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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Music – concerts and opera
Out of Dawn’s Mind is a setting, by Edmund Finnis, of five poems by Alice Oswald. It’s scored for soprano (here Ruby Hughes) and string orchestra (here the 17 strong The Manchester Collective; dir: Rakhi Singh). The poems deal with light, water, time and the experience of coming into contact with the world. The feeling is intimate and meditative. The vocal line is high but quite relaxed in tempo. The accompaniment is elegiac with brooding and shimmering patches. It’s rather beautiful but not at all dramatic.
I sat down with mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska this morning to talk about her upcoming show at Koerner Hall with guitarist Sean Shibe. It’s a touring show that’s being seen in multiple cities across Europe and North America and Ema was very clear that she sees it as an “experience” and “not a song recital”. So let’s take a step back and look at how it came into existence and then evolved into what we will be able to experience later this month. 
