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Volume 24 Issue 1 - September 2018

  • Text
  • September
  • Jazz
  • Toronto
  • Musical
  • Symphony
  • Quartet
  • Orchestra
  • Festival
  • Theatre
  • Violin
In this issue: The WholeNote's 7th Annual TIFF TIPS guide to festival films with musical clout; soprano Erin Wall in conversation with Art of Song columnist Lydia Perovic, about more than the art of song; a summer's worth of recordings reviewed; Toronto Chamber Choir at 50 (is a few close friends all it takes?); and much more, as the 2018/19 season gets under way.

When life is really

When life is really really horrible … you can ache and still be funny. MICHAEL COOPER Erin Wall as Clémence in the Canadian Opera Company production of Love from Afar, 2012 Singing has been a lifeline in the thick of the treatment; when we talked in August, she was undergoing radiation, which she was finding much easier. Singing, and also the rituals around getting ready and being in concert. “It was really nice to do, put on a dress and a wig and pretend that life was normal and not just be a cancer patient sitting on a couch watching Netflix.” You travelled quite a bit too? “It was fun actually because every time I got to go sing between the chemos, it’s like a vacation from cancer. Cancer treatment is like having a job. I rode to the hospital every day on the GO Train with the businessmen in suits, and it’s for weeks in a row, no gigging while this is happening-- it becomes your job.” As soon as she’s recuperated, it’s back to singing. “I’ve never sung more Beethoven Ninths in my life,” she jokes. “Which I love! And they’re easier to handle than, say, Mahler 8. I did a Mahler 8 I think between chemo four and five, and that put me absolutely to my limit.” This was in the Netherlands, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. “Any other time when I’m healthy, the amount of effort in Mahler 8 is between six and seven but there, I was at eleven out of ten.” How does the chemotherapy affect a singer’s body? “The thing that it affected the most is breathing,” she says. As a later side effect, it turned out that she was becoming anemic; the red blood cells were not able to bounce back as quickly as the white cells until with the help of medication, they did. “I had to stop running toward the end of chemo.” You maintained your running schedule?! “I was sort of able to keep it up in the beginning, going slower and slower, but toward the end it became impossible as your blood can’t carry enough oxygen.” I rewind the conversation back to the wigs and ask her about the practicalities around that. As soon as she was diagnosed, Wall emailed a friend who’s a professional wigmaker at the COC to ask her if she could create a wig specifically for her performances. Then she cut her hair short – she was told by girlfriends who’ve been through treatment that it’s easier to mourn the loss of short hair – and sent all the hair extensions she used over the years to the wigmaker friend to incorporate in the wig about to be created. “A week or two after chemo, when it was about to start to fall out, I had my husband shave my head. We had a party in my bathroom with my kids and my parents. I was about to go to Calgary and sing Mendelssohn and I didn’t want chunks of hair in my hands in the hotel room, and also didn’t want to carry hair brushes, and hair dryers and shampoo AND a bagful of wigs. It was all too much: I’m going to go to Calgary with no hair.” But what grew back since that bathroom symposium actually did fall off while she was in Calgary. “I woke up in Calgary and it was all over the pillow. It was still traumatic because it was real.” She doesn’t dwell too much. “It’s nice to have hair again. I dyed it bright magenta a while ago, and will try platinum on Tuesday.” Then she shifts into a comedy mode. “I used a long straight wig for social occasions, but they’re so hot and itchy when you have no hair on your head.” There are also the hot flashes to contend with, another side to cancer. “When you’re getting hot flashes and you have a wig on, it’s un-bearable. There were times when I was in public and decided that the wig has got to come off. I’d go somewhere and 30 minutes in, the wig would go into my bag and I would put a little cap on. And people give you looks, they know you’re a cancer patient… but you stop caring.” As she’s made me laugh multiple times during our conversation, I tell Wall that she’s coming up with some stand-up quality stuff that reminds me of Tig Notaro, the first US comic to talk about her cancer onstage and to, in fact, turn the illness into comedy material. Wall’s eyes lit up. “I love her work! Her comedy about having cancer and all the horrible things that came with it, I could not stop listening to it. CHARPENTIER ACTÉON & RAMEAU PYGMALION OCT 25 – NOV 3, 2018 18.19 BRINGING ART TO LIFE MOZART IDOMENEO APRIL 4 — 13, 2019 “Flawless… Opera Atelier has scored one of its greatest triumphs.” —TORONTO STAR SUBSCRIBE FOR AS LITTLE AS — OPERAATELIER.COM OR 416-703-3767 X222 CANADIAN SUPERSTAR MEASHA BRUEGGERGOSMAN AS ELETTRA Season Presenting Sponsor Season Underwriter Photo by Bruce Zinger 18 | September 2018 thewholenote.com

