Last Wednesday’s concert in the RBA was a showcase for the collaborative pianists of the McGill-UdeM Piano Vocal Arts programme. Each of the five pianists on show got to accompany mezzo Julie Boulianne for a set of songs. Or put another way, Julie got to perform for an hour with five pianists.
Uncharted is a new CD from countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and pianist John Churchwell. It appears to be the first time a countertenor has recorded a disc of classic German Lieder which is interestig and perhaps surprising. There are three sets on the record. It starts with Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds Op. 14; four songs I was previously unfamiliar with but I’m glad to have heard them. The second set alternates mostly well known songs by Brahms and Clara Schumann and the last set is Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39 with, appropriately, his “Der Nussbaum” to wrap things up. Continue reading
Alex Hetherington and Ariane Cossette’s last recital as members of the Ensemble studio happened on thursday lunchtime in the RBA. It was charming. We got a varied selection of art songs bookended by a couple of opera duets. They opened with “Miro O Norma… Si, fino all’ora estreme”. They blended well with Ariane, as Norma, displaying considerable power and richness of tone without overwhelming her Adalgisa.
Tuesday’s lunchtime recital at the Four Seasons Centre was given by soprano Sara Schabas and pianist Isabelle David backed up by some (mercifully concise) musicological/historical background from Robin Elliott. The concert was in two parts. The first celebrated the work of Austrian-Jewish composers active in Vienna in the first third of the 20th century. The second was a song cycle in Yiddish celebrating the Jewish immigrant experience in New York.
No, not Flanders and Swann but rather a well constructed new recording from Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It contains music by four composers exemplifying that lush territory that lies emotionally, if not always temporally, between Wagner and the Second Vienna School. The two central works were both inspired by Richard Dehmel’s Verklärte Nacht. The first is a 1901 setting of the text for mezzo, tenor and orchestra by Oskar Fried. It’s lushly scored and rather beautiful. The sound world is not dissimilar to Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. Gardner gets a lovely sound from his players and some really gorgeous singing from Christine Rice and Stuart Skelton. The second Verklärte Nacht is the more familiar Schoenberg piece for string orchestra. It’s curious how without voices and with only strings it manages to sound almost as lush as the Fried.
Violanta is one of those works which seem oddly out of place, among other things. It’s a one act opera by the eighteen year old Erich Korngold which premiered in Munich and Vienna in 1916. It hardly needs saying that most eighteen year olds in Europe in 1916 were engaged otherwise than in composing rather overwrought operas about seduction and death in 15th century Venice but there you go.
There’s something very special about a song recital by a really good singer at the top of his/her game in a space conducive to song. The stars conjoined yesterday to yield a recital by Adrianne Pieczonka with pianist Rachel Andrist in the song friendly acoustic of Mazzoleni Hall, as part of the Mazzoleni Songmasters series.
The video recording, made at the Deutsche Oper in 2018, of Korngold’s rarely seen Das Wunder der Heliane is yet another lesson in holding off on making judgements on an opera or production until one has seen the whole thing. I still don’t think it’s a lost masterpiece but I’m feeling a lot less derisive than I was at the end of Act I.
At Roy Thomson Hall last night for the TSO playing Carl Orff’s extravaganza Carmina Burana. It was fun. I don’t think it’s a piece to over-intellectualize. Big orchestra, enormous choir (Toronto Mendelssohn Choir augmented by the Toronto Youth Choir plus the Toronto Children’s Chorus), bawdy Latin lyrics and so on. It’s big, brash and mostly quite loud though I think Donald Runnicles did a fine job of balancing orchestra and voices, especially when the soloists or the children were singing.
Today’s RBA lunchtime concert featured the three tenors; Kammersinger Michael Schade, currently appearing as Aegisth in the COC’s Elektra, Irish tenor Mick O’Schade and Scottish folksinger Michael McSchade. They were most ably supported by COC Concertmaster Marie Bérard and Sandra Horst at the piano. The concert was billed as a tribute to John McCormack and Fritz Kreisler but sad events had morphed it into also being a tribute to the CBC’s Neil Crory. I hope, and believe, that he would have appreciated the combination of whimsy and serious music making.
operaramblings 