Tag Archives: copland

L’Histoire du Soldat

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Most music lovers have probably heard the music from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat in either orchestral or chamber arrangement but it’s rare for the work to be given in its full staged form but that’s how it was presented (more or less) last night at Koerner Hall by the Toronto Summer Music Festival in association with LooseTEA Music Theatre.  That form includes a narrator, an actor (originally three actors, nowadays usually just a single actor/narrator) and dancer.  Plus, of course, the band; violin and bass, clarinet and bassoon, cornet and trombone, piano.

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Not a review

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This afternoon I saw Gerry Finley and Julius Drake in recital at Koerner Hall.  In other words, two supreme exponents of the art of lieder at the top of their game in a hall with near perfect acoustics.  They performed Beethoven and Schubert settings of Goethe texts, some Tchaikovsky and some Rachmaninoff, which gave Julius ample opportunity to show off.  They finished up with settings of folky things by Copland, Barber, Respighi and Britten.  The last was The Crocodile; a very silly and funny piece I hadn’t heard before.  The encore was by Healey Willans and Gerry gave a very nice plug for the Canadian Art Song Project.  Insert standard list of adjectival phrases describing top notch singing and accompaniment.  My humble scribing is not worthy.

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Not taken today.  My phone pictures were awful

Osborne and Haji

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SONY DSCYesterday’s free lunchtime concert should have been the first opportunity to see Simone Osborne and Gordon Bintner in recital together but, sadly, Gordon had the lurgy so, if you want to see them perform together you will just have to go and see L’elisir d’amore at the COC.  Fortunately Andrew Haji was able to jump in at short notice.  Not such a bad guy to have on the bench!

Andrew started out with Santoliquido’s I canti della sera.  I had heard him sing these before at Mazzoleni but it was good to hear them again.  Genuine Italian art song isn’t all that common and these show the voice off nicely.  There was both some lovely limpid singing and plenty of power when needed.  He’s a pretty good story teller too.  He also gave us the three Duparc songs that he and Liz Upchurch, once again at the piano,  gave us earlier in the year.  Again the standout was Le manoir de Rosemonde, a most beautiful and haunting song given the full treatment here.

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Americans in Paris

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There Toronto Summer Music Festival, inevitably Americas themed this year, opened with a concert called Americans in Paris featuring music by Copland, Gershwin and Bolcom.  It was a pretty mixed bag.  It opened with Copland’s Appalachian Spring played by 13 members of the TSMF Ensemble and conducted by Tania Miller.  It’s not a work I’m particularly fond of but here it was particularly unfocussed and soporific.

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Sondra Radvanovsky at the Zoomerplex

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sondraSo, Sondra made a live broadcast for 96.3 FM at lunchtime today.  It was one of those media things where the audience was aggressively stage managed by the floor staff but otherwise quite enjoyable.  Also there was lunch which was a definite plus.  What was a bit annoying was the overall vibe of “fitting opera into the programming for old folks”.  Way to build a new audience there!

The performance was varied and interesting with Sondra on good form and the ever reliable Rachel Andrist on piano.  There was no printed progrmme or lyric sheets so I’m going from my hastily scribbled notes but we got some Rachmaninov songs, which suited Sondra really well plus arias from Trovatore, Norma, Tosca and Andrea Chenier plus a Verdi song, Copland’s Simple Gifts and I could have danced all night.  Nothing if not varied!  It’s interesting how dropping from big opera rep to something like the Copland can be astonishingly effective.  Simplicity and lack of artifice has it’s charms.  And, yes, I want to hear her Norma and, if rumour is half way correct, probably will in the not too distant future.

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Bel Canto bliss

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annachristycdarioacostaIt’s one of the nicer things about Toronto that from time to time  a visiting star at the COC will agree to do a free lunchtime recital in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.  Today was the turn of American coloratura Anna Christy who is currently singing the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor.  It was an exceptionally fun sixty minutes.

I was a little worried when she and accompanist Liz Upchurch just took their places and started.  I need not have been.  We got a set of three bel canto art songs that were full of virtuosity and personality.  The sheer technical skill was obvious but so was the range of tone colour.  Those doomandgloomists who think modern singers can’t act with the voice should listen to Ms. Christy.  It’s all there.  After that opening she did open up and explain the middle part of her set; pieces by Bolcom and Copland that she sees as natural successors to bel canto.  Sung with exquisite attention to the texts one can see her point.  She was also very funny and very human.  I do like modern divas so much more than the one’s who get in a snit because the caviar isn’t the right temperature.

She finished up with arias by Rossini, Handel and Donizetti, all sung stylishly and with tasteful ornamentation.  It was really classy.  And to round things out her parents were there and it was her dad’s seventieth and there are no prizes for guessing how things finished up.