It’s what got me through December. Everything is so true. The most horrible thing about it – she had a double mastectomy – is, she says, that nobody can hug you after surgery. It’s the thing you most need and you can’t stand to be touched.” The first Notaro video that went viral and broke new ground in comedy? Wall keeps it on her phone. “She made the hard things funny. And I love that bit where she talks about making fun of her breasts for being so small, and how they have turned on her and went ‘we’re gonna kill her now’… I just love her. I remember driving through Texas with my sister – my aunt passed away from breast cancer in March – my whole family went there to say goodbye and as we were driving back through Dallas after, really depressed about it all, I was like: you need to listen to this, it’s about when life is really really horrible and how you can ache and still be funny. So we listened together.” Already in August when we spoke, in between the preparations for the Proms, Wall was rehearsing the songs for the September 14 recital in Picton with Carolyn Maule. A beautifully crafted program awaits, with long, complex songs by Debussy and Duparc, the three Korngold songs of the Opus 22, the delightfully mad Poulenc cycle Fiançailles pour rire, and a three-song cycle by the fin-de-siècle American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes. “They’re all songs that I like and know really well, that are fresh in my mind, body and voice,” she says. “These Debussy songs – I started singing them about 13 years ago. Which was ambitious of me then because I didn’t always have the low part of the voice to sing them. So I put them away for ten years, and then came back to them a few years ago, after I became a mother.” While she’s sung Thaïs and quite a few Marguerites as a fledgling singer, and had a French repertoire specialist for a coach, she’s more often asked to sing German rep now. Which will also soon enough include Wagner. The recital program is capped off by Elsa’s Dream, the soprano aria from Act 1 of Wagner’s Lohengrin – something she’s never sung before. Is this a sign of things to come? She smiles but can’t divulge too much. “There may be a staged Lohengrin in the cards. In a couple of years. But I can’t say more.” Can we at least know in what country? “…Spain.” Then adds: “I always thought my inroad to big Wagner roles would be either Elsa or Eva from Die Meistersinger… you know, the blonde ones. And that’s exactly how it turned out: Elsa it is.” September 14 at 7:30pm: Prince Edward County Chamber Music Festival presents “An Evening of Song” with Erin Wall, soprano, and Carolyn Maule, piano. St. Mary Magdalene Anglican Church, 335 Main St., Picton. 613-478-8416. . www.pecmusicfestival.com/ erin-wall. Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto. Send her your art-of-song news to artofsong@thewholenote.com. ART OF SONG QUICK PICKS SEP 21, 8PM: SweetWater Music Festival. Opening Night Gala: Party Like It’s 1689. Italian Baroque by Vivaldi, Merula, Simonetti, Legrenzi, Strozzi and Mealli. Historic Leith Church, Leith. Consummate early music performer soprano Suzie LeBlanc in concert with Mark Fewer (violin), Mark Edwards (harpsichord), Matthias Maute (recorder) and Denise Djokic (cello). SEP 27, 7:30PM: Viva Verdi: A Selection of Verdi arias for soprano, tenor and baritone. Brott Music Festival, FirstOntario Concert Hall, Hamilton. Always interesting to see what the young Verdian voices in the making Ambur Braid, Dimitri Pitas and Gregory Dahl do with the most challenging arias of the 19th century rep. OCT 2, 12PM: Canadian Opera Company Vocal Series: Russian Songs and Romances. Oleg Tsibulko, bass; Hyejin Kwon, piano. Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Only confirmed in the program at the time of printing are Sviridov’s Songs to Verses by Robert Burns, but the occasion to hear a selection of Russian romantic songs for the bass should never be missed. Oleg Tsibulko D. YUSUPOV 2018/19 Season CLOSE ENCOUNTERS CHAMBER SERIES Our popular chamber series returns! Quintessential Boccherini Wed Oct 3 & Sat Oct 6 Music Director Elisa Citterio’s Close Encounters debut. Strangers in Strange Lands Wed Apr 10 & Sun Apr 14 Explore galant music written by composers who settled far from home. Fantasticus Wed May 22 & Sun May 25 A journey into the audacious stylus fantasticus of the 17th century. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS MEDIA PARTNER Seating is limited – order your tickets today. tafelmusik.org PHOTO: SIAN RICHARDS thewholenote.com September 2018 | 19

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