British soprano Mary Bevan and pianist Roger Vignoles gave a recital of French chansons in Walter Hall on Monday night. The concept was that the songs were paired; one being a setting of Baudelaire by a male composer and the other song by a female composer of the the same period. With two exceptions all the composers were French and with one exception from roughly the fin de siècle. So Duparc, Déodat de Séverac, Fauré Debussy and de Bréville were paired variously with the predictable; les sœurs Boulanger and Pauline Viardot, and less predictable; Mel Bonis, Marguerite Canal, Amy Beach (American) and Jeanne Landry (Canadian and much later).
George is a new CD from soprano Sonya Yoncheva and friends made up of music George Sand would have listened to and some readings fro her works. There’s a particular emphasis on Pauline Viardot; close friend of Sand and sister of Maria Malibran.
Wednesday’s lunchtime recital in the RBA featured Simone Osborne; currently appearing as Norina in Don Pasquale, and pianist Rachael Kerr. It was a well curated selection of songs apparently, at least partially, inspired by sleep deprivation singer and pianist both have small children!). There were three sets of four songs. One in each set was by a Canadian composer backed up by two others that were thematically related.
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 