Friday evening at Heliconian Hall saw the second of two performances of Confluence Concerts’ Sighs Too Deep For Words: A Canadian Valentine. It was an all Canadian concert featuring songs and spoken word including two world premieres and a performance of Omar Daniel’s 2005 piece Neruda Canzones.
The spoken word pieces, read beautifully by Alison Beckwith, ranged from Lucy Maud Montgomery to Margaret Atwood. Some pieces straightforwardly celebrated romantic love and others came at it a bit sideways! Songs by Canadian composers were well represented With Derek Holman, Jeffrey Ryan and John Beckwith all represented. Anaïs Kelsey-Verdecchia performed (with Christopher Bagan) her own setting of “The Lark in the Clear Air” and Patricia O’Callaghan gave us her setting of “Some by Fire” with Chris again at the pianio, Andrew Downing on bass and a backing group. So many styles! No-one could say that Canadian music is samey or boring. Continue reading
The final programme of Confluence Concerts season took place at Heliconian Hall on Wednesday night. It was billed as The Confluence Songbook and, if there was a theme, it was about doing live versions of music that had been streamed during the Plague. But really by the time we saw it it had outgrown that. For, in addition to the full line up of Confluence artistic associates there was a raft of guests which resulted in a fairly lengthy and very eclectic programme. 
Thursday night’s Conflunce Concerts show at Heliconian Hall was titled Songs from Toronto and consisted of songs by Toronto singer-songwriters arranged for a larger ensemble by Andrew Downing. And by larger ensemble I mean various combinations of string trio, double bass, guitars of sundry varieties, vibraphone and piano. To further spice things up some of the songs were sung by Teiya Kasahara who is a rather different Fach than the average singer in this genre.
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