Rather short notice I’m afraid but McGill’s Schulich Singers and others have a Holocaust remembrance concert on Monday night (November 4th) at Trinity St. Paul’s at 7.30pm featuring Ittai Shapira’s The Ethics in the original choral version. The same programme will be presented in Ottawa on the 10th and Montreal on the 12th.
Iain Scott has three opera appreciation courses starting in November
There’s also the 17th annual “Rosedale Weekend seminar on January 25th and 26th 2020 on the subject of Wagner’s Parsifal. More details at www.opera-is.com.
The Halloween concert by the UoT Contemporary Music Ensemble in Walter Hall was fun. Unfortunately I was only able to catch the first half which featured Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Erwartung for saxophone quartet and percussion. This was a cool piece making interesting use of the space. It was followed by Robert Paterson’s Closet Full of Demons which is scored for small ensemble plus alarm clocks and jack-in-a-box. Sometimes I feel I should listen to music like this more often (and sometimes I don’t!). The main reason for being there though was to see Maeve Palmer and the Ensemble do Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre. I wasn’t disappointed. Clearly tons of work had gone into this and it was much crisper than when I saw it in Barbara Hannigan’s master class a few weeks ago. Maeve really got into character as Gepopo. It was all there. The notes of course but also the keen sense of timing and the ability to convey the paranoia of the character. The Ensemble was well into it too. The bassoon and trombones were ugly. The shouting was convincing.
I wish I had photographs because everyone was in costume not just Maeve. The firs conductor (lorenzo Guggenheim) appeared as a back to front neon lit Wolfman and the second; Wallace Halladay, as a reversed skeleton. The Ensemble included Superwoman among others and Maeve was a sort of leather mini-skirted SS officer. Much fun!
If anyone does have photos I could use please drop me a line.
Summer Night is a CD of songs by Healey Willan produced by the Canadian Art Song project and due to be released on the Centrediscs label next month. Willan is best known as a composer of church and choral music but he also wrote over 100 songs and song arrangements, many of which have not been published, let alone recorded. There are 28 songs on the CD ranging in composition date from 1899 to the late 1920s. Most are original settings of the text though a few are arrangements of existing songs; either traditional or by Burns.
The Ensemble Studio Competition again last night. Seven singers were competing with Ben Heppner’s jokes for cash prizes, champagne and, possibly, a place in the COC Ensemble Studio. There’s one thing I think is vital to understand about the Ensemble Studio Competition. The judges have been working with the singers for a week. The audience gets to hear them sing one aria. It’s easy to see why there isn’t always concurrence between the hall and the judging table. (That’s my excuse anyway).
The contestants with Alexander Neef and Johannes Debus
Yesterday Matthew Cairns and Rachel Kerr performed an unusually wide range of songs in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. It’s part of Matthew’s prep for his CBC recording session which was part of the prize at last year’s Centre Stage and which will be broadcast in the new year. They kicked off with a contrasting pair of Duparc song’s. First came the almost dreamy L’invitation au voyage with it’s arpeggio accompaniment followed by the much more dramatic Le manoir de Rosemonde. These really set the tone for the recital. There was power where it was needed but also considerable delicacy from both singer and pianist.
Last night’s concert at Koerner Hall was a celebration of the life and work of Armenian composer and song collector Komitas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Unsurprisingly Koerner was packed with members of Toronto’s Armenian community. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable at events like this; unable to really appreciate what the music means in its home culture, but last night what I felt was joy and inclusion. It was an extremely well curated concert of rather beautiful music extremely well performed.
Purcell’s King Arthur is a problematic work. It was originally written as a sort of praise poem for Charles II showing the inevitable ascent to glory of the Stuarts from earliest days. Unfortunately Charles died and his brother lost his job before the piece could be given. The staunchly Protestant court of William and Mary wasn’t much in favour of a celebration of crypto-Catholic Charles by openly Catholic Dryden and it wasn’t until Dryden and Purcell needed a new commercial project that it reemerged with various cuts, insertions and reworkings to get it past the censorship. No reliable record exists of what was actually performed in that first commercial run so for their new CD release Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort have used a mixture of considerable erudition plus impressive musical nous to reconstruct something that is plausibly like what audiences in the 1690s might have heard.
Peter Greve is a Dutch composer of works for various forces all of which could, I suppose, be considered tone poems as they all have thematic/storyline elements. The “stories” for the pieces on the CD can be found here. Stylistically Greve is eclectic but very satisfying to listen to. The Palace of the Dreamking, perhaps unsurprisingly, has a Nordic feel to it particularly in the opening passages. It’s tonal and almost Sibelius like but then it gets agitated, percussive and more dissonant but for returning to a more elegiac mood. He has a real gift for melody too.
I think it’s time to get back to doing two listing posts per month as the schedule is getting pretty busy.
On November 1st at 8pm Karina Gauvin is appearing at Koerner Hall with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra in a programme of opera arias from 18th century St. Petersburg. The following night at 7.30pm, in Mazzoleni Hall, the Glenn Gould School has its fall production. This time it’s Jonathan Dove’s Siren Song. Curiously UoT Opera is also doing a work by Dove this season.
operaramblings 