Tag Archives: finzi

Songs of Remembrance

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monicawhicherSo it’s early November and a recital titled Songs of Remembrance.  One might of expected something like the program Chris Maltman presented just down Philosophers’ Walk last year but no, Monica Whicher and Rachel Andrist’s program was gentler.  Dare we say “more feminine”?  This concert was about remembrance of childhood and love; happy and not so happy.  Framed by Roger Quilter’s settings of Blake we got two “concocted cycles” drawn from very diverse sources; English, French and German texts; art song and popular song; composers from Schubert to Richard Rogers and Hans Eisler. It was effective.

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Quinn Kelsey singing from the heart

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KLP151027-_DSC7440Baritone Quinn Kelsey, currently singing Germont père in La Traviata at the COC stepped down off the big stage today to give a recital, with Rachel Andrist at the piano, in the more intimate RBA.  As befits the venue, he gave us a more intimate program.  Ralph Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel and the less frequently heard Gerald Finzi cycle, Let Us Garlands Bring sandwiched three songs by Brahms.

The Vaughan Williams is a pretty well known work, almost a recital warhorse.  Kelsey showed considerable sensitivity in, mostly, dialling his big voice back for it.  He is extremely expressive, occasionally I thought maybe just a touch too much so, and he has a surprisingly wide range of colours at his disposal.  The contrast between the light, bright tone he used for The Roadside Fire and the much darker (and louder) approach to Youth and Love was quite striking.  And that’s just an arbitrary comparison of two songs that follow one another.  The rest of the set was equally varied.  This guy is a lot more than “just” a big, Italianate Verdi baritone!  And Rachel Andrist is so much more than “just” an accompanist.  She brings a complimentary personality to every song with some real detail in the piano part that makes it seem quite fresh.

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Daniel Cabena and Stephen Runge at Hart House

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cabenarungeI was at a bit of a loose end yesterday so I made a very last minute decision to catch countertenor Daniel Cabena and pianist Stephen Runge in recital in the Great Hall at Hart House.  It was a free concert and I hadn’t seen a program listing so I was pleasantly surprised to find a rather varied mix of early 20th century Canadian and English art song as well as piano pieces by York Bowen.  I guess I was expecting baroque and earlier material since that’s what countertenors do!

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From Severn to Somme

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maltmanLast night at Walter Hall, as part of the Toronto Summer Music Festival,  Chris Maltman and Graham Johnson gave a recital that explored the experience of war through song.  It was a long and varied programme with twenty two songs in four languages commemorating most of the great empires that went to war in 1914 though many of the songs were from earlier periods.  At the core of the programme were early 20th century settings of English pastoral poems.  Butterworth’s settings of Houseman were there but, sneakily, we got Somervell’s much less well known setting of Think no more lad.  In a similar vein there were Gurney and Finzi.  The Americas were represented in a characteristically rambunctious Ives setting of a horribly jingoistic McCrae poem; He is there. McCrae may be the only well known war poet who managed to survive until 1918 without developing any sense of irony.  Beyond the English speaking world there were songs by Mussorgsky, Mahler, Fauré, Schumann, Wolf and Poulenc.

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A couple of interesting crowd funding projects

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The first project is to make a recording of Vincent Ho’s concerto for percussion and orchestra, The Shaman, with percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Mickelthwate.  This piece has been seen in Winnipeg, Toronto and taipei and has received a lot of positive reviews.  Full details are here.

In 1937 La Scala held a contest for a new opera. The winning opera should have been La Serenata al Vento composed by Aldo Finzi, a young, but already successful composer.  It never played during his lifetime.  Finzi was Jewish and the regime wasn’t prepared for a Jew as the heir of Verdi and Puccini.  It wasn’t until 2012 that the work premiered at Bergamo.  Now Croatian director Sanela Bajric wants to make a documentary about Finzi and his music and, of course, needs to raise the necessary.  Full details are here.