The second concert in the OPUS IV series, which took place on Tuesday evening at the Arts and Letters Club, had a similar structure to Sunday evening. The concert was anchored around a major, well known, work. In this case Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with the rest of the programme featuring less familiar material. It was given by the same five instrumentalists as Sunday; Stella Chen and Isabella Perron – violins, Matthew Lipman – viola, Brannon Cho – cello and Kevin Ahfat – piano.
The COC opened its 2023/24 season on Friday night with Matthew Ozawa’s production of Beethoven’s 1805 attack on corruption and tyranny; Fidelio. Ozawa gives it a contemporary American setting with all the action playing out on a sort of multi-level rotating cage. It’s pretty effective and efficient in allowing scenes to succeed each other quite seamlessly.
TSM Wednesday night in Walter Hall featured the Isidore Quartet (Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon – violins, Devin Moore – viola and Joshua McClendon – cello). The first half of the programme featured two new works plus the first four fugues from Bach’s Art of the Fugue.
This year’s Toronto Summer Music; theme “Metamorphosis”, kicked off on Thursday evening in a packed Koerner Hall. It was TSM at its best; the concept a bit odd, even a bit mad, the execution brilliant and the result exciting and very enjoyable. Basically take two seriously virtuosic pianists and as the late, lamented Humphrey Lyttleton might have said “given then silly things to do”. Well they weren’t really silly, just a bit unusual.
Things are a bit sub fusc at the COC these days. The season reveal isn’t a glitzy gala with a big fight to grab the charcuterie. It isn’t even a 10am doughnuts and coffee presser in the RBA where the ghost of Robert Everett-Green could ask what happened to the promised new Canadian operas . It’s just an email arriving at the prescribed time. There isn’t even an embargoed press only version to let us get our ducks in a row before the broader public get the news. Such is life.
As part of music director Riccardo Muti’s final tour with the orchestra, the Chicago Symphony is coming to Toronto in February for the first time since 1914. It’s at Koerner too, so it’s a chance to see one of the world’s great orchestras in a really good acoustic. The dates are February 1st and 2nd 2023 and the programmes are:
Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography
Last night’s TSO program, conducted by Gustavo Gimeno, kicked off with three short pieces by Canadian composers. All were impressive. The first two; Adam Scime’s A Dream of Refuge and Bekah Simms’ Bite are reflections (to some at extent at least) on the pandemic. The Scime piece is lighter and brighter. There is uncertainty there but ultimately it seems to speak of hope. The Simms piece wis much darker with heavy percussion and blaring brass. A sense of uncertainty permeates the string writing. It’s quite disturbing. Roydon Tse’s Unrelenting Sorrow was written for those who have lost loved ones. It’s quite melodic and has strong contrasts between dramatic and more lyrical passages. Sorrowful perhaps but not unrelentingly so.
Almost six years to the day since his last appearance Bryn, now Sir Bryn, Terfel made it back to Koerner hall for a much anticipated recital; this time accompanied by Annabel Thwaite. The first set, partly setting up a Shakespeare theme for the evening, consisted of four songs by Schubert including “Trinklied” and “An Silvia”. It was followed by three of the the Quilter Shakespeare settings; “Come Away, Come Away, Death”, “O Mistress Mine” and “Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind”. The first half concluded with the Vier ernste Gesänge of Brahms. I think it’s fair to say that what we were hearing was not the Bryn that his considerable following in the hall expected. The artistry of interpretation was still there but something was up with the voice. It didn’t have the bloom I remembered and in places, especially with high notes, it just wasn’t happening. Was he a bit under the weather or was it the toll of the years and lots of Wagner? I don’t know but I really hope it was the former.
Yes, a real live concert at Koerner Hall; the first of 2022. Owing to the current restrictions it was quite a short concert with no interval (although the time it took the stage crew to set up for the second half there could have been!). The first piece was the premier of Goodyear’s Piano Quintet. It’s a very complex piece riffing off Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Stewart describes it better than I ever could:
“My piano quintet was commissioned by the Penderecki String Quartet (who played it with Stewart last night – JG) and the Canada Council for the Arts. It was composed in 2020 and pays homage to the spirit of Beethoven. The first movement is a passacaglia on the almost atonal eleven-note sequence from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The second movement is a Ländler, fused with gestures of rhythm and blues and calypso. The third movement is a fast toccata, sampling themes of Beethoven similarly to a hip-hop track. The last movement starts as a lament and ends with a glimmer of hope, the inspiration directly taken from the challenges of the pandemic and the need for Beethoven’s spirit during these tumultuous times.”
It’s a highly virtuosic piece requiring a lot of extended technique from the players and it’s pretty demanding on the listener. I would need to listen to it a couple more times to really “get” it.
It’s July 29th 1951; the opening night of the first Bayreuth Festival since the end of the war. Noted anti-Nazi Wilhelm Furtwängler will conduct the Festival Orchestra in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from the Festspielhaus. It will be broadcast live by Süddeutsche Rundfunk(*) and will be relayed by stations in Germany, Austria, France and Sweden. You are sitting in front of your valve radio because commercial transistor models are not yet on the market. You can’t record it to listen to later because tape reorders are almost as rare in 1951 as transistor radios.
operaramblings 