The nominations for the 2026 Juno awards have been announced and four of the nominees are recordings that I have reviewed here or elsewhere. Continue reading
Juno awards 2026
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Tag Archives: murphy
Simply Mozart
Thursday’s noon hour in the concert was a really great idea; combine the COC Ensemble Studio with the COC Orchestra for an all Mozart concert. Mozart’s Symphony No.35 in D major (Hafner) was split into into its four movements with pairs of arias inserted between the movements to create what Johannes Debus, conducting, described as an opéra imaginaire. It worked really well.
Transoceanic
This year’s New Voices concert from Soundstreams, curated by Haotian Yu, played at Hugh’s Room on Monday evening. It set out to explore some of the issues around human migration through three works by diasporic Canadian composers. It also explored the use of technology in the creation and performance of musical works. Sio pretty ambitious.
Final Ensemble Studio gig of the year
Tuesday lunchtime in the RBA saw the traditional annual holiday gig by the (much depleted by sickness etc) Ensemble Studio. Last minute drop outs meant it was pretty short but what there was was very decent.
Ensemble Studio do the standards
Last Tuesdays’s concert in the RBA featured four singers and two pianists from the Ensemble Studio in a concert of highly recognisable opera arias. I guess with Barber of Seville and Rigoletto coming p on the FSC stage that was a bit inevitable. It was though very well done with all four singers not only singing well but really conveying a sense of character.
C’est nous les dieux, ni yw y duwiau
HORIZON:MADOG is a new chamber opera with music by Paul Frehner and a trilingual libretto by Angela J. Murphy. In a not too distant future where the world has been devastated by flooding and electro-magnetic storms, Madog; a descendant of the legendary Welsh prince, leads a movement for a more eco-friendly, less tech dependent future. He hears (scratchily) a radio broadcast from Wales promising, essentially, a tech fix, which he regards with scorn, and, in his dreams, his ancestor urging him to action. A plan emerges. Continue reading
Ensemble Studio kick off
The free concert series in the RBA kicked off on Wednesday with, as usual, a performance by the artists of the COC’s Ensemble Studio. Owing to illness only five singers performed and only one of those, Emily Rocha, was a returnee. The other four singers and both pianists were newcomers. It was short but enjoyable.
Stravinsky with the TSO
The latest CD from the Toronto Symphony and Gustavo Gimeno features two works by Stravinsky and a Glenn Gould inspired piece by Kelly-Marie Murphy. The first piece is the 24 minute long suite from the ballet Le baiser de la fée which is a sort of pastiche of what Tchaikovsky might sound like if Tchaikovsky could orchestrate as well as Stravinsky! It’s well played but I don’t find it terribly exciting.
Murphy’s piece is another story. There’s a running joke about short pieces by contemporary composers at the TSO. They get called “garage pieces” because they get played at the beginning of concerts when half the patrons are still on their way up from parking. Murphy’s Curiosity, Genius and the Search for Petula Clark absolutely does not deserve the label. It was inspired by a road trip Glenn Gould took up north one time and it’s fascinating. There’s a restless energy to it and a kind of flirting with atonality coupled with lyricism and a lot of percussion. It’s kind of like a feral love child of Holst’s Mars; Bringer of War and a Shostakovich symphony crammed into ten minutes. Continue reading
Alchemical Processes
The second concert in this year’s West End Micro Music Festival took place at Redeemer Lutheran Church on Friday night. Titled Alchemical Processes it featured a mix of early and modern works written or arranged for some combination of string quartet (Jennifer Murphy, Madlen Breckbill – violins, Laila Zakzook – viola, Philip Bergman – cello), harpsichord (Alexander Malikov) and clarinet or bass clarinet (Brad Cherwin).
It started out with Bach’s Concerto in A Major BWV 1055 arranged for string quartet, harpsichord and clarinet. It was enjoyable. Originally written for harpsichord and string orchestra, any loss of richness in the strings by only having one player on a part was compensated by the additional colours of the clarinet.
Celebrating R. Murray Schafer
Sunday, at Grace Church on the Hill, Soundstreams presented Celebrating R. Murray Schafer. It felt like a cross between a concert and a memorial service. There were no prayers but there were eulogies and Eleanor James drew the parallel between Schafer’s sources of inspiration and Pentecost; that feast of the Church having been chosen deliberately for the event.
There was lots of music of course. The afternoon was bookended by two of Schafer’s ceremonial wilderness pieces for voice and trumpet. Meghan Lindsay and Michael Fedyshyn welcomed us with the Aubade for Two Voices and bid us farewell with Departure. Both were made the more haunting from the performers being out of sight. Choir 21 with conductor David Fallis sang two sets. First came the three hymns from The Fall into Light which appropriately set texts drawn from the Manichaean tradition. There was some wonderfully precise singing here. The second set was perhaps more light hearted with Epitaph for Moonlight which was written for amateur performance and the playful Fire which, besides singing, involves banging rocks together.
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