Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot is a sort of companion piece to Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. Indeed, the idea was suggested to the composer by the librettist at the after party for the premier of Eight Songs, or at least so Maxwell Davies claims in the interview that follows the performance on the recording.
The idea comes from the life of a reclusive lady in Sydney who may have been the model for Dicken’s Miss Haversham. She’s a bit nuts but in an altogether less depressing way than king George. It’s another theatrical performance piece (apparently repeating many of the gestures from Eight Songs but, obviously that’s not apparent in an audio recording). Once again the piece is scored for.vocalist, this time a mezzo, and small ensemble. The degree of extended vocal technique required here is less than in the earlier piece, maybe on a par with something like Pierrot :Lunaire. The ensemble though is supplemented with all kinds of toys including four metronomes, a football rattle and a whistle.
Fetter and Air was originally created by composer Dominick DiOrio and sound engineer Justin “JG” Geller as an eight channel public soundscape/display in Philadelphia. It’s now been remixed to stereo and released as a CD. It’s a kind of COVID memorial. Members of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia separately recorded their reactions to the pandemic and DiOrio set some of it to music. The result was 562 audio files which were then mixed down into a single twenty-seven minute track.
As you probably now theatres are closed in Ontario until the end of January and, it seems, organisations are taking a very cautious approach to February. It’s not very heroic but given the flakiness of the Ontario government it’s understandable. The COC’s Madama Butterfly is to be an on-line stream and a whole raft of performances at the RCM are postponed or rescheduled. The only confirmed shows of vocal interest at this point that I’m aware of in February are the Stewart Goodyear concert on February 9th and the Opera Atelier All is Love on February 19th and 20th; both at Koerner.
It’s July 29th 1951; the opening night of the first Bayreuth Festival since the end of the war. Noted anti-Nazi Wilhelm Furtwängler will conduct the Festival Orchestra in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from the Festspielhaus. It will be broadcast live by Süddeutsche Rundfunk(*) and will be relayed by stations in Germany, Austria, France and Sweden. You are sitting in front of your valve radio because commercial transistor models are not yet on the market. You can’t record it to listen to later because tape reorders are almost as rare in 1951 as transistor radios.
There’s no shortage of pandemic inspired music out there but I figured I wanted something that more closely evoked the sheer madness of life in Ontario right now. So, I turned to a 1969 piece by my fellow Manc Peter Maxwell Davies. It’s his Eight Songs for a Mad King inspired by that nutty old Hanoverian George III. The genesis of the piece is quite complex. It involves a music box, once owned by the king but by 1968 in the possession of the historian Steven Runciman. Once used by the king in an attempt to teach bullfinches to sing, it provides the inspiration for the eight “tunes” that make up the Eight Songs. The libretto is largely drawn from the king’s own words and other contemporary sources.
There is news. The COC has cancelled “in person” performances of Madama Butterfly. Instead it will be “made available as a free digital presentation to current 2021/2022 COC subscription holders who are continuing to support Canadian opera through the donation, exchange, or credit of tickets.” How that works I have no idea.
So, it’s cancellation time again. Everything is off as far as “live” is concerned until at least January 26th in Ontario. That means that a whole raft of concerts at the RCM are postponed/off including Gould’s Wall and Gerry Finley. Morgan Paige-Melbourne and Eve Egoyan are going ahead as livestreams. Check the RCM website for details. The COC has suspended single ticket sales for Madama Butterfly until things become clearer. Meanwhile the rest of the world, mostly, is getting on with it. I’m told it’s called the 0 micron variant because that’s roughly the diameter of Doug Ford’s brain.
operaramblings 