Tu me voyais is a new CD from soprano Christina Raphaëlle Haldane and pianist Carl Philippe Gionet. It contains Gionet’s arrangements of Twelve Acadian Folk Songs plus a piece by Adam Sherkin setting poetry by Gionet and two pieces by Jérome Blais setting texts by Léonard Forest and Herménégilde Chiasson.
The twelve folk songs are all Acadien but unsurprisingly some of have roots further back in France. There are songs from Poitou and Gascony (so they are really English….) and so on. They are typically strophic songs with refrains and get a respectful treatment in the style of French chansons though this doesn’t mean the piano part is straightforward!. I like the simplicity of this approach because many of these songs are just gorgeous and Christina sings them with beauty and humour and, in some places, considerable agility coupled to a command of standard international French, Acadien and Poitevin. She really has a lovely rich yet flexible instrument. Gionet is a very sympathetic and accomplished accompanist too.
Unruly Sun is a song cycle in 19 parts with music by Matthew Ricketts (left) and words by Mark Campbell (below). It’s inspired by Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature and was performed last night in Mazzoleni Hall by tenor Karim Sulayman accompanied by piano and string quintet. I was much more affected by this piece than I expected to be. The text covers a lot of ground; Jarman’s cottage at Dungeness with it’s bleak shingle beach and nuclear power station, AIDS and the loss of friends, a bad porn movie and, of course, Jarman’s garden (which also of course inspired 
The 21C Afterhours concert in Temerty Theatre last night featured a candle lit performance by a varied ensemble of conservatory students conducted by Brian Current. Brian did a great job of introducing the music; contextualizing it and suggesting what the audience might listen for. That could maybe be done more often with complex contemporary music.
I have now had a chance to listen to the new SACD release of the 1965 Solti recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre. (For some reason Das Rheingold hasn’t arrived yet). I’m not going to do a detailed review of the performance since pretty much everything that could be said about it has been, and by people better qualified than me. As you might expect for a recording twice voted “recording of the century”. I’ve also already written about the technical details of the new transfer in 
Here’s what I’m looking forward to in February plus a few gigs I can’t make:
Yggdrasil is a new record by the Norwegian women’s choir Cantus conducted by Tove Ramlo-Ystad. There are eleven works on the record by various composers and all inspired, more or less loosely. by the idea of the World Ash Tree of Norse legend. Sometimes they are a fairly literal telling of some episode from myth, other times they explore broader ideas around a tree that lasts for a long time, but not for ever, and contains within it its own destruction and the seed of its rebirth. So, themes of humanity and Earth’s place in the Cosmos, the destructiveness of war, greed and climate change all have their place.
operaramblings 