Dr. Colin Eatock, composer
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A respectful but edgy Carmen at the COC

4/22/2016

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PicturePomeroy and Margaine steam up the COC's Carmen. Photo: Michael Cooper.
The best way to summarize my own response to the Canadian Opera Company’s current production of Carmen – which I saw on Wednesday (April 20) at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre – is to say that it grew on me. Subtly, gradually and artfully, this Carmen won me over.
 
The production has many good things going for it: intelligent staging from Toronto director Joel Ivany (in his debut with the COC), and intricately realistic sets and costumes from Michael Yeargan and François St-Aubin, respectively. Strictly speaking, this Carmen is an update, placed in Cuba in the 1940s. But it’s done so smoothly and effectively that most of the opera fundamentalists in the audience – the kind of people who get their knickers in a twist about the “composer’s intentions” – probably didn’t even realize they should have felt offended.




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Soundstreams celebrates Steve Reich at 80

4/16/2016

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PictureHartenberger and Reich perform Clapping Music. Photo: Trevor Haldenby.
It’s hard to believe that the American composer Steve Reich is turning 80 this year.
 
It doesn’t seem so very long ago that he – along with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and a few others – forged a musical style that represented a clear break from the high-modernist ethos of the Post WWII-era.
 
And the audience that packed Toronto’s Massey Hall on Thursday evening was proof of Reich’s half-century presence at the forefront of the new music scene. There were old, white-haired hippies in blue jeans. There were college-aged hipsters, sporting beards and man-buns. A palpably cool vibe in the hall cut across generations.



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Opera Atelier's Lucio Silla

4/14/2016

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PictureA scene from Opera Atelier's Lucio Silla.
To say that a production by Toronto’s Opera Atelier is a beautiful thing is a little bit like saying that sea-water is salty. OA’s productions are always beautiful – and the current staging of Mozart’s Lucio Silla, which I saw on Tuesday evening at the Elgin Theatre, is no exception. However, each OA show is beautiful in its own particular way.

Silla is an “opera seria” – and as stage director Marshall Pynkoski suggested in his remarks before the curtain, the opera comes with certain built-in challenges. The piece lacks the spontaneity of later Mozart operas, and is based on rigid musical formulas: da capo arias, interspersed with swathes of recitative. Apparently, some people find opera seria boring – and Pynkoski was almost apologetic on this point.



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Piemontesi and Søndergård with the TSO

4/11/2016

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PictureAny chance this man could be the TSO's next music director?
My main reason for trekking down to Roy Thomson Hall on Friday evening was to hear Francesco Piemontesi, a pianist making his debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
 
Turning 33 this year, Piemontesi still has a youthful glow about him. He has a number of awards and prizes under his belt, and has already recorded about half a dozen CDs. But, scanning his bio, what really caught my eye was the revelation that the pianist is a protégé of Alfred Brendel – a name I will always hold synonymous with a high-minded, intellectual pianism.



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Cameron Carpenter brings his organ to Toronto

4/5/2016

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PictureCarpenter is no heard-but-not-seen organist.
Truth be told, I don’t go to a lot of organ recitals. In my experience, they can be pretty boring.

However, I did go to Cameron Carpenter’s sold-out recital at Toronto’s Koerner Hall on Friday evening. It was a lot of things – but boring certainly wasn’t one of them.
 
This 34-year-old American organist makes quite a fashion-statement, from his Mohawk haircut down to the sequins on his heels. He’s certainly no heard-but-not-seen church organist. On the contrary, in many ways, he’s cut from the same cloth as the showman-organists of yesteryear, such as Virgil Fox.



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    Eatock Daily

    I'm a composer based in Toronto – and this is my classical music blog, Eatock Daily.

    When I first started blogging, Eatock Daily was a place to re-post the articles I wrote for Toronto’s Globe and Mail and National Post newspapers, the Houston Chronicle, the Kansas City Star and other publications.

    But now I have stepped back from professional music journalism, and I'm spending more time composing.

    These days, my blog posts are infrequent, and are mostly concerned with my own music. However, I do still occasionally post comments on musical topics, including works I've discovered, enjoyed, and wish to share with others.


    – CE

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