On June 15th 2006, Beverly Sills welcomed the television audience to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre for a live performance of The Light in the Piazza. Yes, I was busy that night in June 2006, unaware that I should have been watching. A few weeks ago I saw and reviewed a production of Adam Guettel’s musical here in Canada, posing that classic question: are the weaknesses because of the text or the production?
It’s not often that such questions can be answered so conclusively. Wow.
A kind friend, seeking to answer my question made the performance available for my viewing. Too bad this magical performance hasn’t yet been offered as a DVD, but perhaps that omission will be corrected someday.
It’s counter-intuitive. One would not expect that a production in a larger space employing a larger band would be subtler. But when you think about it, that’s precisely what orchestras offer in place of chamber music, provided that the conductor keeps them under a tight rein. If I can hear the separate parts in a string quartet as though they were soloists, that grabs my attention in a way that blended strings will not.
They –the local production that I reviewed—lost me early. The Light in the Piazza has a magical premise for a musical. We watch & hear miscommunications all night. When the lead steps on stage as a young Italian, singing in Italian, and supposedly unable to understand the sweet American girl visiting Florence, if we don’t believe his accent, the whole evening is shot. Sorry folks, I go to opera a lot. I see professionals, mostly Canadians & Americans, who manage to sing Italian phonetically. It’s just not good enough to hire a handsome young man for his good looks if he can’t make me believe he’s Italian.
In contrast, almost everyone in that American production was so easy to believe that I felt like a foreigner in Florence: as I should. I shouldn’t be sitting there thinking “he’s a good singer whose accent is bad”.
Patti Cohenour (photo by Thomas Bliss)
The one singer whose Italian accent was merely passable, rather than fluent, must deliver the funniest lines of the entire night, namely Patti Cohenour as Signora Naccarelli. And wow she nails those lines stopping the show when, in the middle of “Aiutami”, the hysterical number in Italian, is interrupted by her deadpan translation. Fabrizio, the young man on the verge of heartbreak, should be hysterical. The rest of them should be much drier and more restrained in comparison, that this number is first and foremost about him. Unfortunately that’s not how the local production did it but wow, listen to this one. Cohenour manages to be upset and detached and sexy all at once. Amazing.
It’s a dream cast in a dream production. The subtlety of their reading is easier to see when you’ve been to another production. Victoria Clark’s vulnerable reading of Margaret Johnson, alongside the understated reading of Chris Sarandon as Signor Naccarelli –including a stunning kiss—makes so much sense. Katie Rose Clarke, the Clara on the broadcast, is especially compelling dramatically, rather than vocally.
Distance serves this production well, in a bigger theatre. Putting it into a smaller space with a smaller ensemble is risky without a very clear vision.
You can find much of this production available on youtube, but I sincerely hope the broadcast will be made available on DVD, if only for its advocacy on behalf of Guettel (music & lyrics) & Craig Lucas (book).
“Press releases and announcements” are presented verbatim without comment.
O GAMELAN
An exotic evening blending Traditional Indonesian & Modern Western Sounds Sunday, November 17, 2013 at Koerner Hall
For Immediate Release: October 30, 2013 – Toronto, ON: On Sunday, November 17, Esprit Orchestra returns to Koerner Hall with O GAMELAN, an evening of music influenced by gamelan or combining gamelan and orchestra. Esprit shares the stage with Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan. Toronto’s unique group of eight musicians continues to expand and develop gamelan repertoire by interspersing traditional Indonesian techniques with contemporary Western ones. The colourful program is highlighted by the premiere of José Evangelista’s O Gamelan (commissioned for the occasion), and Chan Ka Nin’s Éveil aux oiseaux. André Ristic’s Projet«Peuple» for gamelan and orchestra, Lou Harrison’s Threnody for Carlos Chavez for viola and gamelan (spotlighting violist Douglas Perry), Scott Good’s arrangement of Claude Vivier’s Pulau Dewata and Alex Pauk’s Echo Spirit Isle round up the evening. Esprit’s 2013/14 season is sponsored by BMO Financial Group.
Hailed as “One of the world’s leading performers of contemporary music for gamelan”, the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan is an ensemble of eight highly skilled Canadian musicians who perform and record using an assortment of bronze and wooden instruments from Indonesia. Collectively these instruments are known as a gamelan – a traditional instrument ensemble that plays an important role in the Indonesian culture. Formed in 1983 and based in Toronto, Evergreen Club is a unique performing ensemble dedicated to the development and expansion of its repertoire through the commissioning of new works from Canadian and International composers, and interpreting traditional and contemporary Indonesian pieces. Visit http://www.evergreenclubgamelan.ca
The concert’s title evokes José Evangelista’s work, O Gamelan. “Gamelan comes from Javanese gamel, hammer. It designs a variety of Indonesian ensembles where tuned percussion instruments predominate,” he explains. “The gamelans of Java and Bali are the best known and probably the most sophisticated. Traditionally, Javanese music is slow and meditative, Balinese music is noisy and strongly rhythmic. Since I became acquainted with gamelan music I thought of it as an ideal in music: the textures are refined and complex still the music is often direct and catchy.”
Chan Ka Nin’s Éveil aux oiseaux is written for 11 western instruments and 9 Gamelan instruments. The sound worlds of East and West are pitched against each other at the beginning and later combined to a uniquely transformed sound. This signifies the “awaking of the birds”, a childhood experience the composer had when he was growing up in Hong Kong. He remembered that every morning he was wakened by hundreds of sparrows dwelling in a big mango tree next to his home.
Lou Harrison’s gamelan compositions always bear a personal stamp. The American musician (1917-2003) began composing for traditional Javanese and Sundanese gamelan instruments in 1976, soon using the gamelan as a backup orchestra for Western solo instruments. Among the earliest pieces to call for this type of cross-cultural mixture was the 1978 Threnody for Carlos Chávez for viola and Sundanese gamelan. This Esprit performance spotlights Toronto violist Douglas Perry.
A stay in Bali in 1976 marked a turning point in Claude Vivier’s career. Most of the subsequent works were to show the influence of the atmosphere of this Pacific island, whose inhabitants call it the “Island of the Gods,” or Pulau Dewata. This is the title given by Vivier to a work specially dedicated to the people of Bali. “I wanted to write a piece imbued with the spirit of Bali: its dances, its rhythms and, above all, an explosion of life, simple and candid”, wrote Vivier.
André Ristic’s work, Projet«Peuple» for solo doublebass, small wind orchestra and gamelan ensemble was written in 2005. The young Quebec composer describes his music as «a kind of rhythmical shuffle-zapping of elements taken from a collection of instrumental phantasms, often times resulting in self-cannibalism of the music itself, one of the musical ideas ending up devouring all the others».
