Winners of the Eckhardt Grammatée competition, soprano Aemilia Moser and pianist Sabina Rzazade, gave a recital in Walter Hall on Tuesday at lunchtime. It was unusual! The material was all contemporary, much of it Canadian, and almost all of great difficulty. It was also divided into sets with the components of each set run without a break. Fortunately Aemilia’s program notes were excellent!
The first set started with Harry Somers’ Loon Cry, Night Call which evokes loon calling across a lake and was followed by Kaija Saariaho’s difficult and dramatic setting of one of Ariel’s speeches from The Tempest. Cecilia Livingston’s setting of Whitman’s The Dismantled Ship completed the watery theme with a piece that combined a sustained vocal line with some very sparse but intricate piano. What was obvious by the end of the first set was that this was going to be as much a dramatic performance as an art song recital.
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Last night I braved the storm to catch an intriguingly curated show at Trinity St. Paul’s. Talisker Players’ Spirit Dreaming was a selection of music in which “western” composers explore the ideas of colonized peoples through the medium of vocal chamber music. The music was interspersed with readings from creation myths from around the world. It was very interesting to see how changing ideas of “cultural appropriation” and different cultural contexts; French and British colonies, Brazil, northern Finland, influenced works which range in time from the 1920s to the 2010s.
