Wednesday evening’s Shuffle Hour concert at Toronto Summer Music was given by mezzo Alex Hetherington and pianist Vlad Soloviev in Heliconian Hall and carried the curious moniker The Tortured Poets Department. It kicked off with the letter aria from Massenet’s Werther and let’s face it if anyone deserves torturing it’s some combination of Werther himself and Goethe for inventing him (and possibly Massenet for prolonging the life of a character who might otherwise have fallen into obscurity).  Whatever, Alex gave a fine, impassioned reading of the aria which set the stage well for what was to follow.

And that was one of the most dramatic accounts of Schumann’s Dichterliebe that I have ever heard.  Both the singing and the pianism were strongly declamatory though not to an extent that distorted words or music.  It was exciting and very well done.  I’m just not sure I’d wan to hear these songs that way all the time.  There’s a lyricism there too and I’m not sure one can have both at the same time.  Still, let me reiterate it was a valid interpretation that worked well on its own terms.

The concluding piece was Jocelyn Morlock’s Amore.  It’s a playful setting of a couple of short Latin lines[1] with syllables pulled all over the place.  In it’s way it’s both a summary and an antidote to Dichterliebe.  Clever programming!

And there were surtitles.. yay, yay and thrice yay!

fn1: Amore nihil molius… Amore nihil violentius