Volume 23 Issue 6 - March 2018

Beat by Beat | Art of Song
Whither Art Song?
An Immodest Proposal
LYDIA PEROVIĆ
On a pleasantly cold February evening, Toronto Masque Theatre
held one of its last shows. It was a program of songs: Bach’s
Peasant Cantata in English translation, and a selection of pop
and Broadway numbers sung by musician friends. An actor was on
hand to read us poems, mostly of Romantic vintage. The hall was a
heritage schoolhouse that could have passed for a church.
The modestly sized space was filled to the last seat and the audience
enjoyed the show. I noticed though what I notice in a lot of other
Toronto song concerts – a certain atmosphere of everybody knowing
each other, and an audience that knows exactly what to expect and
coming for exactly that.
I was generously invited as a guest reviewer and did not have to
pay the ticket, but they are not cheap: $40 arts worker, $50 general
audience, with senior and under-30 discounts. And the way our arts
funding is structured, this is what the small-to-medium arts organizations
have to charge to make their seasons palatable. Now, if you
were not already a TMT fan (and I appreciate their operatic programming
and will miss it when it’s gone), would you pay that much
for an evening of rearranged popular songs and a quaint museum
piece by Bach?
The stable but modest and stagnating
audience is the impression I
get at a lot of other art song concerts
in Toronto. Talisker Players, which
also recently folded, perfected the
formula: a set of readings, a set of
songs. Some of their concerts gave
me a lot of pleasure over the last few
years, but I knew exactly what to
expect each time. Going further back,
Aldeburgh Connection, the Stephen
Ralls and Bruce Ubukata recital
series, also consisted of reading and
music. It also folded, after an impressive
30-year run. It was largely
looking to the past, in its name
and programming, and it lived in a
cavernous U of T hall, but it could
have easily continued on and its core
audience would have continued to
come. Stable audience, yes, but also
unchanging.
The issue with a stable and
unchanging audience is that the
programming will suffer. It’ll go stale,
ignore the not already converted,
abandon the art of programming
seduction. And the ticket will still
cost at least $50.
I’ve also sat in the Music Gallery’s
contemporary music recitals alongside
the audience of eight so it’s not entirely the matter of heritage
music vs. new music. Empty halls for contemporary music concerts
are as depressing as book events in Toronto, to which nobody, not even
the writer’s friends, go. (I know this well; don’t ask me how.)
So, where is art song performance in Canada’s largest city going?
Due to the way they’ve been presented for decades now, there’s
a not-negligible whiff of Anglican and Methodist churchiness to
Toronto’s art song concerts. They usually take place in a church
(Trinity-St. Paul’s, Rosedale United, Trinity Chapel, St. Andrew’s, etc)
or a place very much like a church (Heliconian Hall). They are often
programmed as an occasion for personal edification – as something
that’ll be good for you, that will be a learning opportunity. Why are
we being read to so much in recitals – instead of, for example, being
talked to and with? Does anybody really enjoy being read to in a
music concert?
I sometimes wonder if the classical music infrastructure of concertgoing,
its comportment etiquette, regulation of space, fussy rituals of
beginning, presentation, breaks and ending wasn’t built to control and
disguise classical music’s visceral power over humans? And to keep
tame its community-expanding, boundary-blurring potential?
In other words, getting out of the church and the U of T will benefit
Toronto’s art song performance. Classical music, including art song, is
a pleasure, not homework; it’s inviting the stranger over, not getting
together with the same group each time. Some of those who program
art song and chamber music in Toronto are already grappling with
these questions, fortunately.
Collectìf
Among them is the ensemble Collectìf, consisting of three singers
and a pianist: Danika Lorèn, Whitney O’Hearn, Jennifer Krabbe
and Tom King. They scour the city for locations and choose places
off the beaten path. They held a recital in an Adelaide St. W. loft,
and a raucous songfest at an old pub in Little Italy. For a Schubert
Winterreise, performed in the more familiar quarters of Heliconian
Hall, Danika Lorèn had prepared video projections to accompany
the performance and the singing was divided among the three
singers, who became three characters. For an outing to the COC’s
free concert series, they created their
own commedia dell’arte props and
programmed thematically around
the poets, not the composers who
set their poems to music. Collectìf is
a shoestring operation, just starting
out, yet already being noticed for
innovation. Lorèn is currently
member of the COC’s Ensemble
Studio, which is why the Collectìf
somewhat slowed down, but when
I spoke to her in Banff this summer,
she assured me that the group is
eager to get back to performing.
Winterreise toured last fall to Quebec
and an art song program around the
theme of nightmares returns to the
same festival later in the year.
Happenstance
Another group that caught my
eye did not even have a name when
I first heard them in concert. They
are now called Happenstance, the
core ensemble formed by clarinettist
Brad Cherwin, soprano Adanya
Dunn and pianist Nahre Sol. That’s an
obscene amount of talent in the trio
(and check out Nahre Sol’s Practice
Notes series on YouTube), but what
makes them stand way out is the
sharp programming that combines
Happenstance (from left: Adanya Dunn, Brad Cherwin and Nahre Sol)
the music of the present day with
musical heritage. “Lineage,” which they performed about a year ago,
was an evening of German Romantic song with Berg, Schoenberg,
Webern and Rihm and not a dull second. A more recent concert, at
the Temerty Theatre on the second floor of the RCM, joined together
Françaix, Messiaen, Debussy, Jolivet and Dusapin. The evening
suffered from some logistical snags – the lights went down before
a long song cycle and nobody but the native French speakers could
follow the text – but Cherwin tells me he is always adjusting and eager
28 | March 2018 thewholenote.com