“I made an in depth study of Javanese gamelan music and had become fascinated by the vitality and richness of the genre”, says Alex Pauk, stating that Echo Spirit Isle “is not intended as an imitation of the gamelan, but rather is designed to transform the essential qualities of that music into an orchestral experience with its own unique frame of references.”
O GAMELAN Sunday, November 17, 2013
8:00 p.m. Concert / 7:15 p.m. Pre-concert Talk
Koerner Hall / Royal Conservatory of Music TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning
273 Bloor Street West, TorontoFor tickets
(Regular: $55/Seniors: $50/Under 30: $20),
Please call (416) 408 0208 or visit performance.rcmusic.ca For more details: www.espritorchestra.com
“Requiescat in Pace” is the last line in the third of three operas presented by Opera 5, namely Cecilia Livingston’s The Masque of the Red Death, whereby we had the name for the evening’s program. I wonder if Poe’s story ends that way? I do know that “In pace requiescat!” is the last line of Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado”. I suspect the phrase could fit somewhere into any of his stories. Note, that in Latin one can reverse the order of the words without disrupting the sense.
And so “RIP” is what i shall call this trio of operas based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
I’ve always felt that I prefer performers whose ambitious striving leads to errors, rather than a more cautious perfection. Professionalism in this country often leaves us with polished performances whose shiny surfaces belie the lack of heart on the inside. Notwithstanding a boldness that sometimes leaves RIP teetering on their tightrope like a circus act, RIP is so very bold, taking us to three very different places, both because of the divergence in story, in compositional strategies & dramaturgy, but also in the mise-en-scène.
We began with Cask of Amontillado by 20th Century American composer Daniel Pinkham. The story I remember builds to a climax, as a man is locked into a vault, crying out for mercy, but none is shown. The intriguing choice made by director Aria Umezawa was that the party revellers from earlier in the story become in effect part of the set, as though they are the vault. It’s a fascinating choice, one that alienates us from the horror in the story, making us instead party to the fury of Montresor, and reducing the outcome to something a bit more comical rather than genuinely horrible. From the beginning –because we’re seeing a Poe story enacted rather than simply told—we not only see the set up for Montresor’s plan and his cold calculation, but an added layer of alienation because of the use of chorus. I wondered how Pinkham wanted the story enacted for his opera, and what he’d say about this presentation; or did Umezawa give us exactly what Pinkham specified? Either way I found it very clever, and portraying an additional layer of horror in the implacability of the chorus. The alternative –showing the actual erection of layers of masonry–would be very difficult (and expensive) to achieve on a stage.
Baritone Adrian Kramer
Second up was none other than Claude Debussy, in his thrilling La Chute de la Maison Usher, the one that felt truest to the spirit of Poe. In places it was as though Golaud was visiting from Allemond, although the textures were just a bit crazier, the harmonies more chromatic than Pelléas et Mélisande. .In this one especially I was very moved by Adrian Kramer, a voice I’ve missed since he left the COC Ensemble, likely working outside of Toronto. His singing was stylish, while his dramatic presence was always a quantum leap above everyone else in the show. He was at the centre of a charming directorial conceit for the triptych, whereby each story was introduced by a small passage read aloud from a story, grounding us in Poe before we moved into the operas. It was good to see Kramer back on a Toronto stage.
Where the first two operas were done with piano, led by Opera 5 music director Maika’i Nash, The Masque of the Red Death was done with a small orchestra led by Constantine Caravassilis. In some respects the first two were like a prelude to the third work, which was a more serious effort in every respect.
Livingston’s opera is in a pragmatic mix of styles, sometimes sounding like Kurt Weill when the raucous chorus was singing, sometimes more like Philip Glass when the pattern music kicked in. I say “pragmatic” because the styles work with the textual requirements of the libretto. Linvingston’s arioso is very easy to understand, even in the passages building to a powerful climax.
Opera 5’s program “In Pace Requiescat” continues October 30th & 31st at the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto. Click picture for more information.
Yesterday I was on the University of Western Ontario campus, attending a special performance of Lee Hoiby’s The Italian Lesson in a production from Diva Lounge Productions. UWO welcomed back alumnae Sonja Gustafson (soprano & Diva Lounge founder) and Tanya Ellis (pianist), in a remount of a show seen in the recent London Fringe Festival.
The Italian Lesson is an attempt to capture monologist Ruth Draper. The words belong to Draper, famous for her flamboyant one-woman shows in the first half of the 20th century. Hoiby set a text organized by Mark Shulgasser, even if the words of the libretto are Draper’s rather than Shulgasser’s; the “libretto” credit is Shulgasser’s even if he is self-effacing about his role.
The piano part is like nothing I’ve ever heard. I want to make an analogy about the relationship between the voice(s) & the piano part, thinking of this as a kind of sonic canvas upon which composers paint operas. I’d usually think of the orchestra –or our virtual impression of the orchestra via a piano arrangement—as representing the background, perhaps giving us the horizon line for a portrait painting, or the three-dimensional microcosm that encloses the voices. Normally we expect the orchestra to hit notes both higher and lower than the voice, playing both before and after entries of voices. Usually it’s an unequal comparison, the voice being like a boat or a swimmer afloat in a larger body such as a lake or ocean, sometimes overwhelmed by the power of that larger body.
That’s not what Hoiby did in this case, not by a long shot. While it’s true that the piano begins & ends the piece, the balance is much more equal than usual. Ellis’ piano is so understated that at times her notes are like a thin cracker almost imperceptible under Gustafson’s hors d’oeuvre spread on top. The monodrama is truly the whole show. Hoiby knew what he was doing. The effect is that the voice –which is to say, the monologist— seems to be the creator of the monologue, her sentences emerging as distinct musical thoughts: as you’d hope. It’s a remarkable achievement because we’re not aware of the presence of a composer’s ego (or style, which is more or less the same thing) in the music, interposed like an unwelcome presence via ostentatious writing. No. Hoiby creates a delicate texture that is just enough to shape a musical characterization of Draper, but always puts the monologist front and centre of the stage and all over the score.
I found myself swept up in the work & its texture, as much in awe of the elegance of the writing as I was enthralled by the light textures between Gustafson & Ellis. One has to wonder in the presence of a new work whether what one is encountering is really in the text or might be due to interpretive choices from the artists. The freedom with which they worked had me wondering about the way the score is notated, particularly whether the text encourages a piacere attacks. The spontaneity in Gustafson’s performance and Ellis’ effortless following had me wondering if this was all in Hoiby’s score or something of their own.
Whatever the origin of the effect, whoever is responsible (likely all four: composer, librettist, singer & pianist) I believe Draper is well-served.
