Here are my top picks for May.
Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin premiered at London’s Soho Theatre a couple of years ago. It’s now playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a Nightwood Theatre production directed by Cherissa Richards. It’s a one woman show about a young woman escaping from corporate Hell and her boat dwelling boyfriend and discovering herself. It’s set in contemporary London and Myah is black and very, very middle class; the daughter of successful immigrants with, as they tend to, ambitions for their children which Myah isn’t really living up to.
Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre. It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas. The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison. In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.
Tuesday evening in Temerty Theatre Brian Current and the GGS New Music Ensemble presented a three work programme that covered more or less the whole time span of composers writing “sounds rather than notes”; which is an interesting and useful way of thinking about this particular type of music. Continue reading
Come Closer is a new opera with music by Ryan Trew and text by Rachel Krehm. It’s scheduled to premiere at Factory Theatre on June 13th but last Wednesday in the RBA we got a preview of some extracts. Come Closer deals with Rachel Krehm’s relationship with her younger sister Elizabeth who died in 2012. It started out as a song cycle setting seven of Elizabeth’s poems and now has narrative added to create a stage work. Yesterday we heard four extracts with Rachel playing herself and Jacqueline Woodley (who I hadn’t seen for far too long) as Elizabeth. Accompaniment was piano trio with Evan Mitchell conducting.
The Girl in My Alphabet is a 2002 CD of music by Errollyn Wallen; the Belize born composer recently appointed Master of the King’s Music. It contains six works for various instruments and small ensembles; some with vocals, and it’s very varied.
It starts with Dervish, a 2001 piece for piano and cello, played by Dominic Harlan and Matthew Sharp. It starts slowly with doom laden piano and scoopy cello but, like a Sufi dance, speeds up and becomes very fast and busy. An impressive beginning.
Following on from the du Pré cello concerto recordings I was also fortunate enough to get my hands on another Warner Classics remaster of old EMI recordings. This one consists of the Barenboim/Klemperer recordings of the five Beethoven piano concertos and the Choral Fantasia recorded with the New Philharmonia Orchestra and the John Allis Choir back in 1967. I used to own these on vinyl decades ago. Now they are available as a three SACD set.
Schmaltz and Pepper have a CD due for release on May 18th imaginatively called Schmaltz and Pepper. If you have heard them live you will likely have heard most of the eleven tracks on the CD. They include songs like I’m Sorry Mama (personal favourite) and Evil Eye, tunes drawn from Jewish folklore like Hershel and the Goblins and Ride to Zaslav and cunning musical jokes like Mozart the Mensch. It’s all composed by combinations of Eric Abramovitz, Rebekah Wolkstein and Drew Jurecka with a bit of help from Mozart. Continue reading
Flamenco is an interesting genre. It’s journey from India to Southern Spain via the Middle East and North Africa means it has influenced everything from Hindustani classical music through just about the whole Islamic world to its influence on Western classical (imagine Carmen without flamenco) and across the pond to Argentina and tango. Confluencias; a new Juno nominated album by Lara Wong and Melón Jimenez pays tribute to that global influence with a series of flamenco-jazz numbers inspired by that geographic spread.
I first started to think seriously about the late Jacqueline du Pré when I saw the Woolf/Vavrek opera Jacqueline in 2020 at Tapestry. Subsequently I listened to the CD release and attended the remount at Tapestry in February this year. Then I saw that all of her concerto recordings for HMV (back catalogue now owned by Warner Classics) made between 1965 and 1970 had got a major facelift along the lines of the Solti Ring. The original analogue tapes have been digitized at 192kHz/24 bit using the latest technology and then remastered for SACD. The result is a four hybrid SACD box set called The Great Cello Concertos. Continue reading
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