Driving downtown to the concert Thursday night July 9th in Koerner Hall I drove through downpours, hearing of roads closed by local flooding. By the time I got there the weather had cleared up, an auspicious beginning: to the 2026 Toronto Summer Music Festival, and to the William Fedkenheuer era at TSM, as our new artistic director.

Fedkenheuer succeeds Jonathan Crow who led the festival for the previous nine years.

The concert was a splendid performance from Les Arts Florissant led by William Christie, that felt like a literal blessing upon the festival, Fedkenheuer and our city, a celebration of the flourishing arts.

We began with the allegorical opera that gave the ensemble its name, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Les Arts Florissants. Their staging is a mixture of modern & baroque elements, a delightfully theatrical invitation to the audience’s imagination. Christie led the chamber ensemble from the keyboard, the musicians situated upstage from the singers & dancers.

While the title of the work suggests a story of art, this is an allegory about war & peace featuring characters portraying music (Camille Chopin), poetry (Sarah Fleiss), architecture (Sydney Frodsham) & painting (Bastien Rimondi), and especially discord(Olivier Bergeron) & peace (Josipa Bilic), reminding us pointedly of the peace that Louis XIV had accomplished.

The flattery was obligatory of course, as that’s the way operas had to be written in this century. 

As usual, good is less flamboyant than evil, discord & war getting the really interesting music to give you shivers up your spine. I’m reminded of the way some mistook Satan for the hero of Paradise Lost, or the way a good villain will always steal the show.

Christie’s music direction made some interesting choices as far as the way the singers approached the most discordant moments (in other words, when discord seemed to hold the upper hand over peace), turning the singers loose to make more grotesquely disordered sounds, whereas they sounded properly angelic when singing about peace. I wonder if Charpentier ever felt sinful, given the way he seemed to do such a good job underlining human frailties, especially with Christie’s help.

After intermission came another work to celebrate music’s power, Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers (The descent of Orpheus to the underworld).

I can’t help comparing the better known opera by Gluck to this less familiar one by Charpentier.

We see the death of Eurydice (Camille Chopin) from a snake-bite, a poignant moment given added pathos by the response of the chorus around her and a stunning funeral procession, her body wrapped in a shroud and borne on the shoulders of dancers while the others grieve.

Charpentier’s take on the story has a different arc from Gluck’s. In this version of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice we meet Pluto (Kevin Arboleda-Oquendo) & his wife Proserpine (Sarah Fleiss), ruling the underworld. Proserpine persuades Pluto to have mercy, although even before that Pluto has been moved by Orpheus’s singing. While the program spoke of furies, the creatures we saw in the underworld seemed to be sad & miserable, without any ability to threaten Orpheus, and cheered up by his singing. I wonder if Charpentier’s Christian understanding of the underworld may have required sad shades being tormented in his version of hell, unlike the Elysium Gluck shows in the next century, putting the scary Furies who confront Orpheus on his arrival into a different musical number from his blessed spirits. I’m not sure whether to see that structuring as musical, dramaturgical or religious/doctrinal, but I look forward to getting better acquainted with Charpentier’s work, especially in October when Opera Atelier will be presenting their own production.

Orpheus (Richard Pittsinger) is as usual the great singer, although he doesn’t get to sing formal arias about heartbreak as in Gluck’s work. It is by far the biggest role in the opera.

Charpentier again writes expressive passages for his chorus. When Eurydice dies we hear their sadness. In addition there is music showing their overwhelming grief that was staged elaborately with powerful yet stylized illustrations of their emotions, one of the highlights of the concert for me. Christie’s ensemble of musicians and singers responded eloquently to every moment. It’s not the first time I wonder why we don’t hear more of the 17th century operas, as the drama was exquisite.

In his introductory remarks Fedkenheuer spoke of his ambitions for the festival, to make TSM a destination known world-wide for artists & audiences.

The Toronto Summer Music festival continues daily, running until August 1st. For more information click here.