Volume 29 Issue 5 | April & May 2024

“Transcending

“Transcending boundaries”: poet, teacher, researcher, media artist, conductor stage director and theatre director, Sandeep Bhagwati ART OF SONG A NEW JOURNEY Third of three The third event in this month’s account of recent and upcoming new music events is coincidentally another three-day festival. Titled Future Resonance and brought to us biennially by New Music Concerts, it takes place from April 26-28 in three different venues. It begins on April 26 at the Canadian Music Centre with a panel discussion titled “What Is the Real Sound of Toronto” aimed at stimulating a lively conversation about alternate ways of approaching the creation and presentation of newly made music. Doors open at 4.30 and the event wraps up with a reception from 6:30 to 7pm. On April 27, the action shifts to St. George by the Grange, the previous home of the Music Gallery, for the concert that promises to be the centrepiece of the festival, titled “Swara Sutras Goes Electronic.” “Swara sutras” in Sanskrit means an assemblage of notes, and the concert lives up to its title. In its first half, it offers four world premieres by Canadian composers where the sounds of guzheng, tablas, bamboo flute, percussion, kora, and Metis fiddle, are individually and in combination blended with new technologies. The concert’s final work features a nine-musician Swara Sutras Ensemble assembled for the occasion under the direction of Sandeep Bhagwati. The final event on April 28 takes the festival uptown to the Aga Khan Museum for a full-day immersive event titled “Śabdagatitāra: How to Inhabit These Different Temporalities?” “Śabdagatitāra” is again from Sanskrit meaning the crossing over (tāra) of methods of making (gati) sound (śabda), and promises to be an event “celebrating many musical roots and containing wonderfully unexpected sound worlds,” including pipa, Bulgarian singing, Turkish violin, double bass and musical sculptures. Coming full circle, Soundstreams appears again on the calendar for a May 4 performance of Grandma’s Shawl which reveals the story of the bond built in the early 20th century between Ukrainian and Indigenous women. Struggling to cope in their new surroundings, the Ukrainian immigrants are welcomed and supported by Indigenous women through food and Khustka shawls. The musical narrative for soprano, mezzo, piano and violin unfolds through the combining of works by both Ukrainian and Canadian composers, and takes place at the Redwood Theatre, a classic 1914 theatre, newly renovated, at 1300 Gerrard St in Toronto’s east end. Reimagining art song for the 2020s STEPHANIE CONN Lieder, or art song, might seem a tough sell at times. With just two performers on stage, singer and pianist, it does not offer the visual dazzle of opera with its scenery, orchestra and casts of thousands. Texts are usually by 19th-century poets such as Verlaine, Goethe, Rilke, Heine and Hesse, and in German or French which makes them less accessible to English-speaking listeners. To do justice to the texts, songs were often throughcomposed and so they lack choruses that might catch the audience’s ears. Lieder, however, holds all the dramatic possibilities of opera – especially when the songs are presented as an entire set or cycle – but the responsibility for realizing the poet’s and composer’s intentions lies entirely with the singer and pianist. Art song can be compared to short story form, eschewing the grandeur of opera, as short stories do novels, to instead capture truth in a more compact or even epigrammatic form. Confluence: There are several musical organizations in Toronto that are taking on art song these days and updating it in a way that hopes to win new audiences, and also to afford artists new possibilities for interacting and creating. This May, Toronto audiences will have the chance to hear an especially inventive re-imagining of Heinrich Teiya Kasahara 笠 原 貞 野 (L) and pianist David Eliakis Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com The creative spirit is alive and kicking! Composer / filmmaker Cameron Tingley presents his imaginative concert music and humorous short films, with colourful descriptions of the creative process. “Themusicexpressesmywishesandhopesforabetter world, one that celebrates diversity, tolerance, curiosity, spontaneity,eccentricity,nuance.Allthegoodstuff.” GAETZ PHOTOGRAPHY camerontingley.com A novel blend of music, film, and creative writing. 16 | April & May 2024 thewholenote.com

TED PHILLIPS "Kasahara’s The Butterfly Project: The Ballade of Chō-Chō San Heine’s Dichterliebe as set by Robert Schumann, reinterpreted as Dichterliebe: Whose Love? It is presented by Confluence Concerts and co-created by Teiya Kasahara 笠 原 貞 野 and pianist David Eliakis. Kasahara told Wholenote that “David Eliakis and I will look at Schumann’s setting of these poems with a queer and trans lens of our lived experiences. We started with the central question, ‘Whose love is important, valid, and celebrated?’, and that is why we are presenting Dichterliebe: Whose Love?” “Lieder is where I began my classical vocal education at age 15,” says Kasahara. “It was the place I first was able to express myself through my singing voice. I think what is special about Lieder is that one can take more into consideration their own lived experience in relation to the poetry. There is less prescription in dramatic portrayal – in “performance” – in comparison to opera, where we are asked to play specific characters in usually very structured narratives.” It’s worthwhile to note that in a previous project with Confluence, Kasahara re-examined Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly in The Butterfly Project: The Ballade of Chō-Chō San. With this program, Kasahara and Eliakis interrogate “their classical music educations, the traditions which they have perpetuated in both music and life, and the sex and gender norms that still govern much of today’s performance practices and social discourse.” Schumann composed the original Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) song cycle in 1840 during a period when he and his beloved Clara were uncertain if they would be allowed to marry; for this reason, the music he produced sometimes contradicts or belies the seemingly sunny content of some poems. Nevertheless it is a conventional journey of gender and love that is described in his original composition. In this new version, Kasahara and Eliakis, too, use Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo as a starting point and incorporate Schumann’s original settings, but they also bring in settings by Schumann’s contemporaries, including Liszt, Franz Wolf and Fanny Mendelssohn (Hensel), with some contemporary electronic additions. As Kasahara explained to WholeNote, although Dichterliebe’s themes of love, unrequited love, lost love, etc. are presented as universal “that isn’t always the case for queer and trans people in the stories we tell in historical and contemporary mediums. I also often wondered why sopranos and mezzos, but more specifically women, weren’t seen singing or recording this repertoire as much as their counterparts. Tradition has seemed to tell another story, but what has continued to bring me back to canonical works in Lieder and in opera is that my imagination, curiosity and creativity continues to inspire me to want to tell another story: queer stories, trans stories, BIPOC stories, my story.” Larry Beckwith founded Confluence Concerts in 2018, and says they’ve programmed “a good deal of art song, including Debussy’s Cinq Poèmes de Charles Baudelaire in the fall of 2018, Marion Newman’s program of Indigenous Art Song in 2019, a generous sampling from the fascinating Irish Art Song Project and a program of James Rolfe’s songs in the fall of 2023.” Their presentations have been creative, and as Beckwith explains, “Most have Larry Beckwith included art songs juxtaposed with jazz standards, folk or contemporary pop songs, such as last season’s All the Diamonds cabaret, curated by yours truly, or the Mandala (curated by Suba Sankaran) DAHLIA KATZ The Secret Hero of the 19 th Century June 9 th , 2024 at 3:00 p.m. FEATURING: Erica Iris Huang, mezzo-soprano; Elina Kelebeev, piano; Inna Perkis, piano; Ernesto Ramirez, tenor; Boris Zarankin, piano Artistic Directors: Boris Zarankin & Inna Perkis For more details and to purchase tickets www.offcentremusic.com thewholenote.com April & May 2024 | 17