Pursue Peace; Contemporary Chamber Music by Canadian Jewish Composers is the first recording by the Jewish Music at York initiative of Toronto’s York University. It features three works by living Canadian Jewish composers; Sid Robinovitch, Noam Lemish and James Rolfe. Full review at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: New Focus Recordings FCR48
Lise Davidsen’s latest CD with Ed Gardner and the LPO features arias from five Verdi operas; Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, Don Carlo and Aida. It’s pretty good. Full review at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: Decca 4872241
Le Récital des Anges is a CD of Schubert songs orchestrated by Ian Cusson and Hector Berlioz plus the orchestral version of Ian’s Le Récital des Anges; a setting of six poems by Émile Nelligan. The full review is at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: aparté music AP446
Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher is a rather peculiar work. It’s scored for orchestra, adult and children’s choruses, solo singers and actors. There’s a lot of spoken word, usually accompanied by the orchestra or interleaved with singing. It’s important too, as Jeanne and her confessor, Brother Dominic, are both spoken roles. The text is a mix of French and Latin and the mood varies wildly from sombre, to grand, to liturgical, to reflective, to farcical. Each scene (there are eleven plus a prologue) is very much it’s own thing. The music is basically tonal, with some chromaticism, but it varies widely in mood to suit the needed atmosphere for each scene.
The work under consideration here is Francesca Caccini’s Il liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina. Written as a court entertainment in Florence in 1625 it’s almost certainly the first work of its kind by a woman. It was commissioned by the two female regents of Florence; Christine of Lorraine and Maria Maddalena of Austria, for the visit of Wladyslaw, Prince of Poland and Sweden. Can it really be thought of as an opera though? It’s from that period when gentlemanly (and ladylike) scholars were trying to reconstruct what they believed Classical Greek drama had been like, though in this case the theatrical elements are mixed with dances (that would have been performed by the ladies and gentlemen of the Court) and even an equestrian ballet which might prove tricky in a modern opera house!
Out of Dawn’s Mind is a setting, by Edmund Finnis, of five poems by Alice Oswald. It’s scored for soprano (here Ruby Hughes) and string orchestra (here the 17 strong The Manchester Collective; dir: Rakhi Singh). The poems deal with light, water, time and the experience of coming into contact with the world. The feeling is intimate and meditative. The vocal line is high but quite relaxed in tempo. The accompaniment is elegiac with brooding and shimmering patches. It’s rather beautiful but not at all dramatic.
I don’t often listen to CDs released on Australian jazz labels but I did come across tripudiis sonis variis from the Melbourne trio Hyperbaroq and was quite intrigued. It’s a set of performances of, mainly, Italian baroque music. Composers such as Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Strozzi feature but there are also a couple of earlier pieces in Latin and Galician and two English songs; one by Henry Purcell and a Robert Johnson setting of Ben Jonson.
This is not your typical HIP baroque performance. Hyperbaroq’s style is highly improvisatory and incorporates a lot of atypical instruments as well as pre-recorded electronics. The results are interesting but the dominant style seems to be a kind of cool jazz sound. This is very evident in their version of Scarlatti’s O Cessate Di Piagarmi; which features saxophone and electric guitar along with vocals. Some other tracks are rather different though. Monteverdi’s Lamento Della Ninfa gets a much more experimental feeling treatment with lots of electronics and the 13th century Galician Ay Ondas Que Eu Vim Veer makes interesting use of nature sounds and electronic effects. There’s also a weirdly boppy but rather enjoyable version of Purcell’s Music for a While. It’s pretty varied though I think I could have used more up tempo, high energy material as it mostly feels pretty relaxed.
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The Deeps Have Music is a new record from mezzo Beth Taylor; a Cardiff Singer of the World finalist in 2023, and pianist Hamish Brown. It’s distinctly sea themed with songs predominantly in English with a few French and German numbers for variety.
It starts off with Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of My Lagan Love which is a rather lovely introduction to Taylor’s flexible but generally fairly dark mezzo. She is very versatile though as the next set; Hedwige Chretien’s Petits Poèmes du bord de L’Eau, demonstrates. These six short songs show that Taylor has a considerable palette of colours and moods. There’s some nice precise piano playing from Brown here too.
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The Way Appears is a CD by cellist duo Leah Plave and India Gailey. It consists of seven commissioned pieces by young(ish) Canadian composers who were asked to create pieces in which the two instruments function as equal partners rather than, say, as soloist and continuo. It’s a really varied and interesting collection providing a little over forty minutes of music.
Right up front there’s an interesting contrast between Emily Kennedy’s conversational but rather busy Triptych and Adam Vincent Clarke’s Voix Lointaines which is much more elegiac with some vocalisation thrown in.
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French tenor Cyrille Dubois has collected some of the better known Britten works “en français” for this recording. One normally hears these works performed by English singers in what is pretty much an “official” Britten style so I was intrigued to hear them interpreted by a native French speaker, albeit one with a track record of performing Britten’s operas, song cycles and choral works!
The first piece is the early Quatre chansons françaises, performed with orchestra in this case the Orchestre national de Metz Grand Est with David Reiland conducting. The singing here is quite stylish and distinctly French; perhaps a little more emphatic than one is accustomed too but it works. The orchestra copes admirably with the dense and colourful orchestral writing. It includes Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” with the famous opening “Les sanglots longs des violins” though in 1928 the composer could not have known the significance that line would assume later.
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