Invocations

invocationsThursday night at the Jane Mallett Theatre Soundstreams and Music Toronto presented a concert featuring the Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon – violin, Roman Borys – cello, Jamie Parker – piano) and others.  Also two world premières.

First up was the première of  Vivian Fung’s Prayer; a short piece for violin (Lara St.John) and piano.  It’s a rather beautiful short piece with a melismatic beginning that gets more dramatic and then morphs to a kind of searching quality.  It was followed by Amy Beach’s Invocation for violin and piano, Op. 55 of 1904.  It’s a competent, melodic piece in the Romantic tradition.  Pleasant enough. Continue reading

A Woman’s Voice

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