Dragon’s Tale

Dragon’s Tale; music by Chan Ka Nin, text by Mark Brownell,  premiered at Harbourfront last night.  It’s a rather clever mash up of two stories which, taken together, address how we face the future without abandoning the past or, alternatively, getting stuck in it.  The first story concerns a young Chinese Canadian woman in Toronto, Xiao Lian, whose widowed father is dying.  She is torn between her desire to “get a life” and his obsessive insistence that the “old ways”, meaning essentially here looking after him, come first.

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ReGENERATION – July 21st part 1

The last two ReGENERATION concerts featuring song took place in Walter Hall yesterday at 1pm and 4pm.  Both featured four singers doing a set with piano, a vocal piece with chamber accompaniment and a chamber piece.  All the members of the Artsong Academy programme appeared at least once.  First up was tenor Joey Jang with Frances Armstrong at the piano with a set of Schubert and Schumann.  He sounded OK, if a bit underpowered, in Liebesbotschaft with its fairly fast rhythmic lines but technical issues showed up in the slower pieces requiring real legato.

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Artsong reGENERATION – part 1

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Florence Bourget

TSMF has made some small changes to the line up this year.  Instead of the art song component recitals for the academy programme being given together as two concerts they have been spread across four concerts with the balance being made up of chamber music.  The first two of the four were yesterday in Walter Hall.

There was no printed programme for the concerts.  The singers announced themselves and their accompanists and their material.  The last was repeated in the projected surtitles (yeah!) which also provided text and translation for the non-English items (including Scots) but not for songs to English texts.  So, mad scribbling was required to get a complete listing and I may have made the odd error.

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