Tag Archives: santoliquido

Norcop Prize 2023

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Thursday lunchtime in Walter Hall saw the winner of the 2023 Norcop Song Prize, Jamal Al-Titi give his prizewinner recital accompanied by Koldolsky Prize winner Indra Egan.  It was an interesting selection of material for baritone in English, French, Italian and Russian.  Starting off with Butterworth’s Loveliest of Trees and Vaughan Williams’ Silent Noon was bold.  The standard for these songs is particularly high and I don’t think they are Al-Titi’s sweet spot.  We would see laster in the recital a leaning towards a very operatic approach that didn’t work so well here.

al-titi

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The Norcop prize recital

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It’s that time of year again at UoT when the respective winners of the Norcop song prize and the Williams Koldofsdky prize for accompanying collaborate in a lunchtime recital.  This year’s winners were mezzo Simona Genga and pianist Jialiang Zhu who gave us a program of songs by Schoenberg, Freedman, Berlioz and Santoliquido.  The Vier Lieder Op. 2 of Schoenberg are extremely lyrical though with a rather complex and involved piano part.  They played to the strengths of both musicians.  Taken at fairly slow tempi they allowed Simona to show off the beauty and ease of her voice all through the registers combined with terrific breath control and spot on German diction while Jialiang had something fairly virtuosic to display her skills.

norcopprize18

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Osborne and Haji

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SONY DSCYesterday’s free lunchtime concert should have been the first opportunity to see Simone Osborne and Gordon Bintner in recital together but, sadly, Gordon had the lurgy so, if you want to see them perform together you will just have to go and see L’elisir d’amore at the COC.  Fortunately Andrew Haji was able to jump in at short notice.  Not such a bad guy to have on the bench!

Andrew started out with Santoliquido’s I canti della sera.  I had heard him sing these before at Mazzoleni but it was good to hear them again.  Genuine Italian art song isn’t all that common and these show the voice off nicely.  There was both some lovely limpid singing and plenty of power when needed.  He’s a pretty good story teller too.  He also gave us the three Duparc songs that he and Liz Upchurch, once again at the piano,  gave us earlier in the year.  Again the standout was Le manoir de Rosemonde, a most beautiful and haunting song given the full treatment here.

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Howard and Haji

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Yesterday afternoon’s Mazzoleni Songmasters concert featured local tenor Andrew Haji and Welsh baritone Jason Howard in a program somewhat loosely linked to England.  Neither singer was, I think, 100% well (Haji’s cold was announced, Howrad’s merely obvious!) but both battled through manfully and gave us some fine singing.  There were some interesting contrasts especially in the first half of the program.  Andrew kicked off with Francesco Santoliquido’s I canti della sera.  I’m no expert on Italian art song but these did sound like songs rather than opera arias, at least in the hands of Andrew and Rachel Andrist.  In contrast, Jason’s set (Tosti’s L’ultima canzone, Respighi’s Nebbie, Tosti’s L’ideale and Verdi’s In solitaria stanza), with Robert Kortgaard sounded distinctly operatic and suited Jason’s darkish voice rather well.

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