Here’s what’s coming up next month as best I know.
The last concert of Soundstreams 2024/25 season took place at Hugh’s Room on Wednesday evening. Marion Newman and Angela Park gave a recital called Ancestral Voices which premiered the piano version of the Bramwell Tovey song cycle of that name. I had heard the orchestral version with Marion singing and Bramwell conducting the VSO at Roy Thomson Hall when the orchestral version was new. It’s just as powerful in piano score; maybe more so as the singer can more easily convey the nuances of the text. The selection of texts is clever; tracing an arc from an imagined Eden via environmental destruction and the Residential School system to, maybe, the seeds of Reconciliation. The setting serves the text well and Angela made a really good substitute for an orchestra!
Tim Albery’s show; Garden of Vanished Pleasures, about Derek Jarman and his Kent coast garden was supposed to figure in Soundstreams 2020/21 season and we know what happened to that! So, it was reengineered as a film and streamed in September of 2021. I reviewed it at some length for Opera Canada. Now director Tim Albery has recreated it as a live show at the Berkeley Street Theatre.
Here are my top picks for May.
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.
Thursday evening’s concert by the Vancouver Chamber Choir at Christ Church Deer Park was the culmination of Soundstreams’ RBC Bridges Emerging Composers program. It’s an annual week long workshop that brings six young composers together with an experienced mentor and a professional resident ensemble with the resulting works being performed at the end of the week. So the core of Thursday’s programme was the six works so created bookended by three works by the mentor; British composer Tarik O’Regan and three works chosen to give the concert a balanced opening.
So what looks fun in March?
Piano, piano, piano, piano (as Elmer Fudd might say) along with double bass and electronics are the basis for Kalaisan Kalaichelvan’s Poitu Varen which premiered at Hugh’s Room last night as part of the Soundstreams TD Encounters series.
Before looking forward to next month I want to mention a couple of things this weekend that I haven’t previously noticed. Saturday (Jan 25th) at 12.30pm there is a Met HD broadcast of new production of Aida with a pretty interesting looking cast. Later, at 6pm there’s a rather special concert at the Arts and letters Club to celebrate the 100th birthday of Morry Kernerman (former assistant concertmaster of both the TSO and OSM). The concert is presented by Canzona Chamber Players and wiull feature Trio Uchida-Crozman-Chiu. Continue reading
Here’s what’s coming down for the holiday season, as best I know:
