This year's TOR

I'm singing in the Toronto Opera Repertoire chorus again this year.  We're putting on Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMANN and Rossini's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. (There are several really small male soloist roles in HOFFMANN, more acting than singing, and I might be cast in one!)

We usually do one opera with a big role for the chorus and one where their presence is smaller, and HOFFMANN definitely has the bigger chorus part of the two.  So we've been concentrating on that one so far; we'll only be starting BARBER next week.  I'm actually a bit behind so far this year:  I was in London during the first rehearsal, and had to leave the second early because I was still dealing with jet lag. (I'd flown home the day before.)

Tonight we had an acting class for choristers, which is always fun. David Roche and Tita Griffin preside. (Giovanni Menardi, who'd just had a hip operation, came in on crutches to give us a class on pronouncing Italian and French.) They talked about the HOFFMANN plot, and we ended up splitting into sub-groups and making conversation as characters in a scene from the opera.

I was looking up the story behind HOFFMANN on Wikipedia, and it's pretty interesting.  He was an actual romantic writer living in Germany early in the nineteenth century, and he wrote himself into  his stories as the main character. (He also wrote the stories that the ballets NUTCRACKER and COPPELIA were based on, and some early science fiction.) I've seen it performed, both in the 1950 British movie directed by Powell & Pressburger and in the recent Met production that was broadcast in cinemas.  Offenbach died before its premiere and there are several different versions, but the muse was really smiling on him during his last work!