Shulgasser may have been addressing this sense of fluidity & freedom in a remark he made in our recent interview:
“The Italian Lesson” is certainly a very niche-y piece and perfect for the kind of singer that Sonja Gustafson is, who blurs the border between cabaret and opera. (I can’t actually remember when it was last done with orchestra.)
The piece and the artist are a good match.
Hoiby’s score seems to suggest that Draper’s persona is really multiple personalities, a series of voices that show different aspects of this woman, as she puts on different masks. Gustafson literally sings with a few different timbres, teasing us with several colours. Sometimes she’s doing something more like sprechstimme, sometimes it’s a bit of a croon, sometimes the line is from a pop-singer, sometimes fuller & boldly operatic. The colours are sometimes light, sometimes dark, and everything in between.
I’m hoping the project was recorded.
Composer Lee Hoiby and his partner/collaborator Mark Shulgasser at The Falls, Long Eddy, New York.
In the meantime –and this has no connection to Diva Lounge or Gustafson / Ellis—Shulgasser also told me of an uncoming New York production of The Italian Lesson December 6-8, by Darynn Zimmer, accompanied by Ted Taylor, directed by Beth Greenberg. (http://eastharlempresents.org).
I’m delighted, This is a work deserving to be heard.
I had a wonderful time at the dress rehearsal for Opera Atelier’s new Abduction from the Seraglio. It’s a remount but as usual they probed more deeply this time, accentuating the comic elements of the work. Anyone who’s seen this opera expects to laugh in certain places, such as Osmin’s aria where he speaks of hanging or in Pedrillo’s serenade. Without giving anything away –and spoiling the laughs—let’s just say that Marshall Pynkoski makes you laugh in places you wouldn’t expect to laugh.
This is a company with some claim to authenticity in terms of its use of period dance, movement, singing and an orchestra playing a historically informed style, yet this production is clearly meant for a modern audience, as seen in surtitles referencing “shagging” and “getting it on”
We are eager for people to understand that Opera Atelier is not a museum and our productions are not artefacts. A period production is simply an opportunity for us to challenge ourselves in a new way as artists in the 21st century. We explore the aesthetics of other eras and cultures in order to help us look to the future. Our recent production of Lucio Silla for the Salzburg Festival was greeted as one of the most radical productions to take place in Salzburg for decades.
A period production is the new avant-garde of the 21st century.
Opera Atelier make marvellous use of their dance troupe during comical set-pieces. And so we see baroque dancers brandishing instruments of torture. We see a farcical kidnapping enacted during the overture.
I was struck by an absurdly ironic thought tonight. Opera Atelier use ballet more than one might expect. Across town, the Canadian Opera Company seem to avoid using dance even in works –for instance their recent Aida—where one would expect to see dance. Otherwise their repertoire seems to deliberately avoid any grand operas that include ballet. Of course dance is expensive: even when you happen to have dance personnel in your company.
It’s a funny town.
I keep harping on a theme that obsesses me. Those who show up with stipulations—especially the critics—will miss what’s right in front of them. So maybe it’s true that Marshall & his choreographer co-artistic director Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg give us dance in unexpected places, and more than we might expect (and more than some people might like). But it’s often in the service of the comedy or the story-telling, and always in step (excuse the pun) with the score.
Singing in German with English dialogue, the cast was strong throughout. Lawrence Wiliford is a wonderfully elegant Belmonte, contrasted by the likeable comedy of Adam Fisher as his sidekick Pedrillo. Gustav Andreassen as Osmin & Curtis Sullivan as Pasha Selim are a formidable pair, who manage to be intimidating but never too scary. Andreassen is physically and vocally a wonderful clown, while Sullivan’s Pasha has the requisite dignity that we want to see, particularly in the last scene.
Soprano Carla Huhtanen (photo: Tobin Grimshaw)
Carla Huhtanen always impresses me with her fluid voice, never off pitch even in a dress rehearsal, this time including an interpolated high note somewhere near Earth orbit. She’s an artist of range & intelligence (often appearing with Talisker players or last month in Tapestry Briefs), and usually my favourite in whatever she does.
But Huhtanen had competition tonight, admittedly in a role where one expects fireworks. Ambur Braid’s Konstanze met the challenges of her role in an unexpected way. There’s the big aria “Martern aller Arten” for example, where one sometimes sees a singer gamely struggle. Not only did Braid make it look easy (although we should also credit conductor David Fallis in the pit for supporting his singers so perfectly that they’re easy to hear), but of course Pynkoski & Zingg make this hysterically funny. I won’t say how. Sometimes we’re watching overdone romance, a young woman in tears for her missing BF, sometimes we’re watching her defy her scary captors. It’s wonderfully funny, owing much to Braid’s comic gift, which we saw amply displayed last year in Die Fledermaus. Yes Braid can sing, but she’s very smart and never dull.
So naturally it’s another wonderful Opera Atelier production, opening Saturday. The singers are good, Tafelmusik sounds ravishing throughout under David Fallis, and the ballet is charming.
I want to see it again. Click the picture for information.
Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs II continues more or less where the first left off. The story resumes a short time after the end of the first film, that I saw (and reviewed) just a little while ago. I was right to obtain the video to the first film, as there’s a lot in the second film that isn’t easily intelligible without the first one.
As with the first film, yes there’s lots for children to enjoy. But there’s also a great deal that likely goes over their heads, subtle meanings making reference to other films & aspects of modern culure, including products & logos.
Where the moral of the first film seemed to promote sustainability while decrying the excesses of our commercialized civilization, Meatballs II seems to go in a different direction.
Yes there’s symbolism. But there’s a very specific target of the satire, and it’s no longer about our excesses. Instead the film targets a particular corporate culture.
I am mindful of Jobs, another film celebrating a particularly nerdy flavour of the American dream. You’ll recall that Meatballs I concerned an inventor whose creations backfire. Technology in that world is a mixed blessing that (literally) promises pie in the sky unless all that pie buries us when it falls on us.
In Meatballs II we see a different understanding of technology & invention. Where the first film is an inspirational tale of pure nerdiness & creativity, the second film is much darker, suggesting heroes & villains, good guys & bad guys.
And the bad guys are clearly a recognizable brand, namely Apple & their guru Steve Jobs, shown as a phony new-age guru who may mouth “Namaste”, but doesn’t walk the talk. Oh no. He’s evil through and through. We see a kind of idea factory that recruits our inventor hero Flint Lockwood, but only for the purpose of stealing his ideas.
The sneaker’s on the other foot now.
