The King’s Grief is the latest show from the Happenstancers who performed it at Redeemer Lutheran on Friday and Saturday evenings. Like pretty much all Happenstancers’ shows it takes a number of works with multiple acts/movements/etc and combines them in unconventional ways. This programme was built around Judith Weir’s King Harald’s Saga, Thomas Adès’ Court Studies, from The Tempest and the only three songs that survive by Lady Mary Dering with some Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin, John Dowland and Colin Matthews thrown into the mix.
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 (*).
