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.
You might have noticed I’ve been expanding my horizons a bit recently. Saturday night was no exception. I was at The Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival at the Theatre Centre for a double bill of sketch comedy. I don’t think I’ve seen sketch comedy live since university so I really didn’t know what to expect.
Iconic British countertenor James Bowman passed away last March. On Sunday night at Trinity-St. Pauls the Early Music folks at UoT presented a tribute to the man and his career. It was very well done. Music associated with Bowman; mostly Purcell and Britten, was interspersed with video and personal recollections/testimonials that fully reflected the considerable influence Bowman had on the English music scene and on the more widespread acceptance of the countertenor voice in the classical music world generally. 
Previous concerts from the Happenstancers have typically featured fairly conventional chamber music either arranged or combined in unusual ways; sometimes mixed with more modern/contemporary material. Saturday night’s concert at Redeemer Lutheran was a bit different. Titled Future Pastorale it was built around Claude Vivier’s 1968 work Ojikawa plus the text of Psalm 131 (also used, in French, by Vivier) and text from the “Introduction” to Blake’s Songs of Innocence; “Piping down the valleys wild. Piping songs of pleasant glee” etc with lambs, shepherds and clouds.
Dance to the Abyss is a show of music from the Weimar Republic currently on stage at Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s given by Art of Time Ensemble as part of their 25th and final season.![TAP EX Versus - Photo by Brian Medina - 89[Cropped]](https://operaramblings.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/tap-ex-versus-photo-by-brian-medina-89cropped.jpg?w=584)
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