This year’s fall opera offering from the Glenn Gould School is a double bill; Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. Both of these were written in the 1950s and satirise bourgeois marriage of the time. Opera goers are absolutely used to seeing the marriage customs of, say, the 1850s or 1790s sent up in opera but some how the 1950s seem weirdly exotic. Director Mario Pacheco seems to have thought so too and sets both works in Dr. Pritchett’s Clinic for Matrimonial Memory Erasure. So the quartet in the Barber are nurses in scrubs; three of whom also form the trio for the Bernstein where Dinah and Sam are played as patients. It actually works pretty well.
Pursue Peace; Contemporary Chamber Music by Canadian Jewish Composers is the first recording by the Jewish Music at York initiative of Toronto’s York University. It features three works by living Canadian Jewish composers; Sid Robinovitch, Noam Lemish and James Rolfe. 
Lise Davidsen’s latest CD with Ed Gardner and the LPO features arias from five Verdi operas; Macbeth, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, Don Carlo and Aida. It’s pretty good. 
Le Récital des Anges is a CD of Schubert songs orchestrated by Ian Cusson and Hector Berlioz plus the orchestral version of Ian’s Le Récital des Anges; a setting of six poems by Émile Nelligan. 
The Bauhaus is usually associated with architecture and industrial design but it also had a musical side. The musical archive is mostly unexplored but there’s now a project to publish and record as much as possible. The first recording to be released is Marc Blitzstein’s 1929 opera Parabola and Circula to an English libretto by George Whitsett. What’s really unusual is that all the characters are geometric shapes (or maybe concepts, since a point and a line don’t have “shape). These characters interact on a series of planes. It makes me curious to know whether composer or librettist were familiar with Edin Abbott’s Flatland though the opera is about love and philosophy rather than geometry and class (*).
Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher is a rather peculiar work. It’s scored for orchestra, adult and children’s choruses, solo singers and actors. There’s a lot of spoken word, usually accompanied by the orchestra or interleaved with singing. It’s important too, as Jeanne and her confessor, Brother Dominic, are both spoken roles. The text is a mix of French and Latin and the mood varies wildly from sombre, to grand, to liturgical, to reflective, to farcical. Each scene (there are eleven plus a prologue) is very much it’s own thing. The music is basically tonal, with some chromaticism, but it varies widely in mood to suit the needed atmosphere for each scene.
