Verdi’s 1849 opera La battaglia di Legnano is loosely based on a battle that took place in 1176 between the forces of Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Lombard League; just one episode in the interminable struggle between Guelfs and Ghibellines. By Verdi’s time the battle had been appropriated by Italian nationalists (at least in northern Italy) as symbolic of the Italians struggle against the Austrian occupiers and that’s pretty much where Verdi is at.
Saturday evening, at Redeemer Lutheran, the Happenstancers offered up a palindromic tribute to Pascal Dusapin. As it was a palindrome I shall review it from the middle outwards. Let us take the interval as t=0. Then at t=+/-1 we heard Two Walkings from singers Danika Lorèn and Hilary Jean Young. Two songs; “How Many Little Wings” and “Kiss My Lips She Did” came before the break and the rest; “May June”, “A Scene in Singing” and “It Seems To Be Turning Music” after. And, of course the singers swapped positions at the break! This is extremely interesting but fiendishly difficult music with the unaccompanied singers trading snatches of phrases and half thoughts in a complex atonal musical language. I’m actually in awe that anybody can actually perform a work like this but they did, and very well.
At t=+/-2 we got works for clarinet (Brad Cherwin of course), cello (Peter Eom) and singer. At t=-2 it was Danika with the evocative Canto and at t=+2 an equally effective account of Now the Fields from Hilary. It’s always interesting to hear art song with something other than piano especially when the works are as complex and challenging as these. Continue reading
The Tragedy of Hamlet; directed by Robert Lepage with choreography by Guillaume Côté is a 100 minute long dance work based on Shakespeare’s play. It opened last (Thursday) night at the Elgin Theatre.
Photo : Stéphane Bourgeois
Angel’s Bone; music by Du Yun, libretto by Royce Vavrek, is an interesting concept. It deals with human trafficking through the medium of two angels who fall to earth and find themselves in the hands of a couple; one of them a formerly trafficked person, who exploit them for sexual/commercial purposes. It’s dramatically quite effective, well constructed and the libretto has a certain poetry to it. It played at Harbourfront Theatre this last weekend in a co-pro by Sound the Alarm Music Theatre, Loose Tea Music Theatre and Array Music.
Thursday night’s Conflunce Concerts show at Heliconian Hall was titled Songs from Toronto and consisted of songs by Toronto singer-songwriters arranged for a larger ensemble by Andrew Downing. And by larger ensemble I mean various combinations of string trio, double bass, guitars of sundry varieties, vibraphone and piano. To further spice things up some of the songs were sung by Teiya Kasahara who is a rather different Fach than the average singer in this genre.
I have very limited exposure to Toronto’s singer-songer writer community (I didn’t even know it was a “thing”) and so it’s hard to assess where last night departed from some sort of norm or not or to assess whether arranging for a larger ensemble enhanced the experience or detracted from the intimate nature of someone singing their own stuff in their own way. FWIW I do have a fair bit of experience with singer-song writer music from the British isles and Atlantic Canada and I know that can work pretty well with a band. Think Liza Carthy or Billy Bragg for example.
Staircases is an unusual and interesting show currently being presented at Trinity St. Paul’s by Tafelmusik. The show is the brainchild of Alison Mackay collaborating with baritone Jonathan Woody. Who knew a “simple” set of stairs could carry so many meanings? We are taken from ceremonial staircases at Versailles and the Vatican to the banks of the frozen Thames to the hidden meanings of the Monument to the Great Fire and more to a most surprising conclusion. All of this rooted in the idea of the rock staircase on Mount Parnassus that leads to the home of Apollo and the Muses.
Thursday lunchtime in Walter Hall saw the 2024 edition of the annual recital by the winners of the Norcop Prize in Song and the Koldofsky Prize in Accompanying. This year’s winners are mezzo-soprano Nicole Percifield and pianist Minira Najafzade.
I’ve seen Schubert’s Winterreise done many ways. There’s the classic one with baritone and piano and more rarely soprano (including a memorable performance by Adrienne Pieczonka as a passing cold front battered the hall!). I’ve seen it done with projections and three singers and I’ve seen made into a film. So there’s nothing particularly outré about arranging it to add a choir to baritone and piano. The choir can function as Greek chorus or alter ego or whatever. Any way that’s what Gregor Meyer did and what the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers conducted by Jean-Sébastian Vallée performed when they joined forces with Brett Polegato and Philip Chiu at Trinity St. Paul’s on Saturday night.
Metropolitan United Church that is. Not the other place. Anyway, it was a very pleasant Thursday lunchtime recital in which Maeve was accompanied on piano by Helen Becqué. It was essentially a “turn of the century” (as in around 1900) programme.
The first set was Debussy’s Ariettes Oubliees. The six songs are very Debussy. Maeve sang them idiomatically, in excellent French and with a fair amount of variation in emotional intensity from quite restrained to exuberant. She does “exuberant” rather well. Equally excellent and idiomatic playing from Helen who also provided a bit of a break between song sets with pieces drawn from the Preludes Op. 12 of Luise Adolpha Le Beau.
UoT Opera’s spring production; Massenet’s 1899 opera Cendrillon, has been transferred to the Elgin Theatre with the MacMillan currently out of commission. They have made some sensible accommodations to the rather unfriendly Elgin acoustic. The orchestra is reduced to about thirty players and placed at floor level in front of the stage. Almost all the stage action takes place right at the front which helped significantly with voice projection.
Pandolfe & Servants
operaramblings 