It's official: Measha Brueggergosman is set for 2011 Toronto operatic return in La clemenza di Tito

On the day it opens a brand-new production of The Marriage of Figaro, Opera Atelier has confirmed that soprano Measha Brueggergosman will appear as Vittelia in next season's new production of La clemenza di Tito, also by Mozart. That opera will open Apr. 22, 2011, for a six-performance run at the Elgin Theatre.

Brueggergosman rounds out a high-quality cast that includes tenor Kresimir Spicer, male soprano Michael Maniaci and up-and-coming young Canadian soprano Mireille Asselin.

Short film 'The Sandpit' a miraculous marriage of music, image and creative artifice

American video artist Sam O'Hare has created a short film, The Sandpit, which turns a day in the life of Manhattan into something very special. It's real, but looks like animation. It looks tiny, but embraces the whole city. And the music, written specially for the film by a sound-design outfit called Human, is fabulous.

I'll let you in on the answer to one question that I had to ask: O'Hare achieved his visual effects by shooting more than 35,000 stills with a variety of conventional lenses, then turning them into video -- so it really is animated.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Lang Lang shows San Franciscans how to make an iPad fly

Some people have way too much fun.

Here's Lang Lang playing an encore -- "The Flight of the Bumblebee" at a San Francisco Symphony concert on Monday night:

It's much more gratifying to enjoy the music than to split hairs over historical practice

In every discipline, there are far too many people ready to split hairs over history and practice. And don't think for a moment that musicians, with aureoles bestowed by die holde Kunst, aren't capable of being the worst culprits.

A couple of people have sent me links to a long article on Slate about the vagaries of tuning keyboard instruments. It comes with sound samples, to help illustrate the differences between temperaments -- the relationships between tone intervals, which have to be fudged to achieve a piano or organ or harpsichord that sounds like its in tune.

What the little sound clips reminded me of, more than anything else, are the importance of the instrument and the performance themselves. There are no two acoustic pianos, organs, clavichords or harpsichords in the world that sound exactly the same.

Also, the same keyboard will sound different when someone else is playing it.

So, in a world filled with earthquakes, volcanic ash, harmonized sales taxes, and filthy subway stations, why not just sit back and enjoy the music. It'll help improve your own temperament.

Here to help me make my point are pianist and University of Ottawa music professor David Jalbert, on an Italian Fazioli concert grand, and the late Tatiana Nikolayeva, who inspired and for whom Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, in 1951, on a German Steinway. (The full performance by Nikolayeva is available on DVD. Jalbert's interpretation, on a German Steinway, is available on CD.)

To give them, the pianos and the composer the last word, here are the gorgeously dark, closing Prelude and Fugue No. 24, in D minor (my apologies for Nikolayeva's clip, which cuts off just before the end of the Fugue):

Thomas Dausgaard's Toronto Symphony Sibelius performances even more golden than Paavo Berglund's

It's embarrassing to gush, but I really can't say enough about how wonderful listening to Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard shape the symphonies of Jean Sibelius has been. 

I spent a lot of time listening to the symphonies (specifically 1,2, 5 and 7) when I was younger. My gold-standard conductor was Finn Paavo Berglund. There are three excellent sets of Sibelius recordings by him out there, but not everything is readily available. (One relatively recent release worth picking up is a London Philharmonic Orchestra disc released nearly five years ago which (I think cleverly) pairs Symphonies Nos. 2 and 7, performed live on separate programs (and in different years) at Royal Festival Hall.)

In an interview in 1998 with the London Sunday Times, Berglund shared his secret for polishing what look like jagged musical edges in Sibelius's scores:

"Sibelius's music is often ruined because it's too strictly accurate. I think maybe musicians like to play like this" – he makes a series of downward vertical gestures – "but it's good to do it like this" – his hands, one above the other, oscillate gently in and out of vertical alignment. "Accuracy against atmosphere: it's not that simple. The early Sibelius conductor Georg Schneevoigt once complained that he couldn't get the details out of Sibelius's scores. Sibelius said that he should simply swim in the gravy."

