Here’s the news that’s arrived in my inbox this week.
Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts announced that from 2019 the DORA awards will be gender neutral. In categories where there has traditionally been “Best Performance by a Male” and “Best Performance by a Female” there will now be a single “Best Performance” award.
Last night’s Soundstreams concert at Trinity St. Paul’s riffed off the basic idea of Bach’s Musical Offering; getting musicians to create music on a theme with a high improvisory element. The line up was the Gryphon Trio (Roman Borys, cello; James Parker, piano; Annalee Patipatanakoon, violin), SlowPitchSound (aka Cheldon Paterson); turntables, Dafnis Prieto; drum kit, Scott Good; trombone, conductor and Roberto Occhipiniti; bass. Things started out with SlowPitchSound remixing prerecorded fragments of the Musical Offering with live interventions by the trio. It was interesting and fun though whether it revealed “secret messages” I really couldn’t tell. The turntables reappeared between items in the rest of the program in very short fragments that seemed too cursory to have much to say.
Todays concert in the UoT’s Thursdays at Noon series at Walter Hall was given by baritone Giles Tomkins, soprano Elizabeth McDonald, pianist Kathryn Tremills, clarinettist Peter Stoll and cellist Lydia Munchinsky. The music they played was sometimes in familiar combinations of players and sometimes very much not. Hence the title.
Not a relation of JS, CPE or PDQ but the venue for today’s lunchtime presentation of two JS Bach cantatas by mezzo Lauren Eberwein and organist Hyejin Kwon with violinists Liz Johnston and Rezan Onen-Lapointe, violist Keith Hamm, cellist Paul Widner, bassist Robert Speer and oboeist Mark Rogers. The two pieces were Ich habe genug, BWV 82 and Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust BWV 170; both works about the approach of death and the soul’s yearning for rest and salvation.
This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Divine Karina is a compilation of tracks from previously released Gauvin records on the ATMA Classiques label. There’s Purcell, plenty of Handel, Bach and other baroque composers with ventures into Mozart, Mahler and even Britten. Accompaniment is, mostly, by an assortment of Quebec period bands though the Orchestre Métropolitain with Nézet-Séguin put in an appearance for the Sehr behaglich from Mahler’s Fourth. There’s a previously unreleased track as a bonus; a duet with her Las Vegas based sister in a sort of lounge jazz style.
It’s getting a bit busier again. This afternoon there are a couple of concerts. At 2pm in Mazzoleni Hall you can catch Mireille Asselin and Brett Polegato with Peter Tiefenbach and Rachel Andrist in a painting themed program of lieder, artsongs and chansons called Le travail du peintre. At 4.30pm at Metropolitan United Church Bach’s Mass in B Minor meets German film maker Bastian Clevé’s film The Sound of Eternity. The soloists are Marjorie Maltais, Geoff Sirett, Jennifer Krabbe and Charles Sy plus the Orpheus Choir, Chorus Niagara and the Talisker Players. I suppose it would just about be possible to do both…
Winner – Kim Leeds
This was a vocal competition with a twist. The repertoire was all baroque and the prizes were the soloist spots in upcoming performances of Zelenka’s Missa Omnium Sanctorum. To some extent that dictated the format with three bass-baritones, three tenors and three altos (two mezzos and a countertenor) competing and a prize winner in each triad. Each singer had to offer the appropriate piece from the Zelenka Mass plus a piece of their choice by each of Bach and Handel. I did wonder whether I would get through an afternoon of twenty seven baroque vocal pieces but aided by free pizza and cookies I made it. At least, for once, I was at a singing competition where nobody would be singing Pierrot’s Tanzlied.
Tafelmusik’s opening concert of the season, The Human Passions, was structured around the idea that baroque composers use the soloist in a piece; instrumentalist or vocalist, to explore an emotion and that, in the baroque world, from this point of view, the human voice is just another instrument to be explored/exploited. At least I think that’s more or less what Rodolfo Richter said in his introduction.
I think it’s about time I started doing a weekly preview of upcoming Toronto events. I’m going to try and make this in a regular slot, probably Sunday, so this is a bit late. The main event this week is the opening of Tafelmusik’s season with a concert featuring mezzo Mireille Lebel. It’s a pretty mixed line up. Lebel will perform arias from Vivaldi’s Il Farnace, and Handel’s Alcina, Ariodante, and Rinaldo. Dominic Teresi performs Vivaldi’s Bassoon Concerto in F Major, RV 485, and Rodolfo Richter performs his own violin transcription of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052. The opening bash is tomorrow night at 7pm with repeats at 8pm on Friday and Saturday and a matinée on Sunday. Trinity St. Paul’s of course.
Last night I was fortunate enough to be at a musical evening organised by Jeunesses Musicales Ontario. The umbrella organisation has come a long way since being founded during WW2 as an anti-Nazi youth movement (*). In Ontario it’s main activity is promoting musical events for young people and providing performance opportunities for young artists; notably an annual song recital tour. You may recall that I wrote about the kick off of the latest one in which Simone Osborne and Anne Larlee are performing across Canada with a show that includes a specially commissioned piece by Brian Current. Continue reading
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