Wednesday evening’s Shuffle Hour concert at Toronto Summer Music was given by mezzo Alex Hetherington and pianist Vlad Soloviev in Heliconian Hall and carried the curious moniker The Tortured Poets Department. It kicked off with the letter aria from Massenet’s Werther and let’s face it if anyone deserves torturing it’s some combination of Werther himself and Goethe for inventing him (and possibly Massenet for prolonging the life of a character who might otherwise have fallen into obscurity). Whatever, Alex gave a fine, impassioned reading of the aria which set the stage well for what was to follow. Continue reading
The Tortured Poets Department
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A Left Coast is baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer’s tribute to British Columbia and its music. Seven composers with birthdates ranging from 1908 to 1985 are featured on the disk. BC is a young country as far as western classical music is concerned though, of course, it has rich artistic traditions stretching far back into the mists of the north west.
The Canadian Art Song Project (CASP) has announced that Laurence Jobidon (right) and Jesse Plessis (left) are the inaugural mentees in the Chung-Wai Chow and John Wright Art Song Mentorship Programme for Composers; a new CASP initiative designed to support emerging composers working in the field of Canadian Art Song. They will be working with mentors Luna Pearl Woolf and Jocelyn Morlock, respectively.
Over the course of the next year, Laurence Jobidon will be working with Luna Pearl Woolf on her project that sets the poetry of Blanche Lamontagne; the first French-Canadian woman poet to publish under her own name, while Jesse Plessis will be working with Jocelyn Morlock on a project entitled Time’s Kiss that will interweave texts by Rabindranath Tagore, Anne Carson, and Geneviève Plessis.
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