Well, Dausgaard had us all wallowing in a gravy that, I think, was even more delicately flavoured and lovingly, lyricaly stirred than Berglund's.

CBC Radio 2 has recorded the full Toronto Symphony Sibelius Festival for upcoming broacasts.

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Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who has been the featured soloist throughout the Toronto Symphony's Sibelius Festival, is remarkable. The 30-something dynamo is the poster boy for people who truly, madly, deeply love what they do.

Most visiting soloists disappear once their turn on stage is over. Some sit down somewhere in the auditorium to listen.

Kuusisto, on the other hand, took his curtain call last night, walked out the stars' stage door, then walked back onstage through the door the orchestra musicians use and sat down to play Symphony No. 5 with the second violins.

Then, he met with host/interviewer Robert Harris to treat the intermission audience with some banter as well as a demonstration of his ease in creating and layering loops with an electric violin. His most pointed insight with that instrument was to say that the biggest mistake an artists can make is to treat the electric version of their favourite acoustic tool as the same instrument, when, in fact, it is a completely different instrument that needs to find its own musical voice.

There are plenty of videos of Kuusisto engaged in non-classical music on YouTube. Here, for something from the other end of the violin-history timeline, he gives us some wintry, Finnish insights into the iciest of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, as well as his own personality and musical tastes. Unfortunately, the subtitles are in Japanese:

With middle finger pointed to the ashen skies, the show must go on

Two reporters from Bloomberg News have collected a few highlights from the dozens of stories of musicians caught in the current air travel chaos.

The opening story is worth a smile. Polish soprano Alexandra Kurzak had to get from Warsaw to London, to sing Fiorilla in the Royal Opera House's production of Rossini's Il Turco in Italia. Her solution? A taxi.

They met up in Katowice. “We picked up Joanna Wos, another soprano who had to be in London, and set off at midnight on Thursday,” Kurzak said. “At one point an agent, who thought I was in London, gave me a call asking if I could replace Joanna in case she couldn’t make her concert on Saturday. That was quite amusing.”

“We drove for 19 hours, getting to London at 5 p.m. on Friday, which left me just enough time to go home and change, before I went on stage at 7:30 p.m.”

Kurzak says her performance went well. “I’d been awake for well over 24 hours. I guess the adrenaline kept me going.”

The journey, including the ferry fare, cost 250 euros. “The driver was going to London anyway, and he didn’t want to profit from other people’s misery. It was really heart-warming. I’ve asked him to drive me back to Poland after the final performance.”

You can read the full story here.

I traded half a day for the manifold pleasures of playing through Handel's keyboard works published in 1733

Somewhere in the gush of music that passed between my ears in the last few months, I made a mental note to pick up the score for the keyboard suites of George Frideric Handel. There's a famous set of eight that dates from around 1720. What I finally popped in to buy this morning was a later set of six suites and a couple of other longer works that were published in 1733.

After lunch, instead of working on my writing, I sat down at the piano. I ended up spending the afternoon playing all the way through the book, marvelling at how easily Handel's notes suit the fingers, and smiling at the mix of cleverness, humour and sheer beauty of the composer's imagination.

Although I love period-instrument performances of Baroque music, I have a weird thing about preferring the modern piano over the harpsichord for solo keyboard pieces. There are so many subtle degrees of shading that are possible from a pianist's fingers that can't be translated to a harpsichord or organ keyboard.

Here is English harpsichordist Sophie Yates playing the D minor Suite from the 1733 set, on harpsichord:

Let's compare this to the late Sviatoslav Richter, with the 3rd Suite, also in D minor, from the 1720 set, from a 1979 master class-cum-recital he gave in France.

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Coincidentally, English pianist Philip Edward Fisher recorded the first four keyboard suites for Naxos at Birmingham's Symphony Hall in 2008 -- a disc that has just been released in North America (for more information and audio clips, click here). I find the playing on the admittedly short audio clips a bit eccentric. Here is Fisher during the recording process, followed by an interview/introduction to the disc prepared by Naxos' Toronto rep, Raymond Bisha.

