This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Mother of Light contains a series of works in praise of the Virgin Mary from Isabel Bayrakdarian’s Armenian Church tradition. Origins range from the 5th century to the early 20th. They are performed here in arrangements by Bayrakdarian’s husband Serouj Kradjian for soprano (Isabel Bayrakdarian), cello (Ani Aznavoorian) and female choir (Coro Vox Aeterna conducted by Anna Hamre).
This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
The latest CD release from the Canadian Art Song Project features four works by Derek Holman. Three song cycles are performed by tenor Colin Ainsworth with Stephen Ralls at the piano. This team presented all three works in a very fine concert at the Four Seasons Centre in October 2014. For the CD Ralls is joined by Bruce Ubukata for the piano duet, Variations on a Melody by Dr. Arne.
This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Lebanese Canadian soprano Joyce El Khoury’s new CD on the Opera Rara label is a sort of “tribute album” to 19th century Belgian diva Julie Dorus-Gras. Mme. Dorus-Gras was a fixture at L’Opéra de Paris in the middle decades of the century, though only after she had starred in the performance of Auber’s La muette de Portici which sparked off the Belgian revolution of 1830. In Paris she created many new roles including Alice in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Princess Eudoxie in Halévy’s La Juive. She thrived on the mixture of bel canto and grand opera that flourished in Paris in this period.
This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Moon Loves Its Light is a debut disk by Nova Scotia soprano Allison Angelo accompanied by Australian pianist Simon Docking. It’s a mix of Canadian settings of English language texts; Harry Somers’ Three Songs to texts by Walt Whitman and Lloyd Burritt’s settings of texts from Marilyn Lerch’s Moon Loves Its Light supplemented by individual songs by Ian Bent, Oskar Morawetz and Patrick Cardy, plus songs by Debussy, Hahn, Fauré and Poulenc. Curiously, the two sets; are split up to fit the disk’s division into four sets; Moon, Night, Dreams and Moon.
This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Divine Karina is a compilation of tracks from previously released Gauvin records on the ATMA Classiques label. There’s Purcell, plenty of Handel, Bach and other baroque composers with ventures into Mozart, Mahler and even Britten. Accompaniment is, mostly, by an assortment of Quebec period bands though the Orchestre Métropolitain with Nézet-Séguin put in an appearance for the Sehr behaglich from Mahler’s Fourth. There’s a previously unreleased track as a bonus; a duet with her Las Vegas based sister in a sort of lounge jazz style.
Exultet Terra is a disc of choral works (mostly) by Welsh-American composer Hilary Tann. The first half of the disc consists of shorter works for a cappella female chamber choir bookended by two pieces by Hildegard of Bingen in the latter of which the ladies are joined by the men of the choir. The second half of the disc consists of Exultet Terra; a five movement work for chamber choir, two bassoons, two oboes and cor Anglais.
It’s not often that discs of contemporary a capella choral music come my way but that’s what The Stolen Child: Choral Works of Scott Perkins is. There are three works on the disc exploring the themes of loss of innocence, nature, magic, sleep and death. The first, The Stolen Child (2006), sets texts by WB Yeats, the second, A Word Out of the Sea (2003), is a Whitman setting and the final work, The World of Dream (2016), uses texts by WH Auden and Walter de la Mare. The first is set for tenor, baritone and choir, the second for tenor and choir and the last for choir alone though the sound world Perkins’ creates is such that the solo roles are more or less blended into the overall sound.
Joyce DiDonato’s latest CD In War and Peace is a compilation of baroque arias on the theme of war and peace, apparently prompted by the terrorist attacks in Paris. The arias are divided, apparently, into the two categories and while I get that Handel’s Scenes of Sorrow, Scenes of Woe from Jeptha is “war” I’m not at all sure how Purcell’s Dido’s Lament finds itself on that side of the balance sheet. No matter there’s lots of Handel; very well done, and quite a bit of Purcell, some of it quite little known; even better, with some Leo, Jommelli and Monteverdi along the way.
I’ve just been listening to Revive; a new recital disk from Elina Garanča. It marks her move into more dramatic territory as she enters her fifth decade. It also says quite a lot about how she wants to develop her career. There’s a very personal introductory essay titled Strong Women in Moments of Weakness and it seems to me that she’s looking to find her place in the 19th century French/Italian romantic/verismo repertoire as opposed to, say, Strauss or Wagner. Certainly the pieces on the disk represent roles like Eboli, Didon, Delila and Hérodiade, as well as some more obscure stuff like Musette from the Leoncavallo La Bohème and Anne from Saint-Saëns Henry VIII.
This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Alice Ping Yee Ho’s The Lesson of Da Ji, to an English libretto by Marjorie Chan, is an ambitious piece. It tells the story of the concubine Da Ji who is having an affair with the son of a local lord, Bo Yi, who is masquerading as her music teacher. The king covets the young man’s father’s land and finds out about the affair when Da Ji’s maid betrays her. He invites Bo Yi and his parents to dine. Bo Yi doesn’t show because he’s been intercepted and killed by the king’s agents. The king, painted as a rather cartoonish villain, serves the boy up as a stew to Da Ji and his parents before killing them and presenting Da Ji with the boy’s heart. Thus is order restored and betrayal punished!
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