Saturday night Toronto Summer Music closed out with a final concert in Walter Hall showcasing the many and various aspects of the festival. It’s a pretty good solution to the problem of how to wrap up such a diverse set of programmes.
So, we got a few numbers from the Community Choir. There was some nicely sung Vivaldi and Brahms and an arrangement by Kathleen Allan of “Come and I Will Sing You” that was firmly in the more fun to sing than to listen to genre.
Rougarou is a work in progress written and directed by Damion LeClair for unnecessary mountain theatre. On Saturday and Sunday it was given in a semi-workshop format in partnership with Native Earth at Aki Studio as part of Summerworks.
The format was basically a reading with one actor playing all the parts and a second person “setting the stage” as there were no sets or props, though the sound design, or at least part of it, was included. I think the intent at this point is for the finished product to use two (or perhaps more) actors; one playing the main character Renee and another perhaps playing everyone else but I’m not sure of that.
Tuesday night’s Toronto Summer Music concert in Walter Hall featured Quebec soprano Elisabeth St-Gelais with Louise Pelletier on piano. The first part of the concert consisted of songs by Brahms and Strauss. I’m not a huge fan of Brahm’s Zigeunerlieder, Op.103 which are very much an example of Germans misunderstanding just about everything about Hungarian folk music let alone gypsies. The texts are cliché ridden and the music isn’t much better. Ms. St-Gelais sang then with a full pleasant tone and some attention to the text but she really needs to work on her German diction.
I first came across the music of Errollyn Wallen in a recent recital by Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton. There was a quality in her music that reminded me of some other composers of Caribbean origin writing about the immigrant experience in Canada. Wallen is from Belize but now lives in Scotland (in a lighthouse no less) and her music is quite varied. Unusually, besides being a classically trained composer, she also sings while accompanying herself on the piano and the works she has written for that genre definitely have a singer/songwriter vibe.
The second disk in pianist Malcolm Martineau’s project to record all the Brahms songs will soon be available. It features twenty nine songs for low voice with, as far as i could tell, no theme. All the works have titles like Fünf Gesänge Op.72 which actually starts the disk.
The singing is shared between mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann. Both are wonderful singers with terrific artistry and sensitive treatment of text. With Martineau at the piano it’s hard to imagine these relatively little performed songs getting better performances.
Rooms of Elsinore is a new CD of music related to Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet. Those familiar with the opera will quickly recognise the sound worlds of all five pieces. Two began life as “character studies” for Ophelia and Gertrude respectively and so set words by Matthew Jocelyn. The first, And once I played Ophelia is scored for soprano and chamber orchestra. Some readers may recall Barbara Hannigan performing it with the TSO in 2019. Here it’s performed by Jennifer France with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the composer. It’s a tough sing with some very high sections and staccato repeated phrases. She does a fine job. Continue reading
This year’s Dream in High Park production is Hamlet directed by Jessica Carmichael. Now Hamlet is an interesting choice for this format because it is, notoriously, a really long play and the High Park format demands something that comes in around two hours. A full blown Hamlet, as in the Branagh film lasts over four hours and even with the usual stage cuts it’s a three hour plus project. So getting it down to two hours rather meands that it’s almost as much Carmichael’s Hamlet as Shakespeare’s.
Schmaltz and Pepper is a comparatively newly formed band (November 2023) but it contains quite a few familiar faces; Rebekah Wolkstein (vocals, violin) and Drew Jurecka (vocals and assorted instruments) from Payadora, Eric Abramowitz (clarinet) from the TSO plus multitalented Jeremy Ledbetter (piano) and Michael Herring (double bass). Between them they have backgrounds in classical, klezmer, tango, calypso, Yiddish swing, jazz and much more. The focus of the new band appears to be klezmer and Yiddish swing but since most of their material is original there are lots of influences.
Monday night’s Toronto Summer Music concert in Walter Hall was a cross-cultural exploration of Nature, Heartbeat and Breathing. It featured an instrumental ensemble of Persian and Western instruments and two Indigenous vocalist/drummers; one Mi’kmaq, one Inuit.
It’s still mostly festival season with two events coming up in Toronto.
There’s Summer Opera Lyric Theatre It runs July 26th to August 4th and features three operas in piano score with young artist singers. The operas are Puccini’s La Bohème, Handel’s Serse and Mozart’s Idomeneo and the venue is the Alumnae Theatre on Berkeley Street. Full details, tickets etc. Continue reading
