Beautiful Feet

Baritone Peter McGillivray in rehearsal for Dark Star Requiem . Photo by Brian Mosoff. Dark Star Requiem premiered at Luminato Friday night to an audience among whom you could hear a pin drop. This oratorio cum opera cum requiem was definitely dramatic, and most of that was accomplished through the libretto by Jill Battson and by the visual text projections. I disagree with the Star 's John Terauds who wrote Saturday that it 'lacks visceral punch': I think this is where the connection lay. While the choice of words projected was very effective--such as long lists of HIV-related drugs and a real-time measurement of AIDS-related deaths every 14 seconds--some of the images were a bit long in presentation or short on the quick changes we are accustomed to in present media. The movements themselves were all that were needed to hold our thoughtful reflections. While Koerner Hall is undoubtedly gorgeous--subdued, organic--I felt this important piece deserved a more appropriate v...

This is the big weekend for Tapestry -- the world premiere of Dark Star Requiem ! Text by Jill Battson, interviewed below. For more information go to Tapestry's site . Looking forward to this landmark piece!

Eucharist by Anne Wetzel

photo credit: Edie Steiner This week I interviewed Jill Battson, librettist for the new piece Dark Star Requiem , a world première from Tapestry New Opera & Luminato, the Toronto Festival of Arts & Creativity. It premières on June 11 & 12, 2010 at 8pm at The Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall. Tapestry describes it as ‘a dramatic oratorio on the history of HIV-AIDS in North America and Africa. In this marriage of content and form, poet Jill Battson and composer Andrew Staniland trace the twenty-five year history of AIDS from its origins to the present day. This evocative, poetic concert work interlaces such topics as ecology, myth, politics, and family. While this text includes fragments from the Latin Mass for the Dead, the overall perspective is humanistic rather than religious.’ Being a linguist, I looked forward to having a conversation with someone who loves the texture of language. We ended up discussing the production, the subject matter and opera in general. Ji...

"Nobody can commit photography alone" ~ Marshall McLuhan

.....in the New York Times, that is: click here to read it.