CD Review: The chamber music of Alexandre Boëly elegantly brought to life by Quatuor Mosaïques

QUATUOR MOSAIQUES

Boëly, Musique de chambre (Laborie)

*** (out of 4)

If you love the chamber music of Haydn and Beethoven, this album is worth hunting down (you can get a bit more info by clicking on the image).

Being born in Versailles to a court singer and teacher would normally be a great start for any future musician. Except that Alexandre Pierre François Boëly was born in 1785 and King Louis XVI had his head cut off in 1793.

Boëly grew up to be an organist-composer-violist at a time when, slogans of liberty and fraternity aside, the state had become the official religion.

Boëly was deeply conservative, championing the likes of J.S. Bach and Frescobaldi. Worse yet, Hector Berlioz was born in 1803. So, guess who died nearly penniless and overlooked in 1858?

Organists continue to play Boëly's nicely crafted compositions. But he wrote a lot of chamber music, too. An all-French effort led by Quatuor Mosaïques has gathered up some highlights on a new disc.

(The album comes with minimal printed notes -- in French, only. You can download a pdf of comprehensive background information here, but it, too, is in French only.)

Two of three substantial pieces on this generous disc were composed in 1827, the String Quartet No. 1, in A minor, and a D Major Sextet. The third is a String Trio from 1808. These works are separated by each of three recently found Mélodies for cello and swell organ ("orgue expressif"), played by Olivier Latry.

The larger works sound a lot like late Haydn or early Beethoven, with carefully laid-out themes and counterpoints. There is a lot to listen to here, and the various musicians involved in the recording have done a polished job.

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To give you a taste of Boëly's style, here is young Polish-born, French-based organist Maria Magdalena Kaczor playing a Fantasy and Fugue in B-flat Major at the church of Saint-Louis en l'Ile in Paris:

Free streaming concert: Russian brother and sister team up for charming violin recital at Louvre museum

Here's a great way to end a beautiful Sunday afternoon: 28-year-old Russian-born violinist Kirill Troussov, virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic, gave a very nice recital of 19th and 20th century works with the help of his pianist sister, Alexandra Troussova, at the Louvre museum's auditorium on Friday. It is available for free on medici.tv (registering is easy, and they won't bug you to become a subscriber, in case you're worried).

The program starts with Alfred Schnittke's charming Suite in Ancient Style, which both brother and sister tackle with light hearts.

Troussov's lithe, lyrical bow works magic with Prokofiev's Violin Sonata No. 2, gorgeously accompanied. It's easy to let this music get too angular. Here, it sings.

The recital's big discovery for me were Dimitri Zyganov's re-arrangements for violin and piano of four of the 24 Op. 34 Préludes for piano by Dmitri Shostakovich. The official part of the recital ends in the 19th century, with pieces by Tchaikovsky (a Meditation and the Waltz Scherzo, Op. 34). As encores, we get the March from Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges and Aram Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance.

Troussov plays the 1702 "Brodsky" Stradivarius violin. Violinist Adolph Brodsky premiered Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto on this instrument in 1879.

Allure of Armida puts ancient seductress in the company of 21st century showgirl Lady Gaga

It appears that Torontonians care about tomorrow's opening of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Gioachino Rossini's opera Armida. How else to explain that the Neilsen Soundscan CD bestseller chart published in today's Star (and based on sales data for Apr. 5-11) has the opera at No. 6, sandwiched between Usher and Lady Gaga?

The Met production, which has Renée Fleming in the title role, and an impressive male vocal cast as her island visitors, is scheduled for HD broadcast in theatres on May 1.

The album that has rocked the sales charts is, I believe, from a live performance with conductor Tulio Serafin. There have been other recordings since -- the most notable being a 1994 release featuring Fleming.

Here are two live performances of Armida's Act 2 aria, "Dove son'io?" to compare: Callas in 1952, followed by Fleming in 1993: