Diapente, with guest Felix Deak on viola da gamba presented a concert of music by John Dowland and some of his contemporaries at St. Thomas’s Anglican on Tuesday evening. It was a generous selection of pieces arranged for various combinations of the musicians available; Jane Fingler (soprano), Peter Koniers (countertenor), Jonathan Stuchberry (tenor and lute), Alexander Capellazzo (tenor), Martin Gomes (bass) and, of course, Felix Deak (viola da gamba).
In 2025 the Salzburg Festival assembled a stellar cast and an exceptional orchestra for Dmitri Tcherniakov’s challenging but compelling production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. It’s a contemporary setting with all the action taking place in the confines of a bunker, which appears to be sporadically under shell fire. Pretty much all of the issues raised by having all the characters in the small space all the time are cleverly resolved to create a very tightly wrought, tense piece of theatre.
Pursue Peace; Contemporary Chamber Music by Canadian Jewish Composers is the first recording by the Jewish Music at York initiative of Toronto’s York University. It features three works by living Canadian Jewish composers; Sid Robinovitch, Noam Lemish and James Rolfe. Full review at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: New Focus Recordings FCR48
Lise Davidsen’s latest CD with Ed Gardner and the LPO features arias from five Verdi operas; Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, Don Carlo and Aida. It’s pretty good. Full review at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: Decca 4872241
Le Récital des Anges is a CD of Schubert songs orchestrated by Ian Cusson and Hector Berlioz plus the orchestral version of Ian’s Le Récital des Anges; a setting of six poems by Émile Nelligan. The full review is at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: aparté music AP446
Orlando is a touring programme which mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska and guitarist Sean Shibe brought to Koerner hall on Thursday evening. For some background on the show see my interview with Ema earlier this month. As promised it was more of an “experience” than a conventional song recital. The overarching theme, sometimes obvious, sometimes less so, was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
The Bauhaus is usually associated with architecture and industrial design but it also had a musical side. The musical archive is mostly unexplored but there’s now a project to publish and record as much as possible. The first recording to be released is Marc Blitzstein’s 1929 opera Parabola and Circula to an English libretto by George Whitsett. What’s really unusual is that all the characters are geometric shapes (or maybe concepts, since a point and a line don’t have “shape). These characters interact on a series of planes. It makes me curious to know whether composer or librettist were familiar with Edin Abbott’s Flatland though the opera is about love and philosophy rather than geometry and class (*).
Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher is a rather peculiar work. It’s scored for orchestra, adult and children’s choruses, solo singers and actors. There’s a lot of spoken word, usually accompanied by the orchestra or interleaved with singing. It’s important too, as Jeanne and her confessor, Brother Dominic, are both spoken roles. The text is a mix of French and Latin and the mood varies wildly from sombre, to grand, to liturgical, to reflective, to farcical. Each scene (there are eleven plus a prologue) is very much it’s own thing. The music is basically tonal, with some chromaticism, but it varies widely in mood to suit the needed atmosphere for each scene.
Opera Atelier’s fall offering is Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée. It’s rather curious that such a rarely performed work should have had two productions in Toronto within a few months but there you go! It’s also a work that was conceived on quite a small scale. At the time of composition Lully had a monopoly on presenting opera in theatres in Paris so Charpentier’s work was written for the Duchesse de Guise and presented in private performance.
The 2025 production of Verdi’s Nabucco recorded in the Arena di Verona is nothing if not spectacular; visually and vocally. One might ask though if it’s anything other than spectacular. Stefano Poda, who was responsible for designs and direction, makes some pretty bold claims in his Notes; “a symbolically charged reflection on power, spirituality and human identity”, “contrasting dualities: Babylonians and Hebrews, rationality and spirituality, progress and faith”, “the possibility of inner transformation and human reconciliation”. That’s a lot of freight for Nabucco to carry and I’m not sure it does but the visuals are certainly spectacular.