We see visual flamboyance as in the first film, but the humour is often lame. And yes, there’s this odd attack on Apple. If I didn’t know better I’d be wondering: who stands to benefit from this. If the film had been made by the competition (HP or Microsoft) it would be totally explicable, a cartoon version of an attack ad. I am reminded of Apple’s ads mocking the PC. Perhaps this is karma?
The thing in the film that I liked best is a tune by Paul Mccartney. And yes, the film is flamboyant visually. But where the first film had an integrity that made it feel like a healthy meal, this time my tummy doesn’t feel quite so good.
Sigh, so maybe I shouldn’t have asked for seconds. I had more than enough meatballs the first time.
Mark Shulgasser is a librettist especially known for his collaborations with composer Lee Hoiby. They created several operas together, until Hoiby’s passing in 2011. One might call Shulgasser a champion for Hoiby’s work, except that I believe Shulgasser is still adjusting to the double trauma of losing his beloved life partner & his great artistic collaborator. Considering how recent his loss, I feel very privileged that he’s able to talk at all.
I was intrigued that although produced by Des Moines Metro Opera, Dallas Opera & Pacific Opera in Victoria BC, it wasn’t the Hoiby/Shulgasser adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that was produced at the Metropolitan Opera, but a newer one by Thomas Adès.
Here’s a performance of the aria “Be not afear’d”, an aria called “the finest tenor aria of the last 50 years” by the Opera News critic on the occasion of the Dallas Opera production in 1996.
As you can hear, Hoiby’s voice is tonal, in the tradition of composers such as Gian-Carlo Menotti & Samuel Barber, and has been championed by such artists as Leontyne Price.
Hoiby has a substantial body of work, including several collaborations with Shulgasser. Some are full-length adaptations, such as The Tempest or Romeo and Juliet, their last work together. Others are short monodramas, such as The Italian Lesson or Bon Appetit.
On the occasion of Diva Lounge Productions remount of The Italian Lesson at the University of Western Ontario starring Sonja Gustafson next week, I ask Mark Shulgasser ten questions: five about himself and five more about collaborating on The Italian Lesson.
1) Are you more like your father or your mother?
Physically I see both of them, a touch more my mother, I suppose. Temperamentally I’m more my mother, and I felt closer to her, but then my father was rather aloof (tho gregarious, a seeming contradiction.)
Once in my twenties when I was in San Francisco, separated from Mother by a continent, at dawn following a harrowing night, I saw her tear-streaked face look back at me in the mirror. I was in love with one of the Cockettes, a San Fransicso drag collective; he was preoccupied with a heroin addict named Daniel. So I rang Mother up and woke her from a dream. She had entered a church (a holocaust survivor, when awake she had an aversion to churches). The church was full of naked men whose bodies were covered with boils. One of them turned around. It was me. She lit a candle and left the church.
I try not to think about her too much. She had a great sensitivity to music and art, but she didn’t find them important. She had a propensity to lateness which I share and many times together we slipped into concert seats at the last second, with practiced poise: Emil Gilels in Carnegie Hall (Mozart, Chopin, Liszt), Carlo Bergonzi at the Four Arts in Palm Beach, with Lee in tow, incredulous). Sometimes the artist would acknowledge us before beginning to play. She had been seriously scared as a child at her first opera, Faust. Once we drove behind an ambulance to Lincoln Center. Once in Paris an international flight was held for us.
Did I mention that she was terribly well-dressed? And frankly stunning as you can see from the picture, in Europe often taken for Anouk Aimee. Also, she had real style as an interior decorator and was a regular client of Herman Miller and the Eames, both in our home furnishings and for friends, and she even had her own clients. Until she realized that she knew nothing about business. That’s another way I resemble her, and became briefly a clueless gallerist.
She could have been a handful; unfortunately she came up against an assortment of chronic illnesses. Nor did she ever say goodby to Paris, where she & my father lived from 1945-47. (I was conceived in Nice.) So thru Mums I grew up Francophile. Don’t get me started on my mother’s childhood. She had a nurse named Juzefa. Bialystock, on the Lithuanian border, the most jewish city in Europe, population 100,000 one half Jews imagining themselves to be Polish, even Franco/Polish,. She lived among crystal rosebowls on mahogany tables, oriental carpets, and periodic trips to spas in German and France all the while being mildly kosher. The family, with a branch in Czechoslovakia traded in lightbulbs and glass fixtures. Her father was handsome, of somewhat mysterious origin, and unfaithful.
Dad, on the other hand He relished a jewish Lithuanian shtetl identity with its rabbinical depth, as well as Russian culture, and he had no trouble maintaining his identification with the best of German culture in spite of the war. (Mums on the other hand, hated to hear the language). His mother was literary and twice a year he would accompany her to the Deutschesbuchhandler, who received her privately in someone’s salon and brought out the newest arrivals that might interest her. Dad had 13 years on Mums, the decade of the thirties spent traveling Europe commercially. A natural linguist, he became cosmopolitan.
He gave me the bible, Goethe, Thomas Mann, and the example that reading continually is a proper activity. He especially read modern European history as if researching his own past, and he told me often, admiringly, that his family had supported numerous scholars who had no responsibility but to study torah, including most of his own male relatives. (That seemed to me to be a nice alternative to many of the behavioral models of the time.) My mother designed a beautiful library den for him.
He was completely tone deaf with absolutely no interest in music of any kind (tho he liked Doris Day). We had a baby grand piano and my mother and I both took lessons, first from a Mrs. Bay, who was the sister of Emanuel Bay, Heifetz’s longtime accompanist. Mother got to the point of playing those annoying Clementi sonatinas and then gave it up; I perservered to not much greater attainment, instructed by a magical woman, a hunchbacked dwarf with a red bouffant hairdo, who at lessons rarely touched the keyboard, but, just on occasion, she would play a simple scale with one hand and it was an aria.
And one day Father sat down at the keyboard and played a few licks with such style, nuance, charm and tone I couldn’t believe my ears. He grinned sheepishly and refused to ever do it again!
2) What is the best thing or worst thing about being a librettist ?
What IS a librettist? It sounds like a little figurine on a glass shelf.
Ideally, or classically, an original librettist is a poet for whom the writing of material to be set to music is a sideline at best. He may also be a writer of prose and plays. He was often the dominant member of the partnership, but unless lucky enough to hook up with a composer who lasted, his opera have been forgotten.
Most often, however, a libretto is merely an adaptation, requiring no more than an editorial hand, so many good libretti come from the stage-struck, including producers, directors, conductors, dramaturgs and patrons. (Rarely from critics, however; Andrew Porter’s dreadful Tempest, for instance.) Of course adaptations can be quite plain, or free and imaginative, and here the most evanescent of arts, the genius of theater, comes into play. In fact, if ideally the librettist is a poet, usually he is any sort of ‘homme de theatre’or ‘boulevardier’. Many a lighting designer and props person has a stab at a libretto in a drawer somewhere.
