Category Archives: Web streams and casts

Beckwith at 94

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Canadian composer John Beckwith will be 94 tomorrow.  His son, Larry, under the auspices of Confluence Concerts webcast a trio of concert’s of Beckwith’s extensive song output yesterday on their Youtube channel.  There’s four and a half hours of music and interviews!  It’s extremely varied.  Composition dates range from 1947 to 2014 and the diversity of the music is equally broad though with a distinct personality.  The pieces range from a set of etudes for cello and voice written for his grand-daughter when she was nine years old to the the crazy Avowals which requires a gifted and slightly mad tenor and a keyboardist who can play piano, celeste and harpsichord; sometimes simultaneously!

beckwiths

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Coming up at UoT

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Alex-Hetherington-Mezzo-Soprano-Headshot-scaledIt’s Norcop Prize time. On March 11th at 1.10pm there will be a pre-recorded recital by mezzo-soprano Alex Hetherington and pianist Dakota Scott-Digout, this year’s recipients of the Jim and Charlotte Norcop Prize in Song and Gwendolyn Williams Koldofsky Prize in Accompanying. Free on the UoT Music Youtube channel. I shall miss watching it with Jim N!
It should also be time for UoT Opera’s spring performance. Last year, their Mansfield Park (March 13th) was my last pre-plague live show. This years festival of one act operas has been postponed and will now be streamed on April 22nd to 25th.

Defrocking the canon

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There have been a lot of discussions lately about diversity in opera and how, particularly, race and gender are represented in very limited and problematic ways, especially in the canonical operas of the long 19th century.  The latest to come my way is a very good panel discussion hosted by the COC (on their Youtube channel) and moderated by Aria Umezawa.  This one tackled gender issues but, inevitably broader questions came up and that’s what I want to explore here.  You might want to watch it either before or after reading the rest of this piece.

Episodes_from_September_Days_1830_on_the_Place_de_l’Hôtel_de_Ville_in_Brussels

The only revolution to ever start in an opera house….

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Our Song d’Hiver

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Our Song d’Hiver is Tapestry Opera’s latest on-line offering.  It’s a little over an hour long and features Mireille Asselin exploring French-English bilingualism and biculturalism as it manifests itself from l’Acadie to the Ottawa valley with a bit of Provence thrown in for good measure.  It’s very cleverly done and the production values are high.  In places it’s very funny and in others impossibly sad.  There are lovely performances by Mimi and pianist Frédéric and guest appearances from guitarists Maxim and Gervais Cormier, poet Élise Gauthier and composers Ian Cusson and Marie-Claire Saindon.

songdhiver

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Interviews and such

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There are three new Youtube videos that aren’t performances but may be of interest.  On the Confluence Concerts channel there’s the John Beckwith Songbook Lecture.  I was expecting the usual sort of pre-show thing ahead of this weekend’s concert but it wasn’t that at all.  What we get is Bradley Christensen explaining his doctoral thesis research on developing an interpretive and pedagogical guide to Beckwith’s songs.  One might expect this to be rather dry and in a way it is but dry like a certain kind of British (or I guess Kiwi) humour.  It’s a sort of “Note the sheep do not so much fly as plummet” performance.  No sheep though.  One would have thought a Kiwi could have fixed that.  I shouldn’t joke really.  It’s a perfectly serious and valuable project but the deadpan delivery is curiously compelling.

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Coming up at the Royal Conservatory

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Coming up at the Royal Conservatory….

  • March 12th at 8pm.  ARC Ensemble plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 and English Songs.  An all Beethoven programme featuring Monica Whicher in the songs.  That’s a free livestream on the Koerner Hall performance page.
  • March 21st at 1pm.  To the Distant Beloved.  Miriam Khalil, Russell Braun and Carolyn Maule perform Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and a world premiere piece by award-winning Iranian Canadian composer, Afarin Mansouri, commissioned by Canadian Art Song Project.  This one is $10 with tickets/codes available from the RCM box office.

More Youtube projects

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There’s an interesting new project on Youtube from Natalya Gennadi and Catherine Carew.  It’s called HBD! Project and the idea is to produce a short themed video each month featuring composers whose birthdays fall in that month.  The February pilot is online and it’s a bit different from other “shows” in similar vein that I’ve come across.  This one features a song by Alban Berg sung by Natalya with a fluffy puppy, music for cello and piano by Jean Coulthard played by Alice Kim and Hye Won Cecilia Lee and Rodney Sharman’s Tobacco Road sung by Catherine.  So what’s new you ask (apart from the puppy)?  It’s the graphics with Mozart in a party hat, animated Emily Carr paintings and a look for the Sharman that could double as the witches’ scene in Macbeth.  Yes it’s a bit weird but oddly compelling.

hbd!

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Around the tubes

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Once more the week’s Youtube offerings show that digital works best when it’s “made for digital”.  Who’d a thunk it eh!  Anyway there’s very watchable new content on Youtube from Alexander Hajek, Opera Revue and Domoney Artists.  Best of all though is a new short film called Sempra Libera from Carsen Gilmore and the very good soprano Michelle Drever.  If you like the look and feel of Morte you’ll love this.  It’s really dark.  It’s the grimmest take on Violetta I’ve seen; Natalie Dessay included!

sempralibera

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Into March

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groundhogPickings are still decidedly slim in terms of locally created on-line content with many postponements due to the current lockdown in Toronto.  What I have lined up is as follows:

  • The UoT Opera Student Composer Collective’s annual show is being streamed at 2.30pm on Sunday 21st February.  This year it’s called Escape Room and it’s a comedy with a scenario of characters trapped in a darkened room with no memory of how they got there.  It’s being streamed via Zoom and preregistration at this link is required.
  • The COC has a roundtable on Gender and Opera on its Youtube channel on March 5th at 7pm.
  • Confluence Concerts are offering a tribute to John Beckwith; specifically his songs, on March 7th at 2pm, 5pm and 8pm.  That’s on Confluence’s Youtube channel.
  • Tapestry have two shows coming up on their Youtube channel.  March 6th at 8pm sees Mireille Asselin and guests perform a range of works celebrating their French heritage.  Then on March 27th at 8pm Morgan-Paige Melbourne performs Where Do I Go?; an intriguing looking mixture of piano and dance.

There’s also new short but fun content on the appropriate Youtube channels from Opera Revue, Alexander Hajek and Domoney Artists.

Do check to make sure that there aren’t further changes before planning your life around these events!

Good news for once!

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I found out yesterday that Vancouver based composer Jeffrey Ryan has won the 2021 Art Song Prize from the National Association of Singing Teachers (a US based body) for his song cycle Everything Already Lost.  This is believed to be a first for a Canadian composer.  Now, readers with good memories might recall that I was decidedly impressed by Ryan’s Miss Carr in Seven Scenes which was the 2018 CASP commission so, obviously, I was keen to check out the new work.

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