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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Saturday evening, at Redeemer Lutheran, the Happenstancers offered up a palindromic tribute to Pascal Dusapin. As it was a palindrome I shall review it from the middle outwards. Let us take the interval as t=0. Then at t=+/-1 we heard Two Walkings from singers Danika Lorèn and Hilary Jean Young. Two songs; “How Many Little Wings” and “Kiss My Lips She Did” came before the break and the rest; “May June”, “A Scene in Singing” and “It Seems To Be Turning Music” after. And, of course the singers swapped positions at the break! This is extremely interesting but fiendishly difficult music with the unaccompanied singers trading snatches of phrases and half thoughts in a complex atonal musical language. I’m actually in awe that anybody can actually perform a work like this but they did, and very well.
Previous concerts from the Happenstancers have typically featured fairly conventional chamber music either arranged or combined in unusual ways; sometimes mixed with more modern/contemporary material. Saturday night’s concert at Redeemer Lutheran was a bit different. Titled Future Pastorale it was built around Claude Vivier’s 1968 work Ojikawa plus the text of Psalm 131 (also used, in French, by Vivier) and text from the “Introduction” to Blake’s Songs of Innocence; “Piping down the valleys wild. Piping songs of pleasant glee” etc with lambs, shepherds and clouds.
