The second of three concerts of the Bach cello suites prresented by Confluence Concerts and the Toronto Bach Festival is now up on Confluence’s Youtube channel. There’s an hour or so of really nice cello playing with Kieran Campbell playing the Suite no.4 and Eleanor Fry performing the Suite no.6. The most interesting segments though are hearing the musicians talk about their rather unusual instruments. Kieran was playing an early 18th century instrument that is quite a bit larger than a modern cello and has no spike at the foot. It’s strung with gut of course though two of the strings are metal wrapped. Eleanor’s instrument is a modern reproduction of a baroque five stringed cello. I had no idea such a thing existed! As with all the Confluence streams, technical quality is impeccable. Definitely worth a look.
Here are a couple more shows I missed one way or another.
As the rest of the world moves to live in-person performance Toronto is still mostly stuck in Covidland. My calendar for the month currently has two in-person shows (both courtesy of the RCM) and three streams. So:
Back to the Royal Conservatory yesterday for the first time since the plague struck. Ironically the programme, which had originally featured the Dover Quartet with Davóne Tines, had to be rearranged at less than 24 hours notice due to one of the Dovers testing positive for COVID. What we got instead was two mini concerts. In the first half the New Orford Quartet performed works by Caroline Shaw and Mendelssohn and in the second Davóne Tines, with Rachael Kerr, performed excerpts from his Recital No. 1: MASS. 
Listening to Emily D’Angelo’s new CD set me off on a search for more music by Hildur Gu∂nadóttir. This led me to Nortdic Affect; an ensemble who play contemporary music, mostly by female Iceandic composers) on baroque instruments. The older of the two albums is Clockworking, from 2015. It’s rather hypnotic. The music kind of inhabits the space between ambient sound and something more structured. Certainly the range of sounds that the musicians generate is remarkable, even when electronics aren’t involves, as they sometimes are. The 
If you follow such things you will probably have seen that the Bergen recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes won Gramophone magazine’s “Record of the Year” award. This came as no surprise as it is very, very good. My detailed review is in the Fall 2020 edition of Opera Canada. In that review, which was made using the electronic copy supplied by the distributor (16 bit, 44.1kHz stereo .wav files), I speculated that the commercial release, which is hybrid 24 bit/48kHz stereo and SACD surround, might well be “demonstration quality”. It is. I’ve now had a chance to sample the SACD version and it’s really good. There’s a really good level of detail and transparency with plenty of entirely natural sounding bass extension. That’s generally been my experience of such releases on the Chandos label and this is one of the best of them that I’ve heard. If you have gear that will play SACD you really should hear this!
operaramblings 