First some additional February shows
- On the 23rd at Harbourfront Centre Art of Time Ensemble are presenting Music from the Weimar Republic.
- On the 25th VOICEBOX have a concert performance of Verdi’s Ernani at the St. Lawrence Centre.
Opera
- Opera York are presenting Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on March 1st and 3rd.
- March 14th to 17th UoT Opera are doing Massenet’s Cendrillon at a to be determined location.
- March 20th and 22nd at Koerner Hall, the Glenn Gould School spring opera is Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. That one has me excited!
Tuesday night at Heliconian Hall was the time and place for a concert curated by, and largely performed by, Confluence Concerts’ young associate artists; the KöNG duo. KöNG consists of two Toronto-Hong Kong percussionists; Bevis Ng and Hoi Tong Keung, pursuing doctoral studies in Toronto. They were supported on some numbers by Ryan Davis (viola) and Ben Finley (double bass).
Cantilena is a CD of art songs by various composers arranged for soprano, harp and cello. It’s an interesting twist on music that one is likely to be fairly (sometimes very) familiar with in the usual voice and piano format. It’s a generous disk with nineteen songs in all. The composers featured are Debussy, Duparc, Fauré, Massenet, Tosti, Tedeschi, Richard Strauss, Gregory and Villa-Lobos. The performers are soprano Gillian Zammit, harpist Britt Arend and cellist Frank Camilleri. Arend and Camilleri are principals with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra.
Layla Claire is one of a handful of young Canadian singers making something of a splash on both sides of the Atlantic with major roles in Glyndebourne, Zürich, Toronto and Salzburg and an upcoming Pamina at the Met. Her debut recital CD Songbird, with pianist Marie-Eve Scarfone, was recently issued on the ATMA Classique label. It’s an interesting and varied collection of songs though never straying very far from familiar recital territory. It’s tilted towards French (Gounod, Chausson, Debussy, Fauré, Bizet) and German (Wolf, Strauss, Brahms, Liszt) repertoire but there’s also Quilter, Barber, Argento and Britten (the comparatively rare Seascape which is, oddly, omitted from the CD liner).
Yesterday’s lunchtime concert in the RBA featured mezzo Lauren Eberwin, soprano Danika Lorèn and pianists Hyejin Kwon and Stéphane Meyer. Lauren and Hyejin were first up with Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. I’ve rarely seen this sung by a singer so obviously “in” the story. There was a real sense of first person storytelling as well as rather good singing. I thought Lauren sounded surprisingly sopranoish in the first seven numbers but they are optimistic and happy and a bright coloured voice seems apt. She certainly darkened it nicely for the final grim song. Hyejin was a most sympathetic partner.
Last night’s Soundstreams Koerner Hall presentation; Magic Flutes was an interesting experience. Aside from interesting (mostly) contemporary flute pieces it was very much an experiment in different ways of staging a concert. I’m all for breaking down the conventions of Mahlerian solemnity and I think experimentation is great. It’s in the nature of taking risks though that some things don’t quite work.
operaramblings 