The Talisker Players at Trinity-St Paul’s Centre. October 25. Repeats Oct. 26.
Enchantment is a tall order in a world bristling with political Trumperies on one end and augmented Pokemon on the other. But that didn’t stop the Talisker Players from opening their season with a program entitled Songs of Enchantment at Trinity-St Paul’s Centre’s Jeanne Lamon Hall on Tuesday night.
Did they deliver on their promise? No. The evening felt flat and monotone — more like a charcoal drawing than a bright assemblage of primary-coloured oils. Or, as actor Stewart Arnott intoned in his final monologue, drawn from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “You have but slumbered here while these visions appeared.”
It would be unfair to characterize the whole evening as a big snooze, or to dismiss the careful effort and noble intentions of the Talisker Players, who had invited two of Canada’s finest younger singers, soprano Miriam Khalil and mezzo Lauren Segal, to join them on stage.
The Taliskers need to be applauded for devoting themselves to contemporary music and presenting it in an easily digestible format, interspersed with dramatic readings. The choice of music invariably includes a wide variety of styles, allowing points of entry for people who may not naturally gravitate to living (or at least recently so) composers.
Tuesday’s concert was no exception, presenting works by three living Canadians: Torontonian Alexina Louie, Ontarian R. Murray Schafer, and Vancouverite Jocelyn Morlock. We also heard music by underappreciated British composer Malcolm Arnold, who died in 2006 and deserves to be heard much more often.
The odd composer out was Henry Purcell, having accidentally stepped into a time machine and dropped onto the stage in the form of an excerpt from The Fairy Queen. This was the big mistake of the evening, not thematically, but on the level of execution. Laura Jones’ modern cello drowned out John Edwards’ theorbo in the continuo bits, and Khalil had no grasp of Baroque singing style, filling the concert space with her big, lush voice without providing sufficient vocal or dramatic nuance.
Khalil was much better suited to three of Arnold’s Blake Songs, which opened and closed the evening. She has one of those voices that one could listen to for hours, but her forte is drama, not lyricism. Arnold’s settings demand a lighter touch than she could muster, but she was perfect in Alexina Louie’s Songs of Enchantment, which have a dark tinge to them.
Khalil and Segal teamed up for Morlock’s “… et je danse”, which sets some poetry in French by Arthur Rimbaud. They were nicely matched. Morlock’s setting is full of playful gestures for the violin, cello and piano accompaniment, but only pianist Peter Longworth found the right, light touch in an otherwise leaden reading of the score.
The program’s highlight was Schafer’s “Beauty and the Beast”, a setting of the fairy tale in text and song, with Segal doing quadruple duty as spoken narrator and sung characters (father, Beauty and Mr. Beast). The mezzo found a way to modulate her delivery just so for each character, and she was confident enough to not be welded to her score, which helped bring the sung portions of the music alive.
Schafer’s string accompaniment is largely atmospheric, but, like much of the rest of the string playing during the evening, the execution lacked texture and colour. Listening to it was like watching incense sit still in midair in a room with no air current moving through it.
Arnott was in fine form for his readings, which separated each piece of music. It’s a format the Talisker Players are accustomed to, but the program didn’t come across as coherently as it sometimes has in the past.
It’s too bad that, in a city that offers music lovers many choices and opportunities every night of the week, that one can’t be satisfied with an A for effort. Witnessing Segal’s performance in “Beauty and the Beast” was a treat, but the rest was not enchanting. There is a repeat performance on Wednesday night.
#LUDWIGVAN
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