The second concert in this year’s West End Micro Music Festival took place at Redeemer Lutheran Church on Friday night. Titled Alchemical Processes it featured a mix of early and modern works written or arranged for some combination of string quartet (Jennifer Murphy, Madlen Breckbill – violins, Laila Zakzook – viola, Philip Bergman – cello), harpsichord (Alexander Malikov) and clarinet or bass clarinet (Brad Cherwin).
It started out with Bach’s Concerto in A Major BWV 1055 arranged for string quartet, harpsichord and clarinet. It was enjoyable. Originally written for harpsichord and string orchestra, any loss of richness in the strings by only having one player on a part was compensated by the additional colours of the clarinet.
There are a few things I didn’t mention in my back half of April post. Century Song opened a couple of nights ago at Crow’s Theatre. It’s a live performance hybrid, inspired in part by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Soprano Neema Bickersteth melds classical song (music by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Oliver Messiaen, John Cage, Georges Aperghis and Reza Jacobs) and movement to inhabit a century of women whose identities are contained within a single performer. Details 
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