With Toronto’s stages all but closed, an announcement including full-staged productions might come as a surprise.
Toronto’s Opera Atelier have announced two fully staged productions to be live streamed at Koerner Hall this season. In the event that theatres be allowed to reopen, Atelier subscribers will be given the opportunity to attend in-person.
“The COVID-19 crisis has acted as a creative catalyst for Opera Atelier, providing our extraordinary artists, production and administrative teams with the opportunity to explore and create new repertoire and new means of communication,” says Opera Atelier Co-Artistic Director Pynkoski. “We are truly delighted to be back, working under the health and safety guidelines as outlined by the province, to present these two ground-breaking works during our milestone 35th Anniversary Season.”
The 35th anniversary season will centre around two productions: Something Rich and Strange (October 28, 2020) and Handel’s The Resurrection (April 1, 2021). Both will include Artists of Atelier Ballet and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra led by early music maven David Fallis.
Opening the year will be Something Rich and Strange, a fully-staged production starring Soprano Measha Brueggergosman, Mireille Asselin, and Cynthia Smithers, Tenors Colin Ainsworth and Christopher Enns, Mezzo-Soprano Danielle MacMillan. The program’s namesake Rich and Strange is a combination of theatre music by Handel, Lully, Locke, and Purcell on the themes of dreams, visions and the supernatural. It will also include a composition for Brueggergosman by Edwin Huizinga, who worked with Atelier on the Angel Speaks project in 2017. The new commission will be set to text by the American author and playwright Grace Andreacchi.
Originally scheduled for April 2020, Handel’s Easter classic The Resurrection comes as promised in 2021 with Colin Ainsworth, Carla Huhtanen, Meghan Lindsay, Allyson McHardy, and Douglas Williams.
Tickets to the livestream concerts will be announced early Fall, 2020.
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