Myself as a librettist – well I’ve only ever made adaptations, and only for Lee Hoiby, so I hardly have a well-rounded experience of the terrain. For me the personal relationship with the composer was the principal experience, shared enthusiasms, explorations, readings of wonderful literary properties.
[Leslie, this leads to so many thoughts, for later . . .]
3) Who do you like to listen to or watch?
I make a selection of what I like to listen to on my radio show “Music of the Spheres” which broadcasts live from noon to two on WJFF Radio Catskill. It streams at WJFFradio.org. Chamber music and piano music have always been primo for me, more so than opera. This week I’ll be highlighting Jeremy Denk, as he’s playing a recital locally on Sunday.
But my other side, you might call it, is my passionate interest in the Zodiac. I’ve always kept up my astrology. So often one hears that astrology is misconstrued unless one goes beyond the simple sun-sign stuff, but it’s really only the sun-signs that interest me. I’m a cultural sun-sign spotter. I collect some observations on an intermittent blog: astrodreamer.squarespace.com.
Check it out.
4) What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?
I wish I played the piano better & could accompany singers. I wish I had more earth in my chart.
5) When you’re just relaxing and not working what is your favourite thing to do?
Reading, of course.
My library is unusual in being, to the extent possible, organized by the astrological sign of the author or subject.
I have polymathic leanings, and was as a child very much torn between scientific and artistic interests. That developed into a fascination with astrology, as a practicum of the continual contest between imaginative and scientific creation. I compulsively embellish my experience with astrological observations, but have learned to keep quiet about them, as they tend to make the impression of ostentatious jewelry or heavy perfume. I’ve been digitizing fragments of my collection of disturbing astrological coincidences at http://astrodreamer.squarespace.com. It’s fallen behind as another astrological writing project is in the works.
~~~~~~~
Five more about being the librettist of Lee Hoiby’s The Italian Lesson.
1) Please talk a bit about your process writing a libretto, and how you approach it.
I don’t claim to be the librettist of “The Italian Lesson”. [Leslie at this point admits he may have made an error..? perhaps because the libretto adapts someone else’s words? but nevermind!]
Composer Lee Hoiby and his partner/collaborator Mark Shulgasser at The Falls, Long Eddy, New York.
At times Lee allowed that I was, which surprised me. It was a slight move of his I think to get me blanket credit for all literary and drama-turgical aspects of his work. So at your invitation I will just ramble on with anecdotes librettistical.
I helped out that way, dramaturgically, for instance, when a version of Summer and Smoke had to be created for the Chicago Opera Theater. It had to play half an hour shorter to be videocast. Lee threw up his hands at the task. The opera had a considerable history of reshaping throughout its development and Lee didn’t want to go back to it.
I had no trouble doing this – and 20 of the cut 30 minutes were decided to be improvements and were incorporated into the published score. (The original version still exists in the full orchestration, and was recently performed, but the published vocal score corresponds with the reduced orchestration, which Lee came to prefer for the intimacy.)
Oddly enough, much that I judged excessive turned out to be material that Lee had added at the request of the director of the premiere, Frank Corsaro. For instance a rather overblown funeral procession with black umbrellas. Lee admitted he never really liked that music, but “Frank said it needed it.” I was not too happy when Lee told me that, because I was already embarrassed about having dropped Corsaro’s HB Studio opera-direction class after one session, without a word of apology.
If I could influence a subsequent production of Summer and Smoke I would jettison the Prologue as well. Beginning with a flashback of amplified, recorded children’s voices, for me that’s really like chalk squeaking across a blackboard. The play itself is a problem play in Williams’ output; he wrote three versions, one titled. Eccentricities of a Nightingale”. None really works. Williams offered Lee any play he wanted to set – he chose S&S and was often asked why on earth? Basically Lee would rather write about a nightingale than a man in a wife-beater yelling “Stella!”.
I also got Lee to add a scene which, to my knowledge has never been performed except in the production I directed at USC years and years ago. It’s a telephone conversation between a giddy Alma and a monosyllabic, hung-over John, accompanied only by a piano trio, onstage (using the piano in Alma’s parlor, where she gives a voice lesson later – it works.)
I’d like to see Summer and Smoke set in the 30s. There’s no reason why not, and I hate all that southern gingerbread. I think when the opera is properly done it transcends the deficiencies of the play through music and holds its own. Of all of Williams’ anatomies of female humiliation, Alma’s is the least squalid, Alma is the most dignified, her long decline the most musical and controlled, and in fact this is really the soprano’s opera. The role requires the combined heft and delicacy of a Butterfly, but Lee said Pelleas was his strongest influence. (Pelleas and Figaro being his opera ultimates.)
But I digress. Back to Frank Corsaro. Of course Lee was often asked why he didn’t choose The Glass Menagerie. I myself made a stab at an adaptation, but Lee turned it down. He flatly refused to devote two years or more of musical abilities to making the humiliation of a weak-minded, crippled girl as excruciating as possible. After The Tempest he often said from now on I only want to set Shakespeare.
Plus, we believed that the rights to The Glass Menagerie were unobtainable, having been so informed when Lee wanted to make a setting of Amanda’s “Jonquil” speech for soprano, saxophone and piano. So we were surprised when Frank Corsaro called one day to say that he could obtain the rights to the Menagerie, and would Lee write the music to Frank’s libretto? A substantial commission would be involved, no doubt, and much attention. I think this would have been for Juilliard. Not the sort of thing that comes one’s way very often.
I didn’t actually hear the conversation between Frank and Lee, but it must have included “not really attracted to the play”, and “Mark’s already done a libretto . . .” but the upshot was Frank sputtering, “You know, Lee, you could be doing great things, but you have this reLAYtionship . . .”
I have only one more Frank Corsaro anecdote: we obtained a room at Juilliard in order to drive down to town and play The Italian Lesson for Frank. I was page-turner. Frank was in obvious pain, in the midst of a lower back crisis. He walked with a wince, and squirmed continuously in the metal folding chair, as Lee sang and played. Frank was writhing about, leaning the chair backward on two legs or one leg; I couldn’t have possibly enjoyed listening to a new work or any work in that shape, but Frank is a trouper.
At a certain point in The Italian Lesson, Mrs. Clancy is speaking to her ineffably boring husband on the phone, repeating by rote certain tedious instructions he’s giving her to be conveyed to the chauffeur about golf things and suddenly she exclaims “Look out! Billy! Get off that chair! Look out, darling, you’ll fall!” And there was a crash and Frank and his folding metal chair went over in a tangle!
