Last Wednesday’s lunchtime’s concert in the RBA was given by Payadora Tango Ensemble with guest vocalist Elbio Fernandez. I’ve been following pretty much every musical initiative from the dynamic duo of Rebekah Wolkstein and (Grammy winner) Drew Jurecka for a while now. From the Venuti String Quartet, to Schmaltz and Pepper (of course) to Justin Gray’s Grammy winning Immersed and Wednesday’s avatar Payadora Tango Ensemble.
Bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni is currently appearing as Basilio in The Barber of Seville at the COC. On Tuesday he gave a noon hour recital in the RBA accompanied by Hyejin Kwon. There were two halves to the programme; Schubert’s Schwanengesang D.957 and a set of six Italian songs by Francesco Paolo Tosti.
Despite having seen Pisaroni live twice before in recital I’d never heard him sing German Lieder so the Schubert was especially interesting. It was good. He can be as dramatic or as lyrical as he needs to be with quite a range of dynamics and colour. “Der Atlas” was powerful and emphatic while “Das Fischermädchen” was really rather lovely. “Der Doppelgänger” was very controlled with any temptation to over sing it resiosted. I also noted some really interesting piano playing in “Die Stadt”. Continue reading
Thursday’s noon hour in the concert was a really great idea; combine the COC Ensemble Studio with the COC Orchestra for an all Mozart concert. Mozart’s Symphony No.35 in D major (Hafner) was split into into its four movements with pairs of arias inserted between the movements to create what Johannes Debus, conducting, described as an opéra imaginaire. It worked really well.
Tuesday’s lunchtime recital in the RBA, the first of 2026, was given by Israeli mezzo-soprano Michal Aloni and pianist Alona Milner. All the music, most of it Hebrew language art song, was by composers who either emigrated to Palestine/Israel or who were born there. In their excellent introductions Michal and Alona enumerated three waves or generations of composers:
Tuesday lunchtime in the RBA saw the traditional annual holiday gig by the (much depleted by sickness etc) Ensemble Studio. Last minute drop outs meant it was pretty short but what there was was very decent.
Last Tuesdays’s concert in the RBA featured four singers and two pianists from the Ensemble Studio in a concert of highly recognisable opera arias. I guess with Barber of Seville and Rigoletto coming p on the FSC stage that was a bit inevitable. It was though very well done with all four singers not only singing well but really conveying a sense of character.
Wednesday’s concert in the RBA was a challenging programme of song by contemporary women composers presented by soprano Ariane Cossette and pianist Brian Cho. Kaija Saariaho’s Quatre instants sets four related poems by Amin Maalouf. In some ways it’s in the same sort of psychological space as their L’amour de loin; love at a distance, love requited and unrequited, love sensual and quasi-spiritual, but musically it’s very different. It’s much more abrasive and (mostly) less lyrical. Sometimes its really busy and quite angry. It’s also very, very complex and often quite loud, demanding great skill and stamina from both performers. The piano part features loads of trills and arpeggiation and the vocal line has awkward intervals and even screaming. It was handled really well.
Anyone familiar with the work of cellist Peter Eom, who performed on Wednesday in the RBA, would not have been expecting a collection of Bach and Britten pieces. They might have been surprised though by the floor layout, which featured six “cello stations”. Peter’s introduction stated that his recital was titled Primordial because he wanted to suggest rituals, dreams and surrealism and he wanted us to take the recital on whatever terms we, or our subconsciousnesses, chose but to experience it as a single whole played end to end.
This year’s Wirth Vocal Prize winner, Kate Fogg, gave the now customary recital in the RBA on Thursday accompanied by Nate Ben-Horin. The recital was titled Telling Tales and covered soprano rep across art song, musical theatre and opera (just); all in English. Since the opera and art song pieces were by Ricky Ian Gordon, Ned Rorem and Stephen Sondhem as opposed to say brett Dean or George Benjamin it all had pretty much a musical theatre feel; so in many ways not really my music.
Last Wednesday’s concert in the RBA was a showcase for the collaborative pianists of the McGill-UdeM Piano Vocal Arts programme. Each of the five pianists on show got to accompany mezzo Julie Boulianne for a set of songs. Or put another way, Julie got to perform for an hour with five pianists.
operaramblings 