Orlando is a touring programme which mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska and guitarist Sean Shibe brought to Koerner hall on Thursday evening. For some background on the show see my interview with Ema earlier this month. As promised it was more of an “experience” than a conventional song recital. The overarching theme, sometimes obvious, sometimes less so, was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
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.
Opera Atelier’s fall offering is Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée. It’s rather curious that such a rarely performed work should have had two productions in Toronto within a few months but there you go! It’s also a work that was conceived on quite a small scale. At the time of composition Lully had a monopoly on presenting opera in theatres in Paris so Charpentier’s work was written for the Duchesse de Guise and presented in private performance.
The 2025 production of Verdi’s Nabucco recorded in the Arena di Verona is nothing if not spectacular; visually and vocally. One might ask though if it’s anything other than spectacular. Stefano Poda, who was responsible for designs and direction, makes some pretty bold claims in his Notes; “a symbolically charged reflection on power, spirituality and human identity”, “contrasting dualities: Babylonians and Hebrews, rationality and spirituality, progress and faith”, “the possibility of inner transformation and human reconciliation”. That’s a lot of freight for Nabucco to carry and I’m not sure it does but the visuals are certainly spectacular.
The work under consideration here is Francesca Caccini’s Il liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina. Written as a court entertainment in Florence in 1625 it’s almost certainly the first work of its kind by a woman. It was commissioned by the two female regents of Florence; Christine of Lorraine and Maria Maddalena of Austria, for the visit of Wladyslaw, Prince of Poland and Sweden. Can it really be thought of as an opera though? It’s from that period when gentlemanly (and ladylike) scholars were trying to reconstruct what they believed Classical Greek drama had been like, though in this case the theatrical elements are mixed with dances (that would have been performed by the ladies and gentlemen of the Court) and even an equestrian ballet which might prove tricky in a modern opera house!
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.
Continue reading
Music – concerts and opera
Uncivilized is a play by Ahmad Meree dealing with “belonging” in its broadest sense. Meree plays Mohammad who takes us on a journey from arriving as a refugee from war torn Syria to, eventually, becoming a Canadian citizen. But how Canadian can he become? He can vote and get a Canadian passport but he’s still “brown” and Muslim. Throughout the process he’s continually asked if he’s a terrorist. It’s quite cutting but also very funny.
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.
