Of all the groups I’ve seen explore the boundaries of “classical music” in Toronto, none goes further than Slow Rise Music and this was especially true of their concert Collide-o-Scope which played at the Tranzac on Saturday and Sunday.
Slow Rise Music (Tristan Zaba and McKenzie Warriner) presented a concert called here be sirens on Saturday night at the Tranzac. Apparently it’s their third concert but they are new to me and I’m really happy to find a new collaboration of young musicians putting on quite experimental shows of the kind I saw last night. It’s something that was common enough before the plague but has been slow making a comeback.
Andrew Ager’s Führerbunker is a short chamber opera depicting the events leading up to Hitler’s suicide in April 1945. It’s a tautly constructed work in which many short scenes are woven into a seamless and compelling whole. It flies by and its 45 minute length seems even shorter. The score is spare, even brutal, as befits the subject matter. The composer told me he had initially envisioned something Wagnerian but feared that that must descend into pastiche. He made the right decision. So, the piano line is minimalist with elements of serialism and very little support for the singers. It’s a style that has perhaps been largely discarded (in north America at least) but here it was startlingly effective. Perhaps the crappy Tranzac Club piano contributed to the effect!
operaramblings 