Unbroken is a CD of chamber music by contemporary Ukrainian composers played by Canadian-Ukrainian violinist Viktoria Grynenko and friends. My review is now available on the La Scena Musicale website.
My review of Chandos’ SACD release of Strauss’ Salome with Malin Byström in the title role and Edward Gardner conducting is now available on the La Scena Musicale website. Terrific conducting and great work by the recording engineers.
My review of the CD of Brian Current and Marie Clements’ opera MISSING; about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls is now published at La Scena Musicale. This is going to be performed at Toronto Summer Music next month.
My review of the CD recording of Bernard Foccroulle and Matthew Jocelyn’s new opera Cassandre is now up at La Scena Musicale. It’s one of the best new operas I’ve come across recently.
My review of the Bru Zane recording of Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys is featured in the latest issue of La Scena Musicale.
Gyorgy Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments of 1986 is a pretty weird piece. It sets forty short fragments (anything from less than a minute to maybe six and a half) from Kafka’s diaries and journals for soprano and violin, which is unusual enough. But it’s the range of techniques involved for both musicians which i think contributes to why people want to perform them and some people at least to listen to them.
Just about every technique fior violin, short of smashing it, is called for; very rapid staccato phrases, pizzicato, percussive effects of various kinds etc. The vocal part is perhaps even more varied; singing (but with crazy intervals and very high notes), Sprechstimme, speaking, whispering, chattering, screaming ad more. Each fragment basically deals with an emotion (mostly negative!) and is set accordingly so the emotional range is pretty much as wide as the range of techniques. Continue reading
A couple of years ago I took a look at the Bru-Zane reconstruction of the “original”; never performed, five act version of Offenbach’s La vie Parisienne. That version was recorded live on stage in Paris; which was one stop on a multi-city tour. Now it’s got the full Bru-Zane audio recording treatment complete with a 240 page book with much more information about what they did (and why) to create the performing edition used. I won’t duplicate what I said in the review of the video but there are some things I noticed anew on the audio version. Continue reading
L’extase: Debussy and Messiaen is a new CD from mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená and pianist Mitsuko Uchida. There are four sets of songs; three by Debussy and one by Messiaen. The Debussy sets are Trois Chansons de Bilitis which set texts by Pierre Louÿs, Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire and Ariettes oubliées to tests by Paul Verlaine.
To my ear all these cycles inhabit a similar sound world. It’s very beautiful and languorous for the most part with something just not quite wholesome about it. We are clearly looking forward to the language of Pelléas et Mélisande. Only occasionally does something a bit more dynamic happen as in the quite dramatic “La tombeau des Naiades” from the first set and the lively “Chevaux des bois” from the Verlaine settings. Continue reading
The middle years of the 16th century was an interesting period for English church music. There was no shortage of musical talent or sponsorship but the political and ecclesiastical landscape was pretty mixed as the pieces chosen for a new CD from the Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne reveal.
The first piece is a setting of the Lord’s Prayer in English by John Sheppard; Informator Choristarum at Magdalen College. It’s fairly straightforward polyphony but the text is interesting. It’s in English so it must post date Henry VIII, during whose reign the Mass was still sung in Latin, but the wording is slightly different to that of the first edition of The Book of Common Prayer of 1549 in that, among other minor variations, it concludes with “So be it” rather than “Amen” so we can probably date it to the first two years of Edward’s reign. Continue reading
Euripides’ Iphigenia at Tauris formed the basis for an opera almost a century before the more famous one by Gluck. Henri Desmarets; one of the more notable successors to Lully at Versailles/Paris began work on an Iphigenia opera to a libretto by Joseph-François Duché de Vancy in the 1690s but work was interrupted by Desmarets being exiled from France for marrying a minor without her father’s permission. Eventually the Académie Royale de la Musique entrusted the task of completing the opera to André Campra who teamed up with Antoine Danchet as librettist. The end result was a tragédie lyrique in five acts and a prologue that premiered in 1704 to some success. An even more successful revival in 1711 led to multiple productions across France and abroad before it was effectively replaced by the Gluck work in 1779. Continue reading
operaramblings 