Tag Archives: keung

The King’s Grief

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The King’s Grief is the latest show from the Happenstancers who performed it at Redeemer Lutheran on Friday and Saturday evenings. Like pretty much all Happenstancers’ shows it takes a number of works with multiple acts/movements/etc and combines them in unconventional ways. This programme was built around Judith Weir’s King Harald’s Saga, Thomas Adès’ Court Studies, from The Tempest and the only three songs that survive by Lady Mary Dering with some Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin, John Dowland and Colin Matthews thrown into the mix.

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The Happenstancers at 21C

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Regular readers will be familiar with the Happenstancers.  They are a shifting group of young musicians convened by Brad Cherwin who have been presenting innovative chamber music concerts in an assortment of venues for a few years now.  Last year Brad was selected to curate a concert for Soundstreams at the Jane Mallett Theatre which was very like a Happenstancers concert in many ways with the advantage of exposing the approach to a wider audience.  On Friday night they were back under their own flag at Temerty Theatre as part of the 21C festival.  Which is a long winded way of saying this is a very happening and innovative group who are emerging as a significant player in the Toronto chamber music scene.

Friday’s concert, as you would expect, consisted mostly of 21st century music but in line withe theme of “exploring the space between two people” and in typical Happenstancers’ style there was music from the Renaissace plus Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.  The ensemble consisted of sopranos Danika Lorèn and Reilly Nelson, Julia Mirzoev, Russell iceberg and Christopher Whitley on violin, Hezekkiah Leung and Hee-See Yoon on viola, Peter Eom on cello and Brad Cherwin on clarinets with constantly changing combos across the evening. Continue reading →

The Two Deaths of Ophelia

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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.

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One Ring to Rule Them All

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The Canadian Children’s Opera Company is reviving Dean Burry’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit on its twentieth anniversary.  The first performance was on Friday evening at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre.  It’s really quite an achievement to condense a 320pp novel into an 80 minute opera respecting the constraints of writing mostly for young voices.  It’s clever.  It’s structured as twelve discrete scenes and most of the singing is choral.  Groups of performers; essentially sorted by age cohort, represent the various “tribes” of Middle Earth; hobbits, humans, elves, dwarves etc.  There are a limited number of solo roles and dialogue is used rather than recitative so exposed solo singing is kept to a minimum.  This all provides meaningful roles for lots of performers without creating “impossible to cast” ones.

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Being Pascal Dusapin

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dusapin1Saturday 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 →

Dreams of Home

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04_CC_Dreams_of_HomeTuesday night at Heliconian Hall was the time and place for a concert curated by, and largely performed by, Confluence Concerts’ young associate artists; the KöNG duo.  KöNG consists of two Toronto-Hong Kong percussionists; Bevis Ng and Hoi Tong Keung, pursuing doctoral studies in Toronto.  They were supported on some numbers by Ryan Davis (viola) and Ben Finley (double bass).

The concert was very much in two parts.  The first half was a series of fairly short pieces on the theme of “dreams”.  Perhaps designed to be impressionistic and to leave far from clear memories.  First up was the slightly jazzy, very complex My Missing Harbour by Fish Yu.  It blended tuned percussion and both string instruments in a largely tonal, slightly shimmery sound world.

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