Evolving Symmetry

adanyaEvolving Symmetry is the first of a promised series of collaborations by soprano Adanya Dunn, clarinetist Brad Cherwin and pianist Alice Gi-Yong Hwang.  The focus will be on “modern” chamber and vocal works (for some value of “modern”) and last night at Heliconian Hall they presented French works ranging from the 189os to the 1960s.

The program was bookended by two late Poulenc works; the song cycle La courte paille to nonsense verse by Maurice Carème and the clarinet sonata.  These works were composed at the same time and share some musical material though the sonata seems a weightier work.  The songs are fun  and playful and they were interpreted by Ms. Dunn with excellent French diction and lots of humour.  The sonata is seems much sadder and more reflective though its final movement is manic enough.  Fine playing from both musicians here.

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Cheap enough for beggars

Last night I went to see Essential Opera’s cheap and cheerful production of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.  It was a semi staged production in the relatively small Heliconian Hall.  Semi-staged in this case meant sung in costume from music stands with very basic blocking.  Accompaniment was by Cathy Nosaty on piano and accordion which actually suited the music pretty well.

The singing was good, sometimes very good.  Probably the stand out was Laura McAlpine’s Jenny.  Of all the singers on display she was the one who seemed most immersed in the sound world of the piece and could vary style and technique appropriately.  Erin Bardua’s Lucy Brown was really quite idiomatic too.  The others were more consistently operatic which sounded a bit odd in places but worked surprisingly well in, for example David Roth and Heather Jewson’s rather refined refined and bourgeois Peachums.  Obviously this approach also worked for the character who are usually sung operatically; Macheath, Brown and Polly for example.  The ensembles were all also very effective.

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