Invocations

invocationsThursday night at the Jane Mallett Theatre Soundstreams and Music Toronto presented a concert featuring the Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon – violin, Roman Borys – cello, Jamie Parker – piano) and others.  Also two world premières.

First up was the première of  Vivian Fung’s Prayer; a short piece for violin (Lara St.John) and piano.  It’s a rather beautiful short piece with a melismatic beginning that gets more dramatic and then morphs to a kind of searching quality.  It was followed by Amy Beach’s Invocation for violin and piano, Op. 55 of 1904.  It’s a competent, melodic piece in the Romantic tradition.  Pleasant enough. Continue reading

Filling big shoes

Sondra Radvanovsky was due to give a recital in Koerner Hall on Thursday night but she cancelled due to illness.  Toronto Summer Music did extremely well to find a replacement of the calibre of American mezzo J’nai Bridges at such short notice.  While many people turned their tickets in for refunds and others, it seems, just didn’t show up, those who did were treated to a performance by Ms. Bridges, accompanied by the ever reliable Rachel Kerr, that most certainly did not disappoint.

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From another planet

Yesterday lunchtime in the RBA soprano Lauren Eberwein and the Rosebud String Quartet (Sheila Jaffé, Aaron Schwebel, Keith Hamm and Rachel Desoer) entertained us with a program of Haydn and Schoenberg.  First up was an arrangement of Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos.  We got the recitative, Teseo mio ben, and the two arias, Dove sei and Ah! che morir vorrei.  It’s basically a cantata with tessitura that sits very nicely for Lauren’s voice.  It was an elegant performance all round with some passion in the concluding aria.  And it’s always good to hear a Haydn vocal work.

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