The line up for 21C for 2026 has been announced. This is always one of the city’s best programmes of contemporary and related music. Details… Continue reading
21C 2026
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Tag Archives: 21c
The Journal of Helène Berr
Helène Berr was a student at the Sorbonne in the 1940s. She was musical, well read and kept a journal. One looks at her photograph and one sees exactly what one expects; regular features, not too much makeup, nicely cut hair. All in all a typical young middle class Parisienne of the period. But she was Jewish and, ultimately deported to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she was killed just days before British troops liberated the camp on 15th April 1945.
Late night in Temerty
Always one of my favourite concerts, the annual late night one in Temerty Theatre which forms part of the 21C festival. As usual on Saturday night Brian Current was conducting the GGS New Music Ensemble. This time it was two new Canadian works plus a 1994 piece by Luca Francesconi. Continue reading
Imani Winds and Michelle Carr
The opening concert of this year’s 21C festival was given by the Imani Winds (Brandon George Rule – flutes, Toyin Spellman-Diaz – oboe, Mark over – clarinet, Kevin Newton – horn and Monica Ellis – bassoon) and pianist Michelle Carr in Mazzoleni Hall on Saturday evening. It was a programme of 20th and 21st century works with a kind of French/jazz theme.
January 2025
So what’s in store for Toronto early in the New Year?
- December 29th 2024 and January 3rd and 4th 2025, Toronto Operetta Theatre are presenting Kalman’s Countess Maritza at the Jane Mallett Theatre.
- Bad New Days are presenting Adam Paolozza’s Last Landscape; a meditation on environmental collapse, at Buddies in Bad Times. Preview is on the 12th with opening on the 14th and running until the 26th.
21C 2025
The 2025 edition of the 21C festival of contemporary music at the Royal Conservatory of Music basically runs from January 18th to 25th next year with an outlier in May. As usual it’s heavy on premières; World, North American and Canadian and there’s an intriguing mix of genres.
Fazil Say and friends
This year’s 21C Festival opened last night at Koerner Hall with Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say performing some of his works with the help of a few friends. It was a pretty varied evening considering all the works were by one person. The opening pieces Gezi Park 2 and Gezi Park 3 are reflections on the Gezi Park protests of 2013. The first is for solo piano and is by turns dramatic and meditative. It uses a fair amount of extended piano technique and is highly virtuosic with great rhythmic complexity. In the second piece the composer was joined by a string quartet (Scott and Lara St. John – violins, Barry Scxhiffman – viola and Winona Zelenka – cello) and mezzo-soprano Beste Kalender. This work was both expressive and dramatic building on the musical language of the first piece with the additional textures of the strings (more extended technique) and a lot of rather beautiful vocalise from Beste. It’s an impressive piece.
February 2024 – concerts and opera
Contemplating another production of “Carmen”
First a couple of 21C concerts inadvertently omitted from my January listings post. On the 19th in Koerner Hall there’s Fazil Say and friends (including Beste Kalender) in a programme of mostly Turkish music and in the late show in Temerty Theatre the following night Brian Current presents and conducts a concert titled Indigena.
So to February: Continue reading
Unruly Sun
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 Tm Albery’s Garden of Vanished Pleasures), and anger at Thatcher’s Britain and her indifference to those suffering from AIDS (c.f. Jarman’s The Last of England). These ideas are linked together by sections about plants and flowers and quotes from (I think) John Donne. So, the AIDS crisis and the burning tire fire of Thatcherism meets the Georgian tradition that links the Elizabethans to Edmund Blunden and beyond. It’s beautifully constructed and the somewhat minimalist, evocative and rather beautiful music supports without imposing itself. And the performance was stunning; beautiful singing, beautiful playing and cool projected images. Continue reading
Hymns to Night
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.
The first piece was Bekah Simms’ Foreverdark. It’s a ten minute concertino for amplified cello, ensemble and electronics playing homage to heavy metal. It’s scored for a quite a large group including strings, brass, woodwinds and lots of percussion including a drum kit. It starts out very abrasively then becomes somewhat more lyrical and the then the texture lightens up but it’s still pretty complex. David Liam Roberts was the soloist and did an excellent job.
operaramblings 