I guess I’ve learned never to expect the predictable from Emily D’Angelo (except for the black clothes and boots). Her new album; freezing, is as unexpected as enargeia was four years ago. This album is even less “classical”. The seventeen tracks cover a range of genres. I think I’d classify them as contemporary art song, traditional folk song, singer/songwriter covers and English renaissance. All in all there is a total of 47 minutes of music. Continue reading
Picture a Day Like This is the latest operatic collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp (Written on Skin, Lessons in Love and Violence). It’s basically an hour long chamber opera written for five singers and chamber orchestra and it’s now been recorded for CD by Nimbus.
The basic plot line is that a child has died but her mother can revive her if, within 24 hours, she can obtain a sleeve button from a truly happy person. She is given an itinerary to follow to find the likely candidates. In the course of six scenes she encounters two lovers whose relationship is apparently idyllic until the question of what “open” means comes up. (It’s possibly the first serious use of the idea of polyamory in the modern sense in an opera.) There’s an artisan who is superficially happy though he turns out to be going nuts because he’s been replaced by a machine. There’s a composer who is immensely successful but full of self doubt and a collector who owns everything he admires but is utterly alone. The only truly happy person is the enigmatic Zabelle… who turns out not to exist. Continue reading
I first came across the music of Errollyn Wallen in a recent recital by Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton. There was a quality in her music that reminded me of some other composers of Caribbean origin writing about the immigrant experience in Canada. Wallen is from Belize but now lives in Scotland (in a lighthouse no less) and her music is quite varied. Unusually, besides being a classically trained composer, she also sings while accompanying herself on the piano and the works she has written for that genre definitely have a singer/songwriter vibe.
The second disk in pianist Malcolm Martineau’s project to record all the Brahms songs will soon be available. It features twenty nine songs for low voice with, as far as i could tell, no theme. All the works have titles like Fünf Gesänge Op.72 which actually starts the disk.
The singing is shared between mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann. Both are wonderful singers with terrific artistry and sensitive treatment of text. With Martineau at the piano it’s hard to imagine these relatively little performed songs getting better performances.
Rooms of Elsinore is a new CD of music related to Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet. Those familiar with the opera will quickly recognise the sound worlds of all five pieces. Two began life as “character studies” for Ophelia and Gertrude respectively and so set words by Matthew Jocelyn. The first, And once I played Ophelia is scored for soprano and chamber orchestra. Some readers may recall Barbara Hannigan performing it with the TSO in 2019. Here it’s performed by Jennifer France with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the composer. It’s a tough sing with some very high sections and staccato repeated phrases. She does a fine job. Continue reading
What I’m going to do here is use a review of a new CD by Toronto based musician/actor Ahmed Moneka as a means to explore some ideas about listening to music. But first the CD itself. It’s called Kanzafula and it contains nine tracks rooted in an unusual musical tradition; that of the Afro/Iraqi Sufis of Basra. These are descendants of people originally from the East coast of Africa who wound up in Basra in the 8th century CE and have maintained a rich musical tradition combining Arabic and African influences. Continue reading
Games of the Night Wind is a record of nocturnally inspired piano music played by Christina Petrowska Quilico. Much of the record is taken up by twelve nocturnes from Ontario composer David Jaeger. They are interspersed with pieces in similar mood by Polish composers Alexandre Tansman and Henryk Górecki and there is also a solitary piece by Tōru Takemitsu.
The Jaeger pieces were each inspired by a different piece of poetry dealing with some aspect of nocturnal experience. What they have in common is an abstracted, dreamy quality. Some are darker than others, some gentler and more lyrical and they are all interesting. Listening I was reminded of a comment of Brian Current’s to the effect that sometimes listening for things like melody, harmony and rhythm is less useful than listening for texture and I think that’s true of these pieces. They are all deeply textured but in different ways. They are played with great sensitivity.
Project Earth: The Blue Chapter is the first in a projected series of CDs from the Iris Trio (Christine Carter – clarinet, Anna Petrovna – piano, Zoë Martin-Doike – viola) dealing with environmental issues. This one blends music by Florian Hoefner with poems by Don McKay. The longest piece on the CD is the multi-movement Bird Island Suite inspired by the bird life of nesting islands around Newfoundland but really dealing with broader issues of how we interact with and influence the natural world for good or ill. Usually the latter. Continue reading
Les Génies ou les Caractères de l’Amour is an opera/ballet of 1736 by one Mademoiselle Duval who was 22 at the time. Almost nothing is known about Duval except that she was at one time a chorus member at the Royal Opera in Paris. It seems reasonable to deduce that she was from a family of professional musicians and that’s how she got her training. FWIW Les Génies was only the second opera by a woman to be produced by the Royal Opera. It’s recently been recorded for CD under the auspices of Château de Versailles Spectacles. Continue reading
Saint-Saëns Déjanire, of 1911, was his last opera. The plot is basically the same as Handel’s Hercules. Déjanire is infuriated by Hercule’s infatuation with Iole so he gives him a poisoned robe; itself a gift from the Centaur Charon, which kills him. There are a few plot tweaks. Iole is in love with Philoctète and agrees to marry Hercule to save his life. But, basically classic, simple plot.
Musically it’s tonal and elegant. It was well received by the critics who, correctly, pointed out that it looked backwards to Gluck and Spontini and owed little or nothing to Wagner. Premiering when it did; Petrouchka was playing in Paris and it was two years after the premier of Strauss’ Elektra, it seemed to belong to an earlier period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the wake, a few years later, of events louder, more dramatic and more dissonant than any musical composition it rather disappeared from the repertoire. Continue reading
operaramblings 