Continuing the contemporary CanCon theme I’ve been listening to Bestiaries; a CD of music by Bekah Simms. I first heard her music at the TSO in June and liked it enough to want to explore further. There are three pieces on the CD; each a little over ten minutes long. The first, Foreverdark, is a 2018 piece for solo cello, chamber orchestra and live electronics. It’s inspired by the compose and cellist Amahl Arulanandam shared love for metal and quotes from iconic metal albums. I’m not a metal fan but I am intrigued to hear younger composers using ideas drawn from more popular genres. Think Missy Mazzoli and electronic dance music. It’s no different really from Ralph Vaughan Williams using folk songs or Michael Tippett aking ideas from blues music. The result here is heavy textured, weird and chaotic with Arulanandam using all parts of the cello and acoustic instruments of the orchestra (the Cryptid Ensemble conducted by Brian Current) made to sound like electric, amplified ones with all the effects one usually gets from electronic manipulation generated acoustically. Continue reading
Bestiaries
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It’s not everyday you come across a work for cello, chamber orchestra and flamenco dancer but Alice Ping Yee Ho has created one. It’s about fifteen minutes long and, as one might expect in a sort of homage to the genre, it’s melodic and percussive. It was recorded in a Vancouver performance featuring Rachel Mercer on cello and dancer Cyrena Luchkow-Huang with the all female Allegra Chamber Orchestra and conductor Janna Sailor. There’s some interesting choreography beautifully danced as well as excellent music making. The sound and picture quality on Youtube is excellent and the EP version sounds fine in standard CD quality. It’s also available in other formats.
Continuing my exploration of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies I’ve been listening to a 1992 recording of a couple of very different pieces inspired by Orkney. The first is Black Pentecost from 1979. It’s somewhere between an orchestral song cycle and a symphony inspired by the threat to start mining uranium ore on Orkney (which also produced the very lovely piano piece Farewell to Stromness). It’s a four movement work for orchestra, mezzo-soprano and baritone and it’s uncompromisingly modern in idiom. The text depicts environmental destruction and decay and “the Controller”s increasingly strident justification of it as necessary to “human progress”. It begins with orchestral music evocative of the unspoiled landscape but becomes increasingly tougher with menacing brass and percussion and screechy vocals from the baritone before collapsing into a matter of fact description of environmental degradation.
Dissonance is a new CD of Rachmaninov songs from Lithuanian pair Asmik Grigorian and Lukas Geniušas. Regular readers will know Ive been getting quite excited by Ms. Grigorian’s opera performances so I jumped at the chance to hear her sing art song; especially paired with Geniušas who is more of a concert pianist than an accompanist.
Kassandra is a new chamber opera from Anthony Brandt (composer) and Neena Beber (librettist). It’s an updating of the classic myth of Kassandra who was cursed by Apollo to always be right but never believed for having rejected his advances. In the new version Kassandra is an AI scientist who builds a computer with great predictive power, particularly with respect to climate. Apollo is a venture capitalist who bankrolls Kassandra then fires her and trashes her reputation when she rejects his unwelcome sexual overtures. So #metoo meets climate change denialism. Prophets, especially female ones, shouldn’t get in the way of profits or embarrass powerful males.
Sehnsucht is the title of a new CD from Barbara Hannigan and friends. It features three works in new arrangements for voice and chamber ensemble. Hannigan sings Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder in an arrangement by Reinbert de Leeuw. Baritone Raoul Steffani sings the Vier Gesänge Op.2 in an arrangement by Henk de Vlieger. There’s also a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No.4 in an arrangement by Erwin Stein. The eleven member Camerata RCO is conducted by Rolf Verbeek.
My review
This recent Centrediscs release contains 27 songs (a generous 76 minutes of music) written by Québecois singer and composer Lionel Daunais in the mid 20th century. The songs really fall into two distinct groups. Some are art songs written for concert hall performance while others are works in a more popular style written for a wider audience. The art songs are very French; the others distinctly of Quebec.
The Leader and other works is a new record of music by Karim Al-Zand. The most substantial piece is the one act chamber opera The Leader based on Ionesco’s 1955 play Le Maître. A reporter and two devoted fans follow the Leader wherever he goes mesmerised by his often absurd antics. A young couple is gradually drawn into the fascination.
Having enjoyed the performance in the Toronto Music Garden of Alec Roth’s Songs in Time of War I downloaded the CD of the original version with violin rather than erhu. There are actually three pieces on the CD. There’s the complete Songs in Time of War with tenor Mark Padmore, guitarist Morgan Szymanski, harpist Alison Nicholls and violinist Philippe Honoré, there are two solo guitar pieces Canción de la Luna and Danza de la Luna (Szymanski) and Padmore and Szymanski collaborating on Chinese Gardens; a setting of four Vikram Seth poems inspired by the Ming dynasty gardens at Suzhou.
operaramblings 