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Tonight: Soundstreams charts a course through emotionally and spiritually turbulent musical waters

By John Terauds on October 1, 2013

Baritone Geoffrey Sirett is the male soloist in tonight's Soundstreams concert at Koerner Hall.
Baritone Geoffrey Sirett is the male soloist in tonight’s Soundstreams concert at Koerner Hall.

Soundstreams opens its season at Koerner Hall tonight with a vocal-choral-instrumental concert of 21st century music anchored in timeless personal questions both spiritual and worldly.

The organization has assembled excellent forces for a programme featuring two pieces by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt — L’Abbé Agathon, completed in 2005, and Adam’s Lament, from 2009 — and the world premieres of two new pieces by Torontonians: Open Road, by James Rolfe, and a setting of Ave Maria by Riho Esko Maimets.

Leading the musicmaking is Estonian conductor Tönu Kaljuste, widely considered to be one fo the world’s finest choral leaders. The soloists are soprano Shannon Mercer and baritone Geoffrey Sirett. The choir is David Fallis’s new music-oriented Choir 21. The 18-member string instrumental ensemble is made up of city’s finest musicians — from the Toronto Symphony, Canadian Opera Company and National Ballet orchestras.

Pärt’s music tends towards the melancholy and contemplative, but there are elements of ecstasy in the 20-minute L’Abbé Agathon, a Christian parable about an angel who tests a good-hearted monk, and Adam’s Lament, a 23-minute Scriptural meditation on our sinful natures.

In the first piece, a female singer tells the story while an ensemble of cellos acts as the equivalent of a Greek chorus during the narrative. Adam’s Lament is for full choir and string orchestra. The music is built with Pärt’s signature spare, repeated musical motifs, bolstered deep harmonies reminiscent of the bigger choruses of a Bach Passion.

There is no way either of these pieces qualify as minimalist.

The two Canadian commissions are likely to be similar in aesthetic. Maimets, a 25-year-old graduate student in composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, studied with Pärt in Estonia, and has a natural way with choral and orchestral textures.

James Rolfe has chosen to go secular in setting Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” to music. But churchgoers in the audience may notice the parallels between Whitman’s poem and the Christian canticle Benedicite omnia opera (Bless the Lord All You Works of the Lord) in a love-suffused call to seize the day.

“Allons! the road is before us!/ Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!” the opening lines of the final verse exhort.

By the time the doors to Koerner Hall open tonight, the concert will be sold out, so it’s good to know that it will be possible to follow along online. Since last year, Soundstreams has made a huge effort not only to provide live streaming of all its concerts, it has archived most of its previous recordings, going back two decades, creating a magnificent showcase of contemporary art music — both Canadian and international — in Soundmakers.

Besides its ongoing work in promoting new music, Soundstreams has also served as a showcase for many younger artists. Baritone Geoffrey Sirett, one of tonight’s two soloists, is someone to watch. Over the past couple of seasons in Toronto, he has begun to emerge as a great baritone.

The son of Ontario composer, conductor and choral leader Mark Sirett, Geoffrey grew up singing — but says that he and his sisters were never pressured to adopt music as a profession. The teen, who had a knack for math and sciences in high school, decided to try a double major with Physics at Western University in London, but was sidelined by music in his first year when he was cast as the lead in an opera production.

“I really fell in love with it,” he says of opera.

In the intervening years, he has collected degrees from Western and University of Toronto, and has been able to take advantage of several special study programmes at summer festivals and, thanks to the Desmarais Foundation, spend a year with renowned Manhattan vocal coach Malena Malas.

The singer spent part of this past summer leading the life of a minstrel with the Bicycle Opera Project, which included a residency in the cafés of Stratford.

Sirett has not really done much opera since graduating from U of T, but he says this has been good for his voice — an instrument that, for most baritones, doesn’t really settle down until the mid-30s. He says that singing a lot of baroque and new music repertoire is keeping his vocal cords nimble.

The singer has solo parts in Rolfe’s composition, which also includes soprano, chorus and orchestra. Because Rolfe has a lot of experience in writing vocal music, Sirett describes the score as “very friendly for the voice.”

Besides today’s Soundstreams concert, Sirett has been cast in two Canadian Opera Company school shows this season. He will return to Koerner Hall toward the end of the season for Brian Current’s opera Airline Icarus, which is also being presented by Soundstreams.

In March, Sirett sings the role of Count Stankar in a Voicebox/Opera in Concert presentation at the Jane Mallett Theatre of Giuseppe Verdi’s rarely heard Stiffelio.

Also, rumour has it that in December he will be part of a very special, staged Messiah, being prepared by Toronto’s most innovative musical theatre presenter.

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For all the details on tonight’s Soundstreams concert, click here.

John Terauds

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