Known to Dreamers: Black Voices in Canadian Art Song is a new CD from Centrediscs and the Canadian Art Song Project containing Canadian art songs composed by or setting lyrics by Black Canadians, sung by Black Canadians. The first set on the disk is Robert Fleming’s The Confession Stone (Songs of Mary) which sets texts by Owen Dodson’s texts about the life of Christ from his mother’s point of view. It’s a very beautiful piece and must be in the running for the most performed Canadian song cycle of all time! Curiously though it’s only been recorded commercially once before (by Caroline Gélinas on ATMA Classique). The singer here is Measha Brueggergosman-Lee. She wouldn’t be my first choice for this piece but she sings it pretty well. I find her style a bit mannered but she’s accurate and her diction is good. Steven Philcox accompanies with great skill (as he does on all the tracks).
Tag Archives: alexis
Fifteen Dogs
I saw Marie Farsi’s adaptation for the stage of André Alexis novel Fifteen Dogs at Crow’s Theatre last night. I read the book back in the fall and was impressed. It’s a clever, witty, perceptive novel and I was very curious as to how it would translate to the stage; especial since most of the characters are dogs. Bottom line, it works wonderfully well.

The Drawing Room
Confluence Concerts opened their season yesterday at 918 Bathurst with a concert featuring a new work by Ian Cusson and André Alexis. We’ll come to that because before it there was about 45 minutes of music doing what Confluence does; the relatively unexpected. There were arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments of songs by the likes of Kate Bush, Coldplay and Neil Young. There was an instrumental version of Bruce Cockburn’s Pacing the Cage (Larry Beckwith – violin, Andrew Downing – bass) and a Mozart violin sonata (Beckwith and Cusson) plus an intriguing percussion solo by Bevis Ng and more. It featured the usual suspects; Larry Beckwith, Andrew Downing, Suba Sankaran, Dylan Bell and Patricia O’Callaghan plus Messrs Cusson and Ng and it was fun.


Let’s Stay Together
Last night’s virtual salon by Confluence; Let’s Stay Together, featured an extremely, if unsurprisingly, eclectic selection of music and poetry and some serious techno-wizardry. Two numbers featuring Suba Shankaran and her technical whizz husband Dylan Bell exemplified the techy side. Come Together was an overdubbed. live looped, east meets west version of the Lennon and McCartney number in which the pair built up layers of sound incrementally. Meditation Round, which rounded out the evening, was a moving new work by Suba dealing with how we need to move forward, not back, as life, perhaps, returns to some sort of normality. There was an almost 16th century quality to the music and the performance in which pretty much everyone took part remotely. Brilliant mixing and post production here backing up an extremely affecting work.

(Dido and Aeneas)x2
The decision by Toronto Masque Theatre to pair Purcell’s miniature opera, Dido and Aeneas, with James Rolfe and André Alexis’ piece on the lovers’ inner thoughts, Aeneas and Dido, paid off last night. It produced an evening of just the right length with two contrasting but complementary pieces working really well together.
