I think a lot of my motivation for listening to The Beauty of Innuendos was a desire to learn what on Earth the composer, Frank Felice, meant by “consonant adiatonicism”. I’m still not sure I really know. In any event there’s some enjoyable music on the record though I did find it a bit of a mixed bag.
There are four “song cycles” on the record. The first is Four Songs of Jennifer Haines which sets four texts about the poet’s break up with her (female) lover in the wastes of Montana, thus creating a new genre of High Plains lesbian break up song. I wasn’t much enamoured of this piece. It’s workmanlike but neither the texts nor the melodic, largely tonal setting really did it for me.
Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango is a CD of songs based on the recollections of Holocaust survivors. Some of the songs deal with events during the Holocaust and others with the trauma of survivors. There are two main sources for the lyrics. One is the Baycrest Holocaust Surviviors Poetry Project facilitated by Dr. Paula David. The poems produced during that process were published in 1995 and adapted for this project. Other songs are based on the writings of Holocaust survivor Molly Applebaum who escaped by being buried under a barn in a small wooden box. The English texts have been adapted for this project by Dan Rosenberg and translated into Yiddish, others were originally written in Polish and remain in that tongue.
January is looking quite promising on both the music and theatre front but there’s not a lot of opera… Here’s what’s in my agenda.
2022 was the year when live performance in Toronto rose from the dead. It almost didn’t happen though. It’s a bit weird to remember just how strangely 2022 started. The theatres and concert halls had reopened in late 2021 and it looked like “normality” was returning. Some venues had masking policies or vaccine mandates and there were some “50%” performances but my calendar was starting to look something like pre plague. Then the government lost its marbles. Two weeks after a spike in COVID cases and at a point where all the indicators were actually heading south at the speed of a Messerschmidt in a power dive they closed everything down again. And although the shutdown was brief it was extremely disruptive causing all manner of cancellation and rescheduling. But get going again we did eventually and here’s a summary of the best things that came my way in 2022. 
operaramblings 