Ottawa-born mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta is next up in Roy Thomson Hall’s Canadian Voices Series at the Glenn Gould Studio on March 24. Besides catching up with her development as an artist, the recital is a chance to witness a brilliant act of programming.
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Giunta has anchored the programme on Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, pulling apart the work (originally intended to be performed by a singer and a dancer playing off each other) so that she can use each segment thematically with art song as well as pieces drawn from opera and musical theatre.
The recital, accompanied by Ken Noda, a highly respected member of the Metropolitan Opera’s artistic staff, begins and ends with the prologue and epilogue to The Seven Deadly Sins. But Giunta does not use “Idleness,” for example, replacing it with Weill’s “Youkali,” “Hôtel,” by Francis Poulenc (from his cycle Banalités) and “The Sloth” from The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann.
Giunta has paired Weill’s “Pride” with Benjamin Britten’s setting of “The Plough Boy.”
“Wrath” gets grouped together with “Cuba From Inside a Piano” from Xavier Montsalvage’s Cinco canciones negras and the aria “Addio Roma from Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea.
Giunta here shows further cleverness in her choice of material: Weill (and his librettist Bertold Brecht) intended Seven Deadly Sins to be all about the evils of capitalism, which did seem particularly evil in the economic chaos of Weimar-era Germany; in “Cuba a dentro de un piano,” Montsalvage has set a text that laments the disappearance of the old Cuba — “money was to blame” (specifically American money) the song tells us.
The rest of Giunta’s programme continues in a similar vein, focusing on storytelling, narrative flow, cohesion, resonance and variety.
Like the other singers in Roy Thomson Hall’s Canadian Voices Series, Giunta is an up-and-comer, someone who is still very much a work in progress. Her programming is a stroke of genius, which already shows incredible maturity as an artist.
We just saw Giunta on the Canadian Opera Company Stage as jogging fanatic Annio in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito. She returns next season in Atom Egoyan’s new production of Così fan tutte.
This alumna of the COC’s Ensemble Studio has been working in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and is also in the middle of earning an artist diploma from Juilliard. She makes her début on the Met’s My performances of its Vegas Rat-Pack Rigoletto, as Countess Ceprano.
For all the details of Giunta’s programme, as well as ticket information, click here.
Here are two of the songs Giunta will sing on Sunday afternoon — “Hôtel” and “Cuba a dentro de un piano” — accompanied by Kevin Murphy:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
