March 2023

march2023Here’s a look ahead to March.

March 3rd and 5th, Opera York are presenting Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts.  Details are here.  Also on the 5th at 1pm Opera Revue are playing a new venue; The Aviary in the Canary District.  (They are playing another new venue, Granite Brewery, on the 12th.  Opera Revue your source for craft beer!)  And the following night at 7.30pm it’s AtG’s Opera Pub at the Drake at 7.30pm.

From the 9th to the 12th it’s UoT Opera’s spring offering at the MacMillan Theatre.  This year it’s Arthur (not George) Benjamin’s A Tale of Two Cities.  Benjamin is probably the only opera composer to be shot down by Hermann Göring.  I’m not sure what, if anything, that says about his music.

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New Works

The 21C Festival gave us new works by Ian Cusson and Stewart Goodyear yesterday afternoon.  The first half of the programme was three works by Ian Cusson inspired by paintings by Hieronymus Bosch.  The first was The Garden of Earthly Delights scored for piano and violin and played by Duo Concertante (Timothy Steeves and Nancy Dahn).  Slow melodic, evocative sections are interspersed with livelier, somewhat ecstatic, sections using the upper ranges of the violin extensively.  I think it effectively catches the various moods of Bosch’s complex triptych.

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January 2023

januarty wordcloudJanuary is looking quite promising on both the music and theatre front but there’s not a lot of opera…  Here’s what’s in my agenda.

January 11th to 14th the TSO have four performances of a concert that includes Mozart’s Requiem with a good looking line up of soloists.

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21C 2022/23

21c_wordmark_carrier_croppedThe line up for this year’s (and a bit of next’s) 21C at the Royal Conservatory has been announced.  The full line up is here.

I’m particularly interested in the Kronos Quartet concerts on December 8th and 9th; especially the latter which features “Music for Change” including a world premiere of a piece by Tanya Tagaq.

I’ll also want to see three of the concerts in the new year.  On January 21st at 5pm there’s a Cinq à Sept concert in Temerty Hall which, among other things, features a new song cycle by Lembit Beecher and Lisa Balkan.  The following day at 3pm in Koerner Hall there’s a concert of new works by Ian Cusson and Stewart Goodyear.  Finally, on January 28th at 10pm in Temerty Hall Brian Current and the GGS New Music Ensemble have a candlelit concert of night related works including music by Bekkah Simms and R. Murray Schafer.

Lots of good stuff!

Truth and Reconciliation at Koerner Hall

Yesterday was the second National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.  The Royal Conservatory and Koerner Hall marked it with a free concert curated by Denise Bolduc, Mervon Mehta and Sarain Fox who doubled up as an extremely engaging host for the evening.

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The Drawing Room

Confluence Concerts opened their season yesterday at 918 Bathurst with a concert featuring a new work by Ian Cusson and André Alexis.  We’ll come to that because before it there was about 45 minutes of music doing what Confluence does; the relatively unexpected.  There were arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments of songs by the likes of Kate Bush, Coldplay and Neil Young.  There was an instrumental version of Bruce Cockburn’s Pacing the Cage (Larry Beckwith – violin, Andrew Downing – bass) and a Mozart violin sonata (Beckwith and Cusson) plus an intriguing percussion solo by Bevis Ng and more.  It featured the usual suspects; Larry Beckwith, Andrew Downing, Suba Sankaran, Dylan Bell and Patricia O’Callaghan plus Messrs Cusson and Ng and it was fun.

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A couple more listings…

These two slipped through the cracks:

choralsplendourSeptember 21st at 8pm Soundstreams have a choral concert at Koerner Hall.  It’s called Choral Splendour and features Soundstreams’ Choir 21 with Meghan Lindsey, Rebecca Cuddy, Owen McCausland and Alain Coulombe in a programme of music by Frehner, Pärt and Vivier.  Vivier’s Zipangu will be accompanied by a live dancer and a film created by Michael Greyeyes.

sarainfoxSeptember 30th also at Koerner Hall at 8pm there’s a free concert to commemorate National Truth and Reconciliation Day.  Sarain Fox MCs a mixture of the solemn (testimony from a residential school survivor) and the less solemn (Tomson Highway with excerpts from Songs in the Key of Cree), drumming, dancing and the piano quintet version of Ian Cusson’s Marilyn Dumont songs sung by Rebecca Cuddy with the New Orford Quartet and philip Chiu.  If you haven’t heard these songs you should and if you have, but haven’t heard this arrangement, see them anyway because this is the best version!  This show is free but ticketed and tickets are going superfast.

The Americas

Last night’s Toronto Summer Music offering in Walter Hall was American themed in the broadest sense.  The New Orford Quartet kicked things off with three pieces for string quartet.  The first was Piazzolla’s Tango Ballet in Bragato’s arrangement for string quartet.  It’s kind of tango/jazz fusion and great fun.  Jessie Montgomery’s Strum is a sort of homage to the southern American tradition of a different kind of string instrument.  Lots of complex pizzicato and other effects.  Carmen Braden’s Raven Conspiracy is a three movement work for spoken voice and quartet dealing with both the mythical and biological raven.  It’s playful and extremely virtuosic.  I was struck by the fact that the New Orfords are not just a very fine ensemble but a very flexible one.  Nothing seems to faze them!

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Music Garden

Rebecca Cuddy-p-500Today at 4pm in The Music Garden (Harbourfront) there’s a free concert of music by Métis composers performed by Rebecca Cuddy and the Wood and Wire Quartet.  Here’s the full program:

N. Weisensel, Three Songs from Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North, book and text by SM Steele

“The Mending of Violence Song”
“Beneath the Endless Azure Sky”
“You Come and Go”

T. Patrick Carrabré, Métis Songs (2022)

Chanson de la Gornouillèr (from a song by Pierre Falcon)

My People Will Sleep… (story chosen by the soloist)

Since When (poem by Gregory Scofield)

I. Cusson, Five Songs on Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2017) (new arrangement for voice and string quartet)

Letter to Sir John A. MacDonald
The Red & White
Helen Betty Osborne
Half-Human/Half Devil (Halfbreed) Muse
The Devil’s Language

Sorry for the short notice but I only just heard about it.