I first came across Russian soprano Ekaterina Siurina as Zerlina in the 2008 video recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni from Salzburg. She had had plenty of success already in coloratura roles such as Gilda and Adina and was, I thought, the best Zerlina I had come across. Fast forward to 2015 and she sang a very fine Violetta at the Four Seasons Centre opposite her husband Charles Castronovo. A few years on and it’s not terribly surprising that she’s starting to venture into slightly heavier lyric-dramatic territory. This is reflected in her recent album Where is My Beloved? recorded in 2022 with the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Constantin Orbelian. Continue reading
A more mature Siurina
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From Sappho’s Lyre is a double CD of music by Constantine Caravassilis. There are five cycles for voice and various combinations of instruments, all, as the album title suggests, related to Sappho of Lesbos. The first is a setting of her Hymn to Aphrodite; the longest, extant work. It’s intended to be performed as a “spectacle” with dance, costumes etc. It’s scored for soprano (Lana Guberman-Chriss), mezzo soprano (Carla Jablonski), countertenor (Daniel Moody), narrator, chorus Jeffrey Duban), eight piece chamber ensemble (Tenth Muse Ensemble) and recorded sounds and it’s conducted by the composer. It’s sung and narrated in a mixture of Ancient Greek and English and it’s richly orchestrated. It’s complex but mostly tuneful music with quite dense textures and lots of percussive effects. It’s really a very distinct musical voice as becomes clearer as one progresses through the pieces on the records. 
Philippe Boesmans’ last opera, On purge bébé, premiered at La Monnaie/De Munt in Dember 2022, a few months after the composer’s death. It’s a one act farce to a libretto by Richard Brunel after Feydeau. Predictably it’s extremely silly and rather French. It begins with an argument between a porcelain manufacturer (Follavoine) and his wife as they try to discover where Les Isles Hébrides are at the request of their unpleasant and constipated seven year old son. Looking under “Z” and “E” doesn’t help very much but it serves as a backdrop to their argument about administering a laxative to said son while awaiting the arrival of a fonctionnaire (Chouilloux) charged with sourcing 300,000 unbreakable chamber pots for the French Army. 
Unfinished Business is a CD of music by Toronto based composer Tristan Zaba. It’s mostly songs for soprano (McKenzie Warriner) and piano (Paul Williamson) but the second and longest track; Matryoski and Blue Vase is a solo piano piece that plays with different textures and densities; sometimes very spare, sometimes very busy, for twelve minutes. There’s also a shorter, ceaselessly busy piece Swan Dive.
Once in a while one comes across a really impressive new opera and I would put The Lord of Cries; music by John Corigliano, text by Mark Adamo, into that category. It’s an example of how opera is good at telling “big stories”. In this case the base material is Euripides’ Bacchae but Adamo has relocated it to 19th century London and very cleverly layered onto it the core elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to create a multi-layered and subtle psychological thriller.
Sounds and Sweet Airs: A Shakespeare Songbook is a long and unusual CD by Carolyn Sampson, Roderick Williams and Joseph Middleton. The songs set texts (mostly) by Shakespeare but some of it is translated into German or French and in the case of Hannah Kendall’s Rosalind it’s fragments stitched together. Some of the material will be familiar to amateurs of art song but less than one might expect. There’s no Finzi or Quilter!
mouvance is a CD of music by Jerome Blais performed by Suzie LeBlanc (soprano), Eileen Walsh (clarinets), Jeff Torbert (guitars), Norman Adams (cello) and Doug Cameron (percussion). At first glance it looks like a set of songs or maybe a song cycle in the sense that it sets a series of French texts by various writers. In fact it has its origins in a multi-media show about, to quote Blais, “the universal themes of movement, migration and uprooting”. I think this is why I found it more satisfying to think of it as an integrated whole because there’s really no sense of separation between the “songs”. 
Ariane is a late opera (1906) by Jules Massenet. Now largely forgotten it has recently been recorded by the Palazzetto Bru Zane in their admirably produced series of French rarities. Unfortunately, unlike some of their other rediscoveries I wasn’t much taken with it.
Chinatown; music by Alice Ho, words by Madeleine Thien and Paul Yee, is a multilingual opera about the Chinese immigrant experience in British Columbia. It ws commissioned by Vancouver City Opera where it played in 2022. It’s now been recorded for CD by the original cast.
Mi País: Songs of Argentina is a CD from bass-baritone Federico de Michelis and an ensemble that includes Steven Blier on piano, Shinjoo Cho on bandoneon, Sami Merdinian on violin and Pablo Lanouguere on bass. The songs are basically from the middle decades of the 20th century and mostly by classically trained composers such as Carlos Guastavino and Carlos López Buchardo.
operaramblings 