Every year Soundstreams has a competition to find a young artist to curate a main stage concert. This year’s lucky winner is Brad Cherwin, who will need little introduction to readers of this blog, and the concert took place at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Saturday night.
It was, in many ways, a typical Cherwin programme. Some works were played in their entirety while others had their individual movements spread through the programme. The overall theme was “Love and Death” and the programme was divided into four cycles with somewhat enigmatic titles. Twelve instrumentalists, plus soprano Danika Lorèn and conductor Gregory Oh were used in various combinations.
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.
Unruly Sun is a song cycle in 19 parts with music by Matthew Ricketts (left) and words by Mark Campbell (below). It’s inspired by Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature and was performed last night in Mazzoleni Hall by tenor Karim Sulayman accompanied by piano and string quintet. I was much more affected by this piece than I expected to be. The text covers a lot of ground; Jarman’s cottage at Dungeness with it’s bleak shingle beach and nuclear power station, AIDS and the loss of friends, a bad porn movie and, of course, Jarman’s garden (which also of course inspired 
operaramblings 