Lee owed a great deal to Frank Corsaro. First, Frank’s revivification of La Traviata at NYCO with Patricia Brooks won Lee over to Verdi. Then Frank put much of himself into Summer and Smoke, and directing it first in St. Paul before bringing it to NYCO. But a triumvirate of Williams Corsaro and Hoiby was not to be. My fault, apparently.
Ruth Draper’s performance of The Italian Lesson was recorded (along with much of her work) in 1954 when she was 72 (she died 2 years later). It was generally considered her masterpiece, and one reason to set it to music was to preserve the work of a remarkable and unique artist, and to expand the circle of her dwindling coterie.
The late recordings have been released on CD and I quote from the website where they can be obtained, & which is full of info about her : http://www.drapermonologues.com/
“Fans of her original “monodramas” included European royalty and U.S. presidents, and such stage legends as Sarah Bernhardt and George Bernard Shaw. Henry Adams considered her a genius; Henry James wrote a monologue for her (she never performed it); John Singer Sargent sketched her; and John Gielgud declared himself “infinitely fortunate” to have both known her and seen her onstage. “
She was the daughter of a cultured uppercrust New York family and she began to write and perform her monologues for family and friends only. One family friend, as mentioned above, was Henry James. Leon Edel, James’s biographer, writes: “When James first saw Draper do some of her characterizations and sketches she had not yet embarked upon her professional stage career; she had appeared in London, in a few private salons, always writing and developing her own material. Miss Draper talked to James of her plans. She wondered whether she should go on the stage in plays, devote herself to writing, or do the unique type of sketch she later made famous. She has quoted James as saying to her, “”My dear young friend you have woven yourself a magic carpet—stand on it!”
“There was a long time when no one knew who she was,” says Kate Draper, one of Paul Draper’s three daughters, and once a Broadway actress herself, “but she’s always been very popular with gay men. It was always gay actors that found her appealing. I could mention my name, and they’d say ‘You’re not a relation of Ruth Draper’s by any chance?'”
Uta Hagen, who estimated that she saw Draper perform some sixty times, said she never would have considered her own interpretation of a Draper monologue. “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” she said. Neither would Lily Tomlin: “That would be sort of sacrilegious.” Asked if she would ever try her hand at a Draper sketch, Julie Harris responds emphatically, “No! God save us! She was so unique.”
While working as a director at Britain’s National Theatre in the 1980s, Simon Callow attempted to stage a tribute to Draper with five actresses each doing a different monologue. Though initially enthusiastic, the actresses—Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Anna Massey among them—all came back to Callow with sincere regrets. Draper, a memory onstage for some, a recorded voice for others, was too much to live up to. “That’s the real tribute,” he notes.
If no actress alone could entirely reinhabit Draper’s texts, perhaps music could play a helping role. In so far as there is a libretto structure it is this:
1. Introduction: Signorina
2. Mabel Norton
3. Jane
4. Miss Pounder
5. Puppy
6. Count Bluffsky
7. . . . Miss Swift a
8. Camilla
9. Miss Swift b
10. The Lover
2) what do you love about The Italian Lesson?
Leslie: May we rephrase the Q? I’ll answer it in Q. 3, no? Here I will address something I like about The Italian Lesson because of astrological associations.
Henry James suggested Draper’s gift was her magic carpet. Draper chose, in the service of her art, continually and extensively to tour, to spend much of her life as a woman travelling alone, a one-woman show, a self-transportable objet d’art. Now her Sagittarius is the sign of flight and traveling, and tends towards bachelorhood, a temperament that thrives on distance rather than intimacy. (“The Pilgrim’s Progress”, “The Sentimental Journey”, “Gulliver’s Travels” are each by Sagittarians.) Draper had only one significant romantic relationship, and it was a characteristically long-distance one. She fell passionately in love with a dashing Italian poet 17 years her junior. His name was Lauro de Bosis. He died in 1931 when his plane crashed after a daring solo flight distributing anti-Mussolini leaflets over Rome. Three years earlier he had written a premonitory verse drama called “Icaro”. Draper translated it and had it beautifully published. I have a copy.
Oh, and de Bosis was also a Sagittarian.
I can fill out the picture by mentioning that the wonderful poet and Sagittarian James Tate’s first book is called “The Lost Pilot” with reference to his crucial relationship-in-absence with his father, a pilot shot down in WW2, whom he never met. Then there’s the bachelor composer Beethoven, author of Les Adieux and An die ferne Geliebte (To the Far-off Beloved), whose Pastorale Symphony was interpreted by Walt Disney, another Sagittarian, as a tale of centaurs and flying horses. I’d better stop.
3) Do you have favorite moments in The Italian Lesson?
That would have to be when Mrs. Clancy says to her secretary-helper Miss Swift: “And then what have I? Oh! The Philharmonic?! It seems to come so often. Does anyone really like music? Everyone says they do but I never believe them. Oh, I know who does, my old piano teacher, Miss Hattie Tush, she has a friend, and they stumble in together, and they enjoy it more than anyone I know, so send the tickets to her. . . “
4) How do you relate to The Italian Lesson as a modern man?
“The Italian Lesson” is certainly a very niche-y piece and perfect for the kind of singer that Sonja Gustafson is, who blurs the border between cabaret and opera. (I can’t actually remember when it was last done with orchestra.) Several of Lee’s songs do this and I’ve been promising Ms. Gustafson to send them to her. I believe a new collection of Hoiby songs is on the way; he left behind a good deal of unpublished music.
As a “modern man” (as opposed to a medieval ghost haunting our day) my relationship to the Estate of Lee Hoiby, which encompasses works like the operas “The Tempest” and “Romeo and Juliet” in which I had a substantial hand, and music written before I even knew him, all of that, comprises my sole source of income, as a modern man, who would like to remain so. I find it not only a pleasure but a necessity to encourage people to enjoy Lee’s legacy and perform it. I might add here that those like myself who have the misfortune not be in London, Ontario next week will be able to see it performed in New York City, USA on Dec. 6-8, by Darynn Zimmer, accompanied by Ted Taylor, directed by Beth Greenberg. (http://eastharlempresents.org)
Due to this terrible thing called political borders Lee’s work is less known in Canada. Timothy Vernon lit a torch for us with an exceptional production of the Tempest in Victoria. We always regretted missing Barbe et Doucet, who had to leave before we saw the show. I remember Lee and I being sadly resigned to the news that the second act was to be performed without the orchestral prelude, because of time. B&D invented a delicious coup de theatre to replace it.
Marc Edmund Jones
5) Is there anyone out there who you particularly admire, and who has influenced you?
Marc Edmund Jones, Dane Rudhyar, Charles E. O. Carter, Charles Fort.
