Tag Archives: arnott

On a Darkling Plain

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Joel-Allison

Joel Allison

The Talisker Players latest offering is a concert titled On a Darkling Plain.  It’s an ambitious program of 20th and 21st century music interspersed, in the Talisker manner, with selected texts read (very expressively) by Stewart Arnott.

It kicks off with Samuel Barber’s 1931 setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.  It’s a dark and evocative piece for a 21 year old and was sensitively performed by baritone Joel Allison supported by violinists Michelle Ordorico and Andrew Chung, Talisker music director Mary McGeer on viola and Laura Jones on cello.  Allison is very young and hasn’t been seen much in Toronto but he seems to have the hallmarks of a lieder singer.  He’s expressive and attentive to the text, has an attractive voice but can summon up a surprising amount of volume when he needs it.  I was impressed.

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Blah, blah, blah, blah

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Alex Dobson_spring 2014The final show of the season for the Talisker Players, at Trinity St. Paul’s last night, was titled A Poet’s Love and featured baritone Alexander Dobson and actor Stewart Arnott in the usual Talisker format of alternating music and readings on a theme.  The first musical piece was John Beckwith’s Love Lines which took five pieces ranging from Handel’s Where’er you walk to Gershwin’s Blah, Blah, Blah and presented them with the vocal line cleaving straightforwardly to the melody with the accompaniment “deconstructed” into “fragments” for violin, viola, cello and double bass.  It’s a rather disturbing piece, especially when one knows the source material well.  I’d like to hear it again.  It was given an honest and engaging presentation by Dobson and the strings.

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