The Happenstancers ended their 2023/24 season last night at 918 Bathurst with a concert called Babes in Toyland. It consisted of mainly late 20th and 21st century chamber works with one unusual Mozart piece (K617 for glass harmonica (Kevin Ahfat), viola (Hee-Soo Yoon( ,cello (Peter Eom), oboe (Aleh Remezau) and flute (Tristan Durie) to spice things up.
The main interest for me was that there was plenty of vocal music featuring soprano Reilly Nelson who not only sang some highly technical music but played bells, scattered playing cards and carried a boom box. The first substantial vocal work was Unsuk Chin’s acrostic-wordplay which is in seven movements with texts created from fragments from Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. (Chin seems to have a bit of an Alice fixation). It’s a complex piece for soprano and a fairly large chamber ensemble with no clear musical structure. The textures vary from spooky and ethereal to aggressively loud and dissonant. Great work here from Reilly and the ensemble conducted by Simon Rivard. Continue reading
Saturday evening, at Redeemer Lutheran, the Happenstancers offered up a palindromic tribute to Pascal Dusapin. As it was a palindrome I shall review it from the middle outwards. Let us take the interval as t=0. Then at t=+/-1 we heard Two Walkings from singers Danika Lorèn and Hilary Jean Young. Two songs; “How Many Little Wings” and “Kiss My Lips She Did” came before the break and the rest; “May June”, “A Scene in Singing” and “It Seems To Be Turning Music” after. And, of course the singers swapped positions at the break! This is extremely interesting but fiendishly difficult music with the unaccompanied singers trading snatches of phrases and half thoughts in a complex atonal musical language. I’m actually in awe that anybody can actually perform a work like this but they did, and very well.
Previous concerts from the Happenstancers have typically featured fairly conventional chamber music either arranged or combined in unusual ways; sometimes mixed with more modern/contemporary material. Saturday night’s concert at Redeemer Lutheran was a bit different. Titled Future Pastorale it was built around Claude Vivier’s 1968 work Ojikawa plus the text of Psalm 131 (also used, in French, by Vivier) and text from the “Introduction” to Blake’s Songs of Innocence; “Piping down the valleys wild. Piping songs of pleasant glee” etc with lambs, shepherds and clouds.
Last night saw the final concert in this year’s West End Micro Music Festival. Once more the venue was the intimate and acoustically very good Redeemer Lutheran on Bloor West. The first half of the programme was the latest iteration of Nahre Sol (keyboards) and Brad Cherwin’s (clarinets) PAPER. Joined by Louis Pino on electronics, they improved on what paper is, sounds like, looks like and can be used for. There were electronic paper noises, crumpled paper, torn paper, piano prepared with paper and Brad creating a painting on paper and using it as an instrument. I suppose this is more “performance art” than music but it was pretty interesting.
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