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Lee Hoiby’s The Italian Lesson will be presented Friday October 25th at 12:30 pm, at von Kuster Hall, University of Western Ontario’s Don Wright Faculty of Music, London Ontario by Diva Lounge Productions.
It’s a truism that some artists are different in live situations than on record. The presence of an audience can inspire & illuminate a performance in a way that doesn’t happen in a studio.
That’s what I experienced tonight. When I met Beatriz Boizán a few days ago –a chance encounter at a concert, after interviewing her—she very kindly gave me a copy of her CD, knowing I’d be coming to see her play at Gallery 345 tonight. That CD gives me a wonderful gateway—and a good excuse—to explore her music further. I’ll talk for now about the adventure of tonight’s concert, and delve deeper when I speak of the CD in a few days.
Forget your usual assumptions. We associate big loud piano sounds with big guys like Garrick Ohlsson. When you see Beatriz Boizán as I first saw her (at a concert), she’s simply a charming woman, not very big, but pretty. One might be lured into patronizingly thinking “oh yes she’s pretty and her music will be pretty”. The photos give you an idea of course. Boizán wore Rosemary Umetsu couture, a different gown for each half of the concert.
Pianist Beatriz Boizan in one of her Umetsu gowns (photo by Elizabeth Bowman)
But the concert was physically demanding, a lot of pianistic heavy lifting. Boizán has a powerful sound that she unveils at times when she’s not employing one of the cleanest staccato deliveries I’ve ever heard. Her line is pristeen, notes perfectly separated. She is a player of power & wonderful stamina, so that I realize that she was very much like an athlete in her Umetsu couture, effortlessly hurdling the challenges in her virtuoso program (and forgive me if the V word is so overused as to be meaningless).
It was a mostly Latin-themed program, a reflection of allegiances & cultural heritage. Closest to home for Boizán? How about Ignacio Cervantes, a Cuban composer that I feel I should know better, and one that I am looking forward to exploring further (he’s new to me). We heard six charismatic Selections from Danzas Chubanas, including “Los muñecos”. How have i lived this long without hearing this fun piece? There are several versions on youtube, none of a virtuosity to match what we heard from Boizán. This little clip gives you an idea (although I prefer the sound of her two hands to their four, charming as they may sound).
Boizán also gave us Albéniz, Lecuona, her own dazzling transcription of de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance” and as an encore, Ginastera’s “Danza Del Gaucho Matrero” (if I got the name right), a wonderfully dissonant piece that sounds like something Debussy would have written had he been kidnapped by gauchos.
The concert opened with Haydn’s last piano Sonata, played with great lucidity. The last movement was especially original, offering us an approach to the voices that brought out their song-like quality in spite of –or at the heart of—the counterpoint. I love that she compels me to go back to the piece, now that i’ve heard it in a completely new way.
To close the first half of the program Boizán gave us a pair of well-known showpieces from Franz Liszt, namely his “Sonetto #104 del Petrarca” and the “La Campanella” etude, not as the usual show-off show-stopper, but in both cases with more genuine emotion and love than i’ve ever encountered in those pieces.
I suppose I should return to the idea with which I open, concerning live vs recorded. Boizán defies expectation, even after you’ve heard her crystal clear playing on the CD, because in person her passion infuses the music –especially the Latin themed compositions that are close to home—with additional life. I’ve never heard so much power from such a sweet little person, sometimes playing with her eyes closed for long periods of time. And then her emotion bursts out at the keyboard. “Feral” was a word that came up in the enthusiastic conversation afterwards, as we tried to understand what we’d experienced, as though we’d heard someone whose energies have not yet been tamed by the normal expectations of concert routine, as though her wild passions had just been brought back fresh from the wild. It’s a silly metaphor in some ways because Boizán plays with amazing precision. Of course: her live performance is energized by an audience, the undeniable chemistry we feel in the presence of true charisma. I feel very fortunate to have experienced this concert from an artist new to me and apparently new to the Toronto scene, someone who sends me reeling back to old words I have over-used, such as “magic” and “overwhelming”. The cynic in me wants to say that this comes from youth, that with maturity we’ll get mere music rather than shamanic energies opening doors. But another part of me suspects that this is the nature of her art, that the doors are open for her and she can take us through.
I look forward to hearing Boizán again. Trust me, if she’s playing anywhere around here I’ll write about it and let you know so you get a chance to hear her for yourself.
Tonight I saw the Canadian Opera Company production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. I’m late getting to the party for a production that opened on October 5th, but I was out of town that weekend. Regular readers of newspaper reviews will likely have heard of the opening night drama due to the indisposition of Ben Heppner in the title role & his late replacement by Anthony Dean Griffey. Perhaps my timing is good, considering that Heppner is now healthy.
The COC have already commemorated Verdi (Il trovatore) & Wagner (Tristan und Isolde) in this year of Centennials, and now it’s Benjamin Britten’s turn, even if he’s only 100 rather than 200 years old.
The program called Britten the “leading opera composer of the 20th century”. I like Britten but would call him “a”, not “the” leading opera composer of the 20th century, partly because I prefer Richard Strauss & Puccini to Britten, partly because such preferences are shared by a great many people (for example, if you read the statistical website operabase).
Some operas are such a good match to the strengths of certain companies that they serve to bring out the best in that ensemble. Such is the case with Peter Grimes. I’d go so far as to say that this is the kind of opera that the COC should be producing, because it shows off everything that’s good about this company
The opera is full of choral work, meaning not just singing but acting
The orchestra gets moments to shine playing difficult music
The opera is full of smaller parts that draw upon the talents in the COC Ensemble Studio
Peter Grimes is a kind of template, matching excellence we’ve seen before. One of the high-water marks for this company in recent years was their production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, another 20th century work requiring choral & orchestral brilliance, and an abundance of small parts to create a gripping piece of music-theatre. While the principals—whom I’ll speak of in a moment—were also good, that’s not really what makes this opera fly (nor War & Peace). I hope General Director Alexander Neef notices how well the company responds top to bottom, when confronted with a challenging work. The orchestra, especially when led by Johannes Debus, seems to get better every year. They seemed to make a quantum leap last year, sounding phenomenal in Tristan und Isolde and in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites. Hm, I think the Poulenc also matches the template somewhat—20th century, dramatic, wonderful chorus work & ensemble work—although if we push the idea too far it becomes so tenuous as to be meaningless.
Ben Heppner (photo: Michael Cooper)
As I mentioned, Heppner’s back in form after whatever ailed him on the 5th, nearly two weeks ago. I can’t get over how wonderful it is to again see a Canadian star repatriated after a magnificent career abroad, his Toronto appearances a tiny bit of icing on his cake. Perhaps we’ll see him again in this city, now that he seems to be settling into his other role at CBC radio.
