, innovators and renegades” pulling out all the stops.

Our 28th season in print! “And Now, Back to Live Action”; a symphonic-sized listings section, compared to last season; clubs “On the move” ; FuturesStops Festival and Nuit Blanche; “Pianistic high-wire acts”; Season announcements include full-sized choral works like Mendelssohn’s Elijah; “Icons, innovators and renegades” pulling out all the stops.

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AROUND OPERA<br />

BALLYCROY<br />

and Beyond<br />

LYDIA PEROVIĆ<br />

Marek Norman<br />

DAVID COOPER<br />

Stratford: On April 29, 1875, a fire in Ballycroy,<br />

Ontario took three young lives. Several buildings<br />

went down in this probable arson, but the only<br />

human casualties were the three women trapped in<br />

their second floor room of the Small’s Hotel. Recent<br />

immigrants from Ireland, Mary Fanning, Bridget Burke<br />

and Margaret Daley had just started working in the<br />

millinery trade. They belonged to a Catholic parish in<br />

Colgan, one town over. Nothing else is known about<br />

them. Reasons for the arson, if indeed it was, remain<br />

unknown. The once vibrant all-Irish town, Ballycroy<br />

itself is now a ghost town.<br />

Something about this story deeply touched composer and writer<br />

Marek Norman who, upon coming across an article about it in a<br />

local paper, felt called to imagine and write these women’s lives.<br />

The result is Ballycroy, his two-act play with music in which the<br />

ANN BAGLEY<br />

three women come back as ghosts to recount their lives. Stratfordbased<br />

INNERChamber Ensemble with its artistic director Andrew<br />

Chung on violin and Norman conducting from the piano will perform<br />

a condensed concert version of the play on <strong>November</strong> 5 in Avondale<br />

United Church in Stratford. The piece is scored for three voices, piano,<br />

violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet<br />

and percussion. Directing the production:<br />

one of Canada’s theatre legends,<br />

Marti Maraden.<br />

Norman was kind enough to share the<br />

libretto with me and just a few pages in<br />

it became clear to me that we are in for<br />

Marti Maraden<br />

a treat. The narrative is non-linear and<br />

oneiric, reminiscent of Lincoln in the<br />

Bardo, but the three milliners are generously<br />

and sharply drawn. Various hints<br />

are dropped about potential storylines<br />

that may lead to arson. Other town characters appear through their<br />

voices, men who’ve helped them, and men fuelled by the Catholic-<br />

Protestant divide among the Irish. Little is known about the three<br />

women, but Norman has filled their shapes with life. “Their journeys<br />

were born of my imagination,” Norman told me in an email. It<br />

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<strong>20</strong>23<br />

March 19<br />

L’AMANT ANONYME<br />

by Joseph Bologne<br />

CHERUBINI<br />

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OPERAINCONCERT.COM<br />

BOLOGNE<br />

thewholenote.com <strong>September</strong> <strong>20</strong> - <strong>November</strong> 8, <strong>20</strong>22 | 23

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