Sound Mind - A Classical Music Blog

10/29/2010

Glenn Gould School soprano Jennifer Taverner has a very busy musical weekend

Wilfrid Laurier University grad and current Royal Conservatory Glenn Gould Professional School student Jennifer Taverner must have thousands of notes swimming before her eyes.

Tonight at 8 p.m., she's singing one of my very favourite pieces of music ever: Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with the Royal Conservatory Orchestra, led by Canadian Opera Company music director Johannes Debus. (Full details here.)

On Saturday at 4 p.m., she joins the Larkin Singers for a piano-accompanied performance of Brahms' A German Requiem, where she gets to sing the sublime "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit" (You Now Have Sorrow) movement, at Christ Church, Deer Park. (Full details here.)

Both concerts are full of great music, but I can't vouch for the quality of the performances. The last time I heard Taverner, in the Royal Conservatory's opera production of Massenet's Cendrillon last season, I thought she had a lot of potential. At that same performance the Conservatory Orchestra, led by Uri Meyer, sounded excellent. Johannes Debus is a great conductor.

This is probably not fair to Taverner, but here is Jesse Norman, at the height of her art, singing "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit" in 1985, with the London Philhramonic Orchestra and Chorus, under Klaus Tennstedt:

Posted by John Terauds at 08:43:05 AM in Canada, Choral, Current Affairs, Music, News, Voice

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Sound Mind:
A Classical Music Blog

John Terauds started at the Toronto Star as a freelance writer in 1988, and has been on staff since 1997. He began writing on classical music in 2001, and has been the full-time classical music critic since 2005.

He is also the organist and choir director at St. Peter's Anglican Church, a parish founded in 1863 in downtown Toronto.

If he's not listening to, writing about or playing music, it means he's either asleep, unconscious, walking his dog -- or all of the above.

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