Tag Archives: o’callaghan

Side-by-Side by Confluence

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Every year around this time Confluence Concerts work with a group of young artists to curate and present a concert at Heliconian Hall. This year’s took place on Thursday evening. There were twenty two pieces of music on the programme; some written or arranged by members of the group with composers ranging from Henry Purcell and Barbara Strozzi to Libby Larsen and Sting. There was classical vocal and instrumental from the baroque to yesterday, jazz, fado and genre defying pieces. I’m just going to single out a few (to me at least) highlights.

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Celebrating Kurt Weill

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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 →

Sighs Too Deep For Words

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Friday evening at Heliconian Hall saw the second of two performances of Confluence Concerts’ Sighs Too Deep For Words: A Canadian Valentine.  It was an all Canadian concert featuring songs and spoken word including two world premieres and a performance of Omar Daniel’s 2005 piece Neruda Canzones.

The spoken word pieces, read beautifully by Alison Beckwith, ranged from Lucy Maud Montgomery to Margaret Atwood.  Some pieces straightforwardly celebrated romantic love and others came at it a bit sideways!  Songs by Canadian composers were well represented With Derek Holman, Jeffrey Ryan and John Beckwith all represented.  Anaïs Kelsey-Verdecchia performed (with Christopher Bagan) her own setting of “The Lark in the Clear Air” and Patricia O’Callaghan gave us her setting of “Some by Fire” with Chris again at the pianio, Andrew Downing on bass and a backing group.  So many styles!  No-one could say that Canadian music is samey or boring. Continue reading →

The Whole Gang and Then Some

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heliconian-club-2022-4-1024x768The final programme of Confluence Concerts season took place at Heliconian Hall on Wednesday night.  It was billed as The Confluence Songbook and, if there was a theme, it was about doing live versions of music that had been streamed during the Plague.  But really by the time we saw it it had outgrown that.  For, in addition to the full line up of Confluence artistic associates there was a raft of guests which resulted in a fairly lengthy and very eclectic programme. Continue reading →

Dance to the Abyss

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artoftimeDance 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 →

A Woman’s Voice

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A Woman's VoiceConfluence Concerts’ show last night at Heliconian Hall was titled A Woman’s Voice.  It was, after a fashion, a CD release concert in two halves.  The first half featured music by Alice Ping Yee Ho from the album A Woman’s Voice and featuring the same performers; Vania Chan, Katy Clark, Alex Hetherington, Maeve Palmer and Jialiang Zhu.  I’ve already reviewed the album and I don’t think last night changed my opinion much so I’ll not do a detailed rundown.  What I can say is that last night it was mostly opera excerpts; Lesson of Da Ji, Chinatown, The Imp of the Perverse, and a live concert gave an opportunity for a bit of staging which was definitely an enhancement, especially in The Imp of the Perverse scene.  “Café Chit Chat” and “Black” also benefitted from visual interaction between the singers.  I like the CD a lot.  Getting a chance to see some of the music live was great. Continue reading →

The Drawing Room

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Confluence Concerts opened their season yesterday at 918 Bathurst with a concert featuring a new work by Ian Cusson and André Alexis.  We’ll come to that because before it there was about 45 minutes of music doing what Confluence does; the relatively unexpected.  There were arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments of songs by the likes of Kate Bush, Coldplay and Neil Young.  There was an instrumental version of Bruce Cockburn’s Pacing the Cage (Larry Beckwith – violin, Andrew Downing – bass) and a Mozart violin sonata (Beckwith and Cusson) plus an intriguing percussion solo by Bevis Ng and more.  It featured the usual suspects; Larry Beckwith, Andrew Downing, Suba Sankaran, Dylan Bell and Patricia O’Callaghan plus Messrs Cusson and Ng and it was fun.

cussonandre-alexis

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Gracias a la vida

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What I really like about the Confluence concert series is that sometimes they do music that I love and sometimes they do stuff that’s completely unfamiliar to me and which I almost invariably enjoy.  Last night’s streamed concert came into the second category.  It was curated by Patricia O’Callaghan and featured the music of Astor Piazzolla who reinvented the tango and the Andean roots influenced music of Mercedes Sosa.  Tangos are great fun of course but I was more struck by the music of Sosa who spoke for the voiceless and oppressed of dictatorship Argentina in the same way that Victor Juara spoke for the Chilean underclass.  Fortunately for her she didn’t share his fate though she was forced into exile.  The music was interwoven with spoken texts from the likes of Borges read by Diego Matamoros and the visual art of Kevork Mourad.  All in all a very intriguing program.

gracias

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