Toronto’s Happenstancers are among the city’s most adventurous music ensembles, with a floating lineup that has become known for their fearless examination of contemporary repertoire. Their next concert, titled Babes In Toyland, adds a sense of the absurd and otherworldly with a mix of music and theatricality.
The September 12 concert includes the world premiere of a new work for voice and ensemble by composer Matthew Ricketts, commissioned by The Happenstancers, and will be led by conductor Simon Rivard.
Babes In Toyland: The Details
The talented collaborators include:
Dora Award winning clarinetist Brad Cherwin was recently named as the Curator-in-Residence with Toronto’s Soundstreams as part of their New Voices programme. He’s also Artistic Director of Toronto’s West End Micro Music Festival, which recently held its second sold out seasons, along with the Director of The Happenstancers.
Conductor Simon Rivard has been leading the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra since 2018, along with guest conducting across Canada. He was the RBC Resident Conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 2018 to 2022, and served as Associate Conductor (2020–2022), and as Artistic Collaborator (2022) with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir.
Soprano Reilly Nelson was the 2018 winner of the Lotte Lenya Competition, and a district winner in the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. She has completed young artist programs with Kentucky Opera, Tanglewood Music Center, and Glimmgerglass, among others. Reilly is a specialist in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
Cellist Peter Eom was the sole recipient of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and YoungArts NYC Creative Residency for 2023-2024. As part of that program, he will be premiering SEAMLESS, his interdisciplinary installation, at NYC Fashion Week FW 2026.
Along with the soloists, the lineup includes: Sienna Cho, violin; Hee-Soo Yoon, violin and viola; Peter Eom, cello; Travis Harrison, bass; Lenny Ranallo, mandolin; Zane Mallett, harp; Kevin Ahfat, keyboards; Tristan Durie, flutes; Aleh Remezau, oboes; Louis Pino, percussion.
The Music
The Other-World is a place for bold works and sensibilities, where the sounds blend with theatrical gestures. The program includes pieces by Unsuk Chin, Anna Clyne, and even W.A. Mozart… albeit with a transformative twist.
An Original Commission
A native of British Columbia, Canadian composer Matthew Ricketts is based in New York City. Matthew is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow., among a list of prizes and recognition that includes the 2020 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2016 Jacob Druckman Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, and other recognition.
Matthew Ricketts‘ Two Songs, which set texts by Edna St. Vincent Millay to music, were commissioned by The Happenstancers for this performance. The two songs each use a completely different group of instruments.
Ricketts comments in a statement, “These two Edna St. Vincent Millay songs follow a longer Millay setting for baritone and piano (Songs for Judith, 2023) which I had quite recently finished when Brad Cherwin approached me to write some new music for The Happenstancers. Having spent time at Edna’s former home at Steepletop—now an artist residency outside of Austerlitz, NY — in Fall 2022, I was already deeply connected with the poet and poetry alike, and was thus very happy to return to her familiar words once again for these new songs.
“Based on the unusual instrumentation of Brad’s suggestion, the two songs represent a pointed contrast between high and low: the treble-heavy world of piccolo, oboe, celesta and harp for Song of the Prophet-Liar and the bass-heavy world of cor anglais, bass clarinet, cello, low percussion and harp for Song of the Sleep-Thief. These instrumentations respond to the overall qualia of the respective poems: mercurial, quirky and mischievous for The Prophet-Liar and dark, tolling and toiling for The Sleep-Thief. I am grateful for Brad’s encouragement to explore these provocative and evocative scorings — something that truly stoked my imagination in seeking an appropriate musical mise-en-scène to house Edna’s magical text.”
Other Highlights Include:
- The Canadian premiere of Ryan Chase’s Carroll Madrigals an absurdist piece which expands the traditional orchestra of voice, strings, and winds by adding harmonicas, steel pan, and theatrical percussion, (soprano Reilly Nelson, soloist);
- The Canadian premiere of Anna Clyne’s Just As They Are, a piece for an amplified ensemble and pre-recorded audio;
- The Canadian premiere of Phyllis Chen’s Chimers, a piece for five performers that begins with W.A. Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and ends with a deconstructed toy piano and set of tuning forks.
The full program:
- Harrison Birtwistle: Some Petals From My Twickenham Herbarium (1969)
- Unsuk Chin: Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991/1993)
- W.A. Mozart: Adagio and Allegro, k617 (1791)
- Phyllis Chen: Chimers (2011)
- John Cage: Imaginary Landscape no. 5 (1952)
- Anna Clyne: Just As They Are (2015)
- Ryan Chase: Carroll Madrigals (2013)
- Matthew Ricketts: Two Songs (2024, WORLD PREMIERE): Song of the Prophet-Liar; Song of the Sleep-Thief
Find tickets for Babes in Toyland on September 12 (7:30 p.m.), at the 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media and Education [HERE].
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