I can’t rely on my memory to properly contextualize Heppner’s achievement. I saw Jon Vickers sing Grimes here in Toronto in the 1980s, (a rare visit by the Metropolitan Opera at a festival) an interpretation that was ground-breaking in its brave transgression of the composer’s own idea of the role. While I recall Vickers giving us something like madness, a desperation in his repeated lines of “I’ll marry Ellen”, Heppner proudly sang the same lines to the rafters. Heppner’s reading is romantic, a man who has a strong vision but who simply seems to make mistakes, a tragedy tripped up by fortune and his headstrong ways, where Vickers’ Grimes seems like a more genuinely dark & troubled soul. I think Heppner’s reading is a valid alternative, that maybe we don’t need to see madness.
Neil Armfield’s decision to set the production in times contemporary with Britten is not radical by usual operatic practice, especially given his self-reflexive reading centred on Doctor Crabbe, the figure whose writings are the source for the libretto. The focus on the doctor is fascinating, but I did not find anything particularly illuminating in this interpretation. What’s more, the updating (from 1830s to the 1940s) makes some of the story more troubling. The rough treatment meted out by Grimes looks very different set in the 1830s, when the boys came from workhouses, than if it suddenly becomes a 20th century story. By updating I was troubled, applying more modern standards of behaviour for Grimes (especially when the boys are shown as children allowed to play, not refugees from workhouses lugging coal or performing child labour). When we add in the framing –with Dr Crabbe—I found I was simply confused, unclear as to whether I should think of Grimes as a modern or not. None of this detracts from Heppner’s work, but it did serve to distract me in places as I struggled to decode the reading. Armfield gets wonderfully light ensemble work from his company in places, especially at the beginning of the last act, to counter-balance the tragic story arc for Grimes. Perhaps I should allow that Armfield creates a densely woven social fabric, where almost everyone is likeable at some level, where there are no blatant villains or cardboard characterizations, and where one’s emotions may be deeply conflicted.
The other leads were strong. Alan Held, who has had several excellent roles with the COC over the past two years (Kurwenal, Gianni Schicchi and Jochanaan) was a suitably powerful presence, one of the two key moral reference-points in the opera. The other was the Ellen Orford of Ileana Montalbetti, very believable in her embodiment of Grimes’ fondest dream of happiness.
Jill Grove, a powerful Amneris a couple of years ago, gave a colourful portrayal of Auntie, with a voice as powerful as her presence. I found myself constantly watching Robert Pomakov throughout, a suitably rough-edged Hobson. In addition, Owen McCausland (the reverend), Tom Corbeil(Swallow), and Claire de Sévigné & Danielle MacMillan (as the wacky pair of nieces) were standouts. Should I name everyone? Okay. Peter Barrett, Judith Christin, and Roger Honeywell all had moments to shine, and no one was less than compelling.
The COC production of Peter Grimes continues until October 26th at the Four Seasons Centre. It’s a brilliant piece of theatre that is not only worth seeing, but –if I get my wish—is worth emulating in future seasons.
Ileana Montalbetti and Alan Held (photo by Michael Cooper)
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David Eagle and the Art of Interactive Electronics
Friday, November 1 at 8PM at Betty Oliphant Theatre Traditional instruments make music with computers,
iPhone and Kinect sensor
For Immediate Release – Toronto, October 15, 2013: For the second concert of its 43rd season, New Music Concerts’ artistic director Robert Aitken asked Calgary-based composer David Eagle to curate a concert showcasing some of the most exciting young composers working in the field of electroacoustics and interactive media. The concert will include recent works byJimmie LeBlanc, Anthony Tan, Anna Pidgorna, Hans Tutschku and a New Music Concerts commission from Eagle himself for voice, ensemble and live electronics. Guest artists Xin Wang (soprano), Julia Den Boer (piano), Katelyn Clark (harpsichord) and Rachel Mercer (cello) join the New Music Concerts Ensemble and Robert Aitken (solo flute and direction).
Curator David Eagle (b.1955 Canada) is Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music at the University of Calgary. He is represented by two works on the program, Fluctuare for solo flute and electronics written for Robert Aitken in 2009 (first performed at the Happening New Music Festival in Calgary of which Eagle is the director), and the world premiere of the commission Unremembered Tongues noted above. The new work features texts in various languages including Latin, Blackfoot, Basque, Hawaiian, Cree and several indigenous Australian dialects. The composer will use a Kinect sensor to shape the music through physical gestures and an iPhone to trigger the programmed changes in the processing. Soprano Xin Wang is the soloist.
Composer and guitarist Jimmie LeBlanc was born in rural Quebec in 1977. He composed Lignes d’ombre (Shadow Lines) for harpsichord, piano and electronics for the Contemporary Keyboard Society in 2011. Katelyn Clark will reprise her role at the harpsichord and Julia Den Boer will be the pianist.
Anthony Tan is a Chinese-Malaysian composer born in Canada in 1978 now residing in Germany. On the Shadows of Ideas for piano and electronics (2013) was commissioned by the Experimental Studio SWR, Freiburg. Julia Den Boer who premiered the work is the soloist.
Anna Pidgorna (b. 1985) is a Ukrainian-born Canadian composer and media artist who combines her interests sound, visual art and writing to create works that are dramatic and picturesque. She is currently based in Vancouver, BC. The Child, bringer of light for solo cello with optional amplification (2012) was inspired by Carl Jung’s archetype of the Child. Rachel Mercer is the cellist in this Toronto premiere.
Hans Tutschku (b.1966 Germany) is the only non-Canadian on the program. His work, “behind the light for string quartet and electronics (2011) is a reflection on reflections. What surfaces are capable of reflecting incoming light? How does this alter color and how do the qualities of the reflections change the visual atmosphere? behind the light is an exploration of the relationship between source and multiplication.”
David Eagle and the Art of Interactive Electronics
November 1 at Betty Oliphant Theatre (404 Jarvis Street).
Introduction 7:15 | Concert 8:00
Xin Wang, soprano; Julia Den Boer, piano; Katelyn Clark, harpsichord; Rachel Mercer, cello;
New Music Concerts Ensemble, Robert Aitken, solo flute and direction
New Music Concerts gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for the Arts; Toronto Arts Council; The Department of Heritage through the Canadian Arts Presentation Fund; The Province of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Foundation Endowment Fund; The Mary-Margaret Webb Foundation; The Koerner Foundation; The McLean Foundation; The SOCAN Foundation; The Amphion Foundation Inc.; Stefan Wolpe Society; Music Toronto; The Royal Conservatory; Roger D. Moore; Edward Epstein and Gallery 345.
