Saturday night Confluence presented a concert curated by Patricia O’Callaghan of a selection of works by Kurt Weill. Now I have.a bit of a love/hate relationship with Weill which will likely colour this review. Broadly speaking I love his earlier work, especially the collaborations with Brecht, but I’m just not into the Broadway stuff at all with a few exceptions such as Street Scene which has at least a bit of an edge. I also thoroughly dislike some of the American translations of the Brecht pieces that do all they can to take the edge off. Continue reading
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Dance to the Abyss
Dance to the Abyss is a show of music from the Weimar Republic currently on stage at Harbourfront Centre Theatre. It’s given by Art of Time Ensemble as part of their 25th and final season.
It’s an interesting mix of instrumental and vocal music. The first piece in the programme is Erwin Schulhoff’s Hot Sonate for Sax and Piano which is a four movement, heavily jazz piece influenced, expertly played by Andrew Burashko and Wallace Halladay (I think). It’s followed by three pieces by the prolific Mischa Spoliansky. There’s the atmospheric instrumental piece Sehnsucht and two songs sung by Patricia O’Callaghan in English translation; I Am a Vamp and L’heure Bleue. The songs are pretty well known and fun and I liked O’Callaghan’s playful treatment of them. Continue reading
Innocent revels
What do you get when you take nine multi-talented musicians from a variety of musical backgrounds and give them a Purcell toy box to play in? You get the latest concert in the Confluence series; ‘Tis Nature’s Voice: Henry Purcell Reimagined. It’s an amazingly fun evening that completely blows the cobwebs off the often stuffy Toronto baroque music scene. I can’t do a number by number account because I completely lost track. I was having way too much fun.