Tag Archives: remezau

Broken from the Happenstancers

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The Happenstancers latest gig; Broken, played on Friday evening at Redeemer Lutheran. Getting back to their core mission, this concert explored the relationships between baroque music and contemporary repertoire and the plusses and minusses of combining music, instruments and techniques from both.  So, interspersed between sonatas by Johann Rosenmüller; originally scored for strings and continuo but played here by various combinations of oboe/cor anglais, regular and bass clarinet, strings and accordion, we got contemporary pieces.

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Babes in Toyland

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babesintoylandThe 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 →

We’re Late!

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werelateThe Happenstancers latest concert We’re Late! happenstanced on Saturday evening at Redeemer Lutheran.  It was a typical Happenstancers sort of event with chamber music works for various forces split up into their movements with the components then rearranged to make an interesting line up.

Lukas Foss’ Time Cycle provided the opening piece which also provided the title for the concert as a whole.  It’s a setting of Auden for soprano and chamber ensemble and begins “Clocks cannot tell our time of day”.  Which was pretty much the theme for the evening.  This was followed by Toshi Ichiyangi’s Music for Electric Metronomes which had the whole ensemble banging things rhythmically and making stylsed gestures.  Then came the first of three parts of rather a good musical joke; John Cage’s 4’33” arranged into three movements for different forces. which as might be expected cropped up at intervals during the show.  For the record the movements were scored for piano and percussion, conductor and oboe and percussion.

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Hypersuite

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bachheadTo 918 Bathurst last night to hear the Happenstancers’ latest offering Hypersuite.  The concept was to take movements from Bach suites and partitas for solo instrument and combine them into sets with (mostly) contemporary music of like form.  The one exception was some Telemann but we’ll come to that.

So the first set consisted of cellist Sarah Gans playing Ana Sokolovic’s vez before a brief segue brought in Katya Poplanskaya on violin for the adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata BWV 1005.  It’s really interesting as, although the Sokolovic piece uses a fair amount of extended technique there’s a definite sense that they belong to the same soundworld.  Both are spare and spiky and eschew anything that might conventionally be called melody.

textThe second set had a lot in common with it.  Brad Cherwin on clarinet played Augusta R. Thomas’ d(i)agon(als) followed by the sarabande from Bach’s Partita BWV 1013 (usually played on flute).  This segued into Telemann’s fantasie 8 played on English horn by Aleh Remezau.  Completely different from the first set; more melodic and dance like, these three pieces also had much in common.

The second half kicked off with The allemande from BWV 1013 on clarinet, followed by Sokolovic’s cinq danze, II on violin and the gigue from from BWV 1008 on cello.  Here there is more contrast with the Sokolovic exploring a more complex sound world though still with clear affinities to the Bach.  This was followed by Elliott Carter’s a 6 letter letter on English horn.  It’s a quite long and complex piece which clearly places serious physical demands on the player. Continue reading →