Tuesday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA was a really well thought out programme by two of the prize winners from last year’s Montreal International Music Competition; soprano Meredith Wolgemuth and pianist Jinhee Park. The first set was a nicely characterised version of the quite varied Grieg Sechs Lieder op.48. Most of these are fairly sentimental German Romantic texts but Meredith and Jinhee injected lightness and humour where it was appropriate in, for instance, “Lauf der Welt”.
This recent Centrediscs release contains 27 songs (a generous 76 minutes of music) written by Québecois singer and composer Lionel Daunais in the mid 20th century. The songs really fall into two distinct groups. Some are art songs written for concert hall performance while others are works in a more popular style written for a wider audience. The art songs are very French; the others distinctly of Quebec.
The art songs set quite a wide range of texts but there’s a definite leaning towards the symbolist poets of the early 20th century. There’s some Tristan Klingsor and more Paul Fort; a poet rather under-represented in song given his stature and huge output. There’s even one text in similar style written by Daunais himself. Besides the symbolists there’s some Ronsard and Boileau and even a translation of a 13th century Arabic text. There’s some variation in these songs but a strong tendency to languorous settings of poems about unrequited love though sometimes the subject matter becomes more surreal as in Fort’s “Le diable dans le nuit” or the setting more up tempo as in the anonymous “L’innocente”. In many ways these Daunaissongs are not very different from much of the output of composers like Poulenc or Duparc. Fans of that style of chanson will likely enjoy these songs too. Continue reading
This year’s new work from the Canadian Art Song Project, Marjan Mozetich’s Enchantments of Gwendolyn, was premiered yesterday in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. It’s a setting of four really interesting poems by Gwendolyn MacEwen for mezzo-soprano and piano. The first and last pieces; Sunday Morning Sermon and A Coin for the Ferryman are rather beautifulmeditative pieces and frame the two inner songs nicely. These inner two, for me, was where much of the interest really lay. Waiting for You was a blues inflected number of considerable interest, in some ways recalling Michael Tippett but in others entirely original. The third piece; The Tao of Physics, is a setting of a piece linking sub-atomic physics with the cosmology of The Vedas. That’s not exactly an original idea but it’s always an interesting one to explore and, by accident or design, Mozetich does so in a manner that somewhat recall John Adams’ treatment of the same basic ideas. We get a long, impassioned, vocal line floating over an arpeggiated piano accompaniment. It’s impressive and effective. All four pieces were beautifully performed by Allyson McHardy and Adam Sherkin. McHardy’s warm. dark mezzo seemed perfect for the material and listening was like wallowing in hot chocolate (more lurid similes did suggest themselves but this is a family blog). She can sing the blues too. Who would have thought it.
operaramblings 