Upcoming collaboration with Opera Erratica!





THE CLASSICAL MUSIC CONSORT and OPERA ERRATICA to collaborate with
fashion designer HEIDI ACKERMAN in Underground /Opera’s ORLANDO/LUNAIRE
an UNDERGROUND VIDEO CABARET combining OPERA, ART and FASHION.

22-28 August, 2010
At 128 Sterling Avenue

The worlds of opera and fashion are about to collide this summer with the second installment in the innovative Underground /Opera series by emerging classical music darlings The Classical Music Consort and avant garde performance company Opera Erratica. The series aims to make opera accessible to younger generations by combining classical music with a contemporary aesthetic. Always eager to push the envelope, their follow-up production to last summer’s critically acclaimed Dido and Aeneas will be a mash-up opera radically combining early and modern classical music, video projections, fashion and opera with an unlikely and raw environment.

This underground cabaret performance, entitled Orlando/Lunaire will feature costumes by rising Toronto designer Heidi Ackerman. Set to take place in an industrial shed in Toronto’s West End, this production promises to be a rare event that bridges the gap between
classical music, the avant-garde, opera and fashion. Infusing the delicate beauty of the baroque into the unsettling dissonance of the twentieth-century avant-garde, Orlando/Lunaire weaves together G.F. Handel’s opera Orlando with Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal melodrama Pierrot Lunaire. Drawing inspiration from Klaus Nomi, commedia dell’arte, butoh and drag, this new work envisions the melancholic clown Pierrot in an urban underground, haunted by the memory of his lover and his rival. In a world of ghostly projections, dim bulbs and shadows, the boundaries blur between light and dark, past and present, man and woman, lover and beloved. Sung in German and Italian, with projected translations that take on a life of their own, Orlando/Lunaire draws out an original narrative from the jarring intersection of two very different texts. It is a piece that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing.

This unusual project will take place in an unusual space: a storage shed in the Brocton Village Industrial Area, within easy walking distance from the Lansdowne subway station and the Dundas streetcar. A post-industrial speak-easy in the German cabaret tradition, this raw and gritty venue is a perfect backdrop for this piece and a unique environment in which to see opera.

This truly unique opera experience is sure to excite music lovers, fashionistas, art
stars and hipsters alike.

What: Opera Erratica and The Classical Music Consort’s
Orlando/Lunaire
Where: Storage Shed @ 128 Sterling Avenue
When: (all performances at 8pm) 22, 25, 26, 27, 28 August 2010
Admission: $35/$20 for under 30 and seniors
Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com, 1-800-838-3006
Websites: www.opera-erratica.org, www.classicalmusicconsort.org

Press Contact:
Indrit Kasapi
(647) 668-3628
press@opera-erratica.org