Opera Atelier Tours Don Giovanni

Toronto's acclaimed Opera Atelier, will return to the U.S. to tour Mozart's Don Giovanni February 15 - March 17, 2010. This is a fully staged Commedia dell’Arte production of Mozart’s superb creation – a dark, ironic comedy which reflects the style of Mozart’s 1787 premiere. This newly designed production goes beyond Opera Atelier's first Don Giovanni, which traveled to Korea’s prestigious Seoul Arts Centre, toured eight cities in Japan, and visited the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, causing a sensation wherever performed.






                                                       

Iphigenie en Tauride



                                                                       



                                                                                                           Don Giovanni

"Opera Atelier's merging of music and dance and scenery proved to be elegantly persuasive... one went away both instructed and entertained." New York Times

The Toronto Sun hail's Opera Atelier's spring 2008 production of Mozart's Idomeneo:

"...yet another gloriously musical work from the hand of a master -- and it's given life here, not just by the artists of the Tafelmusik Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Parrott, but by an extraordinary cast who, under Pynkoski's direction, fairly electrify the tale."

"From a design point of view, Gerard Gauci scales new heights, collaborating with lighting designer Bonnie Beecher to create a set that blends trompe l'oeil and forced perspective to breath-taking effect, creating a jewel-like setting for the elegance of Margaret Lamb's costumes."

"Brueggergosman tackles the difficult role of Elettra... turning on the heat in a flaming climax that is truly breathtaking"
 

Ensemble Galilei with Neal Conan

Ensemble Galilei tours two programs with spoken word with Neal Conan, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation. A Universe of Dreams with images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and First Person: Stories From the Edge of the World and spectacular photographs from the National Geographic Society image collection. Holiday programs are also available. For more on all Ensemble Galilei's programs, including audio, click here!

I Musici de Montréal performs new scores for classic silent films, live in concert, through a collaborative project with Cinemateque Quebecoise. Now available on tour is the group's performance of the new score by Canadian composer Gabriel Thibodeau for the silent film classic The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney. The other great films available on tour by I Musici de Montréal are Metropolis, the Fall of the House of Usher, Cyranno de Bergerac, and Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, The Circus and The Gold Rush. Some of these are also enhanced by the extraordinary work of composer Thibodeau, one of the few specialists the world over, in the field of live accompaniment for silent films. He recreated the lost score for the Fall of the House of Usher, the French 1920's masterpiece based on the Edgar Allen Poe story. The cult film Metropolis, with it's larger-than-life robot heroine, is now available with the recreated Gottfried Huppertz score, heard at the 1927 Berlin premiere. The score for City Lights was written by Chaplin himself. The music for this tender and exciting film was recreated for the 1989 Chaplin Centenary performances by I Musici de Montréal. The little known masterpiece, The Circus, features Chaplin himself as the clown in love and received it's first recreated performances with live orchestra by I Musici de Montréal in Brussels and Geneva.

Palm Beach Daily News
January 29, 2005

I Musici de Montréal delivers perfect voice to 'Cyrano'
By Jeanne Tarrant

The 1923 silent movie Cyrano de Bergerac was eloquently illuminated by the music of Kurt Kuenne Wednesday night at The Society of the Four Arts.

The orchestra showed precise attention to detail without sacrificing the passionate expression needed for the score. The film was projected on a screen small enough so that the musicians could be seen, as well as heard. The woodwinds were particularly beautiful in expressing recurring love themes, with notable contributions from flutist Heather Howes.

I Musici de Montréal has a well-deserved reputation as one of the world's finest chamber orchestras and among the most important touring orchestras in Canada. Known for gutsy, passionate music-making, I Musici de Montréal presents imaginative programs that draw on repertoire spanning centuries. Under the direction of cellist Yuli Turovsky, the orchestra performs more than 100 concerts annually. To meet the demands of a wide repertoire, the group tours and records with 14-33 members.

The orchestra's precision, cohesion, brio, and distinctive sound charm audiences and critics. Fanfare magazine recently named I Musici de Montréal "one of the best chamber orchestras in North America."
Kuenne is an award-winning filmmaker and composer who began making films during childhood. He is an honors graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television (class of 1995), where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film. Kuenne has scored many of his own films, and he studied Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television at the USC School of Music. Kuenne was hired by Oscar-winning film preservationist David Shepherd to score the restored version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), which was premiered by the San Diego Symphony on May 8, 1999.

This silent version of Edmond Rostand's classic play Cyrano de Bergerac was the first cinematic adaptation of the tale. The eloquent, deeply poetic Cyrano de Bergerac is a swordsman famous for his ugliness, which is accented by an enormous nose. He adores his lovely cousin, Roxanne, but fears that his ugliness will prevent her from returning his feelings. So he uses the handsome but inarticulate Christian as a conduit for his emotions, pouring his heart out in letters signed with Christian's name. Wooed by the beauty of the words, Roxanne falls in love with the man she believes wrote the missives -- never realizing that is Cyrano whose voice has aroused her passion.

Made in 1923, Cyrano de Bergerac was the first film version of French dramatist Edmond Rostand's tragedy. Shot in one of the first hand-painted color processes, Pathecolor, Cyrano is one of the few surviving examples of this visually stunning, lyrical technique, which required three years of meticulous work applying tinting, toning, stencil coloring and hand-painting to each individual frame.


To Visit the I Musici de Montréal Website -- Click Here

 

05/09/2008 12:13:50 PM