Winners of the Eckhardt Grammatée competition, soprano Aemilia Moser and pianist Sabina Rzazade, gave a recital in Walter Hall on Tuesday at lunchtime. It was unusual! The material was all contemporary, much of it Canadian, and almost all of great difficulty. It was also divided into sets with the components of each set run without a break. Fortunately Aemilia’s program notes were excellent!
The first set started with Harry Somers’ Loon Cry, Night Call which evokes loon calling across a lake and was followed by Kaija Saariaho’s difficult and dramatic setting of one of Ariel’s speeches from The Tempest. Cecilia Livingston’s setting of Whitman’s The Dismantled Ship completed the watery theme with a piece that combined a sustained vocal line with some very sparse but intricate piano. What was obvious by the end of the first set was that this was going to be as much a dramatic performance as an art song recital.
Jason Alex Young’s Ayimihîtuwin (The Conversation) based on his grandmother’s experience at Residential School. It’s a pretty dark, atonal piece. Then came the first dip into Georges Aperghis’ Récitations. This is a set of theatrical performance pieces that mostly use nonsensical syllables enunciated in a wide variety of styles; speech, Sprechstimme, full on singing and more. This was followed by Brian Current’s Extreme Positions; another challenging piece.
Two surprisingly lyrical songs from Ana Sokolovic’s Tanzer Lieder opened the next set. The songs use Sprechstimme and are not strictly tonal so they feel a bit unsettling but seem to lie somewhere much more familiar than the works earlier in the program. But Récitation 3 is a real tour de force; it’s long with multiple theatrical instructions, performance styles and emotional states. Then it got a bit more conventional with Maria Eduarda Mendes Martin’s Claire de lune intellectuel. This is a rather beautiful, lyrical piece with recognisable melody!
Then came some pieces that provided a rather twisted take on romantic love. Isabelle Aboulker’s L’inconstante tells the story of Sidonie, whose main attributes are her blonde locks and her nakedness; treated with plenty of humour. Récitation 5, which deals with multiple unhinged states of love, demanded extreme acting and some pretty fancy coloratura. Then finally we got Aboulker’s Je t’aime which deals with extreme reaction to unrequited love.
It was a great performance all round. The music making was stellar given how difficult some of the pieces were but what elevated it was Aemilia’s use of her very evident dramatic and movement skills. Just a great way to experience music one doesn’t here very often.
The two photos, by Albert Hoang, weren’t taken yesterday but show Aemilia in a different outfit by the same designer, Solouk, that she wore yesterday. I think they really convey rather well thge mood of what we saw in the recital.
