Yesterday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured two members of the Ensemble Studio. Andrew Haji, standing in for an indisposed Charles Sy, and Jennifer Szeto performed Liszt’s Tre Sonetti di Petrarca. These songs were unfamiliar to me and came as a pleasant surprise. They are very Italianate and very operatic and have a pretty involved piano part (unsurprisingly). Haji displayed his uncanny ability to find exactly the right idiom for the music and sang with beauty and expression as well as nailing the three high D flats. Szeto was a most accomplished accompanist. Great dress too! New Yorkers can catch these two in the Marilyn Horne Song Celebration at Carnegie Hall on Saturday where they will perform the same music.
GGS and Ensemble Studio graduate Wallis Giunta will be returning to Toronto in early February for Tapestry Opera’s New Opera 101 program and the two concerts of Tapestry Songbook VI. Basically, she will be working with Jordan de Souza and a group of emerging artists on a three day series of workshops in contemporary opera which will include two concerts open to the public on February 5th and 6th. I spoke to her via Skype yesterday at her current digs in Leipzig.
The program for Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s February 21 recital at Koerner Hall has been released. It is:
Next week things get rather busy. There’s all the Hannigan shenanigans at UoT ; lecturing, masterclassing, concerting, walking on water, details 
The COC will add six singers and a pianist to the Ensemble Studio for the 16/17 season. Unsurprisingly the three prize winners from 
So today’s New York Times has an article apparently confirming the 
operaramblings 