On a bright, sunny winter’s day there are few more inviting places to be than the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre positively glowing in the sunlight. When one’s reason for being there is a recital by Jane Archibald with the redoubtable Liz Upchurch at the piano one feels doubly blessed. It was one of the best performances of the many I have attended in that space. 
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There’s 20cm of snow on the ground and more forecast. The groundhog consensus is a long winter. So, here are a few upcoming concerts and other events that may help get you through the rest of the winter.
On February 17th mezzo Janina Baechle, violist Keith Hamm and pianist Rachel Andrist are performing works by Mahler, Brahms and Leoffler in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at noon. Also in the RBA at noon on the 19th there is the annual concert featuring artists from the Ensemble Studio and Montreal’s YAP the Atelier lyrique. And on the 24th, but at 5.30pm Barbara Hannigan and others are presenting works by Chausson and Schoenberg. All these concerts are free.
This year’s new work from the Canadian Art Song Project, Marjan Mozetich’s Enchantments of Gwendolyn, was premiered yesterday in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. It’s a setting of four really interesting poems by Gwendolyn MacEwen for mezzo-soprano and piano. The first and last pieces; Sunday Morning Sermon and A Coin for the Ferryman are rather beautifulmeditative pieces and frame the two inner songs nicely. These inner two, for me, was where much of the interest really lay. Waiting for You was a blues inflected number of considerable interest, in some ways recalling Michael Tippett but in others entirely original. The third piece; The Tao of Physics, is a setting of a piece linking sub-atomic physics with the cosmology of The Vedas. That’s not exactly an original idea but it’s always an interesting one to explore and, by accident or design, Mozetich does so in a manner that somewhat recall John Adams’ treatment of the same basic ideas. We get a long, impassioned, vocal line floating over an arpeggiated piano accompaniment. It’s impressive and effective. All four pieces were beautifully performed by Allyson McHardy and Adam Sherkin. McHardy’s warm. dark mezzo seemed perfect for the material and listening was like wallowing in hot chocolate (more lurid similes did suggest themselves but this is a family blog). She can sing the blues too. Who would have thought it.
I guess it’s a good thing when one’s emotional and intellectual reactions to a program threaten to overwhelm one’s ability to listen analytically and evaluate. That’s what art is for isn’t it? Anyway that’s pretty much what happened to me today listening to a program called Songs of Love and War in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. The songs were all pieces more or less inspired by the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century; the wars, the rise of Nazi power, the occupation of France. These are all events that have many layers of meaning for me. I have studied them and the music and literature they generated for decades. I have known, often well, people who played roles in these events. I have deeply held views. You have been warned!
I wrote “2015” on a cheque today. Scary. Anyway, what’s on in Toronto as the new year dawns? Quite a lot as it happens. Here are my picks.
December 9th sees Anne-Sofie von Otter in recital at Koerner hall. She’s not doing opera anymore and who knows how many more chances there will be to see her in Toronto?
Conductor Brian Current and the Glenn Gould School New Music Ensemble presented three pieces, one of them a world premiere, today in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. The performances were prefaced by a really rather informative and informal chat by Brian on “how to listen to contemporary music”. It was engaging and totally non-patronising.
And so to the music. The first piece was Marco Stroppo’s 1989 piece élet… fogytigian, dialogo immaginario fra un poeta e un filosofo; a piece evoking an imaginary dialogue between a Hungarian poet and an Italian philosopher who never actually met, or so the composer told us. The first movement was bright and aggressive, very much in the European manner of the 70s and 80s with the second even more explosive before, in the third movement, settling into an exploration of string colour. The composer explained this as being like three walls of a house, painted different colours, slowly rotating. It’s the kind of piece one needs to hear more than once.
Lauren Segal performs in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. Photo: Chris Hutcheson
Today’s lunchtime concert in the RBA was given by mezzo-soprano Lauren Segal and bass-baritone Robert Gleadow with Sandra Horst at the piano. The programme was titled Gypsy Songs, Travel Songs. First up was Robert, who looks considerable less rakish without a beard, with three songs from Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel. All three; The Roadside Fire, Bright is the Ring of Words and Whither Must I Wander are familiar recital fare but sung as well as this are a joy to hear. Gleadow has a big, full sound with quite a range of colour but he can also float very beautiful high notes. It was very impressive.
Lauren came next with Dvorák’s Cigánské melodie. These songs cover a wide range of moods, all vividly captured by Segal. Her voice is dark toned and very mezzo; no soprano 2 here! Onewould think her perfectly suited for gloomy Slavic rep until, as she did later, she cut loose on de Falla’s Siete canciones populares Españolas. Here she was every bit the dark eyed Spaniard singing with fiery passion of love and loss. Both sets ended with fierce, bravura numbers brought off with panache. The lady knows how to work a crowd!
Ever since they were first published the poems that make up AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad have exerted a fascination over English composers. Today in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre we heard two first year members of the Ensemble Studio give performances of two settings that take quite different approaches to the texts.
Tenor Colin Ainsworth and pianist Stephen Ralls today presented three song cycles written for them by Derek Holman. The first, The Death of Orpheus (2004) sets two translations of Ovid by Arthur Golding; on the subject of Orpheus in the underworld sandwiching Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII. The parts form an interesting contrast. In the Ovid, Golding chose to write in rhyming iambic heptameters but Holman’s setting completely ignores that, breaking and reshaping the lines very freely. The piano line too is spare and more a commentary on the vocal line than a support. In contrast the Shakespeare is set much more “faithfully”; piano and vocal line both reflecting more closely the metre of the verse. Holman also rarely repeats a phrase of the text) it happens maybe five times in the eleven songs in today’s programme) which puts quite a burden on the listener given the allusive complexity of Ovid/Golding’s verse. Continue reading
Yesterday lunchtime saw the first free lunchtime concert of the season in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. Following tradition, it was presented by the members of the Ensemble Studio. Or, to be more accurate, by six of the nine as an unprecedented three singers had fallen victim to the virus that is apparently sweeping the Toronto opera world (HighCbola?).
Credit: (l-r) Jennifer Szeto, Andrew Haji, Karine Boucher, Charlotte Burrage, Clarence Frazer, Jean-Philippe Fortier-Lazure, Iain MacNeil. Photo: Karen Reeves
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