The line up for 21C for 2026 has been announced. This is always one of the city’s best programmes of contemporary and related music. Details… Continue reading
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Tag Archives: happenstancers
Broken from the Happenstancers
The Happenstancers latest gig; Broken, played on Friday evening at Redeemer Lutheran. Getting back to their core mission, this concert explored the relationships between baroque music and contemporary repertoire and the plusses and minusses of combining music, instruments and techniques from both. So, interspersed between sonatas by Johann Rosenmüller; originally scored for strings and continuo but played here by various combinations of oboe/cor anglais, regular and bass clarinet, strings and accordion, we got contemporary pieces.
Chamber music with a twist
There are a couple of concerts at the end of September that I didn’t hear about in time to include in my September listings post. The concerts are being given by the Happenstancers and Slow Rise Music who each represent some of the interesting and different approaches that Toronto’s younger musicians are taking to presenting chamber music.
The Two Deaths of Ophelia
The latest Happenstancers gig, which took place at 918 Bathurst on Thursday evening, was an exploration of the death of Ophelia and related ideas with works for assorted chamber ensembles plus/minus voices. Ten composers; all of whom could at a stretch be considered “contemporary”, were featured in a programme that, with interval, lasted two and three quarter hours. That’s a feat of stamina for performers and audience alike as none of the music performed was “easy” and no notes or introductions were provided.
Each half of the programme started off with a piece by Linda Catlin Smith, who was in the audience. Stare at the River for piano, string bass, trumpet, clarinet, violin and percussion was quite sparse and open textured while The River was more obviously lyrical with guitar, cello and Danika Lorèn replacing piano, trumpet and bass.
Looking ahead to June
Things slow down just a little bit in June but with both Luminato and Opera 5’s Opera festival it’s not that quiet. Here’s what’s coming down:
- June 5th to 7th at Daniels Spectrum there’s Nigamon/Tunai; an exploration of Indigenous perspectives from North and South America (part of Luminato)
- June 6th at Metropolitan United Krisztina Szabó leads in Queen of the Night Communion, another Luminato show.
Babes in Toyland
The Happenstancers ended their 2023/24 season last night at 918 Bathurst with a concert called Babes in Toyland. It consisted of mainly late 20th and 21st century chamber works with one unusual Mozart piece (K617 for glass harmonica (Kevin Ahfat), viola (Hee-Soo Yoon( ,cello (Peter Eom), oboe (Aleh Remezau) and flute (Tristan Durie) to spice things up.
The main interest for me was that there was plenty of vocal music featuring soprano Reilly Nelson who not only sang some highly technical music but played bells, scattered playing cards and carried a boom box. The first substantial vocal work was Unsuk Chin’s acrostic-wordplay which is in seven movements with texts created from fragments from Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. (Chin seems to have a bit of an Alice fixation). It’s a complex piece for soprano and a fairly large chamber ensemble with no clear musical structure. The textures vary from spooky and ethereal to aggressively loud and dissonant. Great work here from Reilly and the ensemble conducted by Simon Rivard. Continue reading
September 2024
Well late August has been a bit thin in terms of live performances but September. sees things back with a bang.
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- Opera Revue has a Verdi and Weill show at the Redwood Theatre.
- Coal Mine Theatre is opening with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life which played to rave reviews in London and New York. Previews are on the 6th to 8th with opening on the 10th. The play runs until the 29th.
- Crow’s opens their season with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Previews run from the 3rd to the 10th with opening night on the 11th. The run continues to October 6th.
Being Pascal Dusapin
Saturday evening, at Redeemer Lutheran, the Happenstancers offered up a palindromic tribute to Pascal Dusapin. As it was a palindrome I shall review it from the middle outwards. Let us take the interval as t=0. Then at t=+/-1 we heard Two Walkings from singers Danika Lorèn and Hilary Jean Young. Two songs; “How Many Little Wings” and “Kiss My Lips She Did” came before the break and the rest; “May June”, “A Scene in Singing” and “It Seems To Be Turning Music” after. And, of course the singers swapped positions at the break! This is extremely interesting but fiendishly difficult music with the unaccompanied singers trading snatches of phrases and half thoughts in a complex atonal musical language. I’m actually in awe that anybody can actually perform a work like this but they did, and very well.
At t=+/-2 we got works for clarinet (Brad Cherwin of course), cello (Peter Eom) and singer. At t=-2 it was Danika with the evocative Canto and at t=+2 an equally effective account of Now the Fields from Hilary. It’s always interesting to hear art song with something other than piano especially when the works are as complex and challenging as these. Continue reading
April preview
Here are some upcoming shows for April:
Music
- First, a late March Show. Yu Dun and Royce Vavrek’s Pulitzer winning opera Angel’s Bone, about human trafficking, comes to Harbourfront Centre Theatre March 22nd to 24th. More information here.
- On the 6th the Happenstancers have a concert; Being Pascal Dusapin, at Redeemer Lutheran. We are promised a “a portrait concert in palindromic form” featuring music by Dusapin, Kaija Saariaho and Samy Moussa.
Wot no Brahms?
Previous concerts from the Happenstancers have typically featured fairly conventional chamber music either arranged or combined in unusual ways; sometimes mixed with more modern/contemporary material. Saturday night’s concert at Redeemer Lutheran was a bit different. Titled Future Pastorale it was built around Claude Vivier’s 1968 work Ojikawa plus the text of Psalm 131 (also used, in French, by Vivier) and text from the “Introduction” to Blake’s Songs of Innocence; “Piping down the valleys wild. Piping songs of pleasant glee” etc with lambs, shepherds and clouds.
Performing were Brad Cherwin on clarinet, Louis Pino on percussion and soprano Hilary Jean Young. All three were also heavily involved with the plentiful electronics and the performance was significantly enhanced by Billy Wong’s imaginative lighting and there was some interesting stage business for some numbers.
operaramblings 