Tuesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA consisted of works by Cecilia Livingston chosen and performed by members of the COC’s Ensemble Studio. It was a fairly varied programme considering it was all works by one composer.
Quieen Hezumuryango and Mattia Senesi kicked things off with Give Me Your Hand which sets a Duncan McFarlane text exploring aspects of Lady Macbeth. It uses extended piano technique and suits the dark colours of Queen’s voice. It was followed by Moon; an evocative solo piano piece played by Brian Cho. Not the only time the moon would figure in the programme.
Tarot is a new recital CD from tenor Timothy Stoddard and pianist Ellen Fast featuring recent works by American composers. There are four song cycles on the record. The first, Mortally Wounded, features settings by Mark Markowski of eight poems by Lorca in English translation. These are interesting and treat Lorca’s quintessentially Spanish themes sympathetically. The music is basically tonal but complex with flamenco inflected rhythms. It’s beautifully sung and played with diction so good that the absence of texts and translations is not worrisome. 
I first came across Russian soprano Ekaterina Siurina as Zerlina in the 2008 video recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni from Salzburg. She had had plenty of success already in coloratura roles such as Gilda and Adina and was, I thought, the best Zerlina I had come across. Fast forward to 2015 and she sang a very fine Violetta at the Four Seasons Centre opposite her husband Charles Castronovo. A few years on and it’s not terribly surprising that she’s starting to venture into slightly heavier lyric-dramatic territory. This is reflected in her recent album Where is My Beloved? recorded in 2022 with the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Constantin Orbelian. 
From Sappho’s Lyre is a double CD of music by Constantine Caravassilis. There are five cycles for voice and various combinations of instruments, all, as the album title suggests, related to Sappho of Lesbos. The first is a setting of her Hymn to Aphrodite; the longest, extant work. It’s intended to be performed as a “spectacle” with dance, costumes etc. It’s scored for soprano (Lana Guberman-Chriss), mezzo soprano (Carla Jablonski), countertenor (Daniel Moody), narrator, chorus Jeffrey Duban), eight piece chamber ensemble (Tenth Muse Ensemble) and recorded sounds and it’s conducted by the composer. It’s sung and narrated in a mixture of Ancient Greek and English and it’s richly orchestrated. It’s complex but mostly tuneful music with quite dense textures and lots of percussive effects. It’s really a very distinct musical voice as becomes clearer as one progresses through the pieces on the records. 
Philippe Boesmans’ last opera, On purge bébé, premiered at La Monnaie/De Munt in Dember 2022, a few months after the composer’s death. It’s a one act farce to a libretto by Richard Brunel after Feydeau. Predictably it’s extremely silly and rather French. It begins with an argument between a porcelain manufacturer (Follavoine) and his wife as they try to discover where Les Isles Hébrides are at the request of their unpleasant and constipated seven year old son. Looking under “Z” and “E” doesn’t help very much but it serves as a backdrop to their argument about administering a laxative to said son while awaiting the arrival of a fonctionnaire (Chouilloux) charged with sourcing 300,000 unbreakable chamber pots for the French Army. 
Unfinished Business is a CD of music by Toronto based composer Tristan Zaba. It’s mostly songs for soprano (McKenzie Warriner) and piano (Paul Williamson) but the second and longest track; Matryoski and Blue Vase is a solo piano piece that plays with different textures and densities; sometimes very spare, sometimes very busy, for twelve minutes. There’s also a shorter, ceaselessly busy piece Swan Dive.
