The 21C Afterhours concert in Temerty Theatre last night featured a candle lit performance by a varied ensemble of conservatory students conducted by Brian Current. Brian did a great job of introducing the music; contextualizing it and suggesting what the audience might listen for. That could maybe be done more often with complex contemporary music.
The first piece was Bekah Simms’ Foreverdark. It’s a ten minute concertino for amplified cello, ensemble and electronics playing homage to heavy metal. It’s scored for a quite a large group including strings, brass, woodwinds and lots of percussion including a drum kit. It starts out very abrasively then becomes somewhat more lyrical and the then the texture lightens up but it’s still pretty complex. David Liam Roberts was the soloist and did an excellent job.
The line up for this year’s (and a bit of next’s) 21C at the Royal Conservatory has been announced. The full line up is 
Continuing the contemporary CanCon theme I’ve been listening to Bestiaries; a CD of music by Bekah Simms. I first heard her music at the TSO in June and liked it enough to want to explore further. There are three pieces on the CD; each a little over ten minutes long. The first, Foreverdark, is a 2018 piece for solo cello, chamber orchestra and live electronics. It’s inspired by the compose and cellist Amahl Arulanandam shared love for metal and quotes from iconic metal albums. I’m not a metal fan but I am intrigued to hear younger composers using ideas drawn from more popular genres. Think Missy Mazzoli and electronic dance music. It’s no different really from Ralph Vaughan Williams using folk songs or Michael Tippett aking ideas from blues music. The result here is heavy textured, weird and chaotic with Arulanandam using all parts of the cello and acoustic instruments of the orchestra (the Cryptid Ensemble conducted by Brian Current) made to sound like electric, amplified ones with all the effects one usually gets from electronic manipulation generated acoustically. 
Pauline Viardot is one of those names that crops up quite a bit when one is researching the opera of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was a mezzo-soprano of some note, friend (at the least) of both Turgenev and Chopin, hosted a notable Parisian salon and composed; though, being female, she was not taken entirely seriously by the musical establishment of the time. Among her compositions is a “chamber operetta”, Cendrillon, designed for performance at her salon and written when Viardot was already in her eighties. It’s going to be performed again this fall in Mazzoleni Hall at the Royal Conservatory and I sat down yesterday with director Joel Ivany to talk about the issues involved in staging such an unusual piece in a venue that’s not entirely opera friendly.
operaramblings 