The Deeps Have Music is a new record from mezzo Beth Taylor; a Cardiff Singer of the World finalist in 2023, and pianist Hamish Brown. It’s distinctly sea themed with songs predominantly in English with a few French and German numbers for variety.
It starts off with Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of My Lagan Love which is a rather lovely introduction to Taylor’s flexible but generally fairly dark mezzo. She is very versatile though as the next set; Hedwige Chretien’s Petits Poèmes du bord de L’Eau, demonstrates. These six short songs show that Taylor has a considerable palette of colours and moods. There’s some nice precise piano playing from Brown here too.
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Bramwell Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony were in town last night for a one night stand at Roy Thomson Hall. My reason for going was primarily to see Marion Newman sing Ancestral Voices; a work composed for her by Tovey. It’s the composer’s contribution to the sesqui and it deals with the Dominion of Canada’s troubled relationship with the original peoples of this land. The four movements trace an arc from an imagined pre colonial “Arkady” cleverly using a Keats text that deals with a clearly not Canadian imagined state of nature through to Charles Mair’s The Last Bison; a very early warning of what happens when Man and Nature get out of balance. Then comes the most chilling part; an excerpt from a letter in the government archives about residential schools”…separate, isolate, educate; dominate, assimilate; Sow the seeds and forcibly, effectively; Kill the Indian in the child.” It concludes with fragments of letters from Harper and Trudeau cut with parts of the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples.
