Stories Out of Cherry Stems is a recording of four works for soprano and various accompaniments written by American composer Peter Dayton for soprano Katie Procell. There four works are:
- Entwine Our Tongues: Sapphic Fragments. The texts are five fragments of works by Sappho reworked in English by Jordi Alonso. The accompaniment is woodwinds; oboes and clarinets.
- Si Solamente sets three rather dark texts by Pablo Neruda (in Spanish) wth solo cello as accompaniment.
- Lost Daughter: Songs on the Myth of Persephone sets five varied texts, including Oscar Wilde and Tennyson, on different aspects of the Persephone myth to accompaniment by flute, harp and viola. The most substantial text is Louise Glück’s Persephone, the Wanderer. This is a complex text that toys with sex and winter, motherhood and eternity and it’s mostly spoken rather than sung.
- The final piece is a setting of the ten well known aphorisms by Max Ehrmann; Desiderata. I think these are somewhat tongue in cheek as the lively alto-sax accompaniment would suggest.
As we head into summer, as usual, things start to quieten down. I only have five shows in my schedule for the month of June:
Veteran mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter appeared in recital at Koerner Hall yesterday afternoon with pianist Christopher Berner. The first part of the programme was some fairly gentle Mozart with some fairly light weight Weckerlin and one long Schubert piece; “Die Viola”. A short Mozart piano piece rounded out the programme. It was stylish, enjoyable singing but one felt that both choice of material and method of presentation were being chosen to conserve the voice. How would things go after the interval when three songs from Winterreise were promised?
So to Eastminster United last night for the opening concert of the Toronto Bach Festival. We got three concerti bookended by (I think) a sinfonia from one of the cantatas; an excuse to show off the trumpets and timpani recruited for Sunday’s oratorios, and an arrangement of the Air on the G String. Festival director John Abberger contributed a scholarly programme note on the general issue of Bach concerti. Bottom line, there aren’t very many of them but they can be rearranged for a pretty wide range of instrumental options. Last night we got the Concerto for Oboe BWV1056, Concerto for Flute, Violin and Harpsichord BWV 1044 and the much better known Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 BWV 1046.
So continuing my exploration of music by contemporary female composers I listened to Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi’s Soundtrack for an Imaginary Opera. Ahvenniemi is both a composer and a philosopher who is inviting us, in this work, to reflect on opera as a social construct as much as text and music. There’s lots of information on what she’s getting at plus all the texts at 
