George is a new CD from soprano Sonya Yoncheva and friends made up of music George Sand would have listened to and some readings fro her works. There’s a particular emphasis on Pauline Viardot; close friend of Sand and sister of Maria Malibran.
The music includes Chopin piano pieces played by Olga Zado, who also accompanies the songs. His Casta diva, based on the Bellini aria, is particularly interesting. There are songs by Leoncavallo, Delibes, Offenbach, Tosti and Liszt as well as piano music and songs by Viardot. On two of the songs Yoncheva is accompanied by mezzo Marina Viotti and Zado is joined by violinist Adam Taubitz for a Viardot Romance.
So what’s in store for Toronto early in the New Year?
The Toronto opera scene is still a bit flat and lacking the vibrancy of pre-pandemic with Against the Grain pretty much invisible and Tapestry wrapped up in building out their new digs. Still, there were some good shows. The best of the CCC’s offerings, IMO, were Cherubini’s 
Lines of Life is a CD produced out of a deep collaboration between German baritone Benjamin Appl and Hungarian composer György Kurtág. It’s a mixture of works by Schubert and Kurtág (with one song by Brahms at the end). It centers on Kurtág’s Hölderlin-Gesänge Op.35a but there are other Kurtág works on the disk too, Most of these are sung a capella but there are four settings of texts by Ulrike Schuster that have piano accompaniment (Pierre-Laurent Aimard). The Schubert songs feature James Baillieu on piano except for the last one, and the Brahms, where Kurtág himself accompanies. 
Rachel Fenlon is a very rare, perhaps unique, talent. She’s the only Lieder singer I know who accompanies herself on the piano. 
