Tag Archives: willans

Summer Night

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summernightSummer Night is a CD of songs by Healey Willan produced by the Canadian Art Song project and due to be released on the Centrediscs label next month.  Willan is best known as a composer of church and choral music but he also wrote over 100 songs and song arrangements, many of which have not been published, let alone recorded.  There are 28 songs on the CD ranging in composition date from 1899 to the late 1920s.  Most are original settings of the text though a few are arrangements of existing songs; either traditional or by Burns.

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Voices Across the Atlantic

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Last night’s Toronto Summer Music concert at the Church of the redeemer was headlined by Daniel Taylor, Charles Daniels and Steven Philcox but, somewhat to my surprise, also featured multiple fellows from both the art song and chamber music programmes.

The “headliners” kicked things off with Britten’s canticle Abraham and Isaac, based on one of the Chester Mystery Plays.  I thought I knew this piece but soon realised I was confusing it with the setting of Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young in the War Requiem!  It’s an interesting piece with a very medieval Catholic take on an Old Testament story.  It was performed here with the delicacy and attention to detail I’d expect from these performers.

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Not a review

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This afternoon I saw Gerry Finley and Julius Drake in recital at Koerner Hall.  In other words, two supreme exponents of the art of lieder at the top of their game in a hall with near perfect acoustics.  They performed Beethoven and Schubert settings of Goethe texts, some Tchaikovsky and some Rachmaninoff, which gave Julius ample opportunity to show off.  They finished up with settings of folky things by Copland, Barber, Respighi and Britten.  The last was The Crocodile; a very silly and funny piece I hadn’t heard before.  The encore was by Healey Willans and Gerry gave a very nice plug for the Canadian Art Song Project.  Insert standard list of adjectival phrases describing top notch singing and accompaniment.  My humble scribing is not worthy.

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Not taken today.  My phone pictures were awful