The moment Christopher Plummer walked out through the orchestra onto the stage of Roy Thomson Hall on June 26 calling out “How now my hearts, where are these lads?” this concert was everything I had hoped it would be: a heavenly blend of Shakespearean soliloquies and sonnets with music inspired by the plays, filled with what felt like a magnetic spur-of-the-moment connection between actor, conductor, orchestra, and audience.

This is the way a “words and music” concert should be – alive and organically structured, with an arc from beginning to end, and with Peter Oundjian not only a superb conductor and the TSO an excellent orchestra with the music in their bones, but a superb actor with the music in his bones equally to the Shakespearean text. Unusually, this show was created by its star, Christopher Plummer, about seven years ago with Julian Armour, artistic director of Ottawa’s Music and Beyond festival. Over this past year, Plummer revised and reworked the show slightly with Oundjian to suit the scale of a full classical orchestra onstage.

With the text almost entirely memorized, Plummer moved around the stage, establishing a partnership with the conductor and orchestra and talking to us directly – in character or as himself to introduce a new section of words and music.

The selection of words was both expected and unusual: after Hamlet came both Oberon and Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with excerpts from Mendelssohn’s famous Dream music, but then Plummer turned to us to introduce those two rather un-feminist and frustrated scoundrels Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing and Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew, interspersed with some of Nino Rota’s music for the film of Shrew, before sending us off to intermission with a short quote from the loveable “Bully Bottom” from Dream.

After the intermission the really big guns came out. Plummer began with, perhaps, his most famous Shakespeare part – Henry V – followed by the equally famous music created by William Walton for Laurence Olivier’s film of the play. This was particularly glorious to watch, as Plummer clearly knows and loves this character and the music, moving freely and energetically declaiming the speeches to us and to those onstage. Watching this, it is no wonder he has famously performed a full program of Henry V with Walton’s music with orchestras around the world (including here with Oundjian and the TSO in 2011).

Also expected on the program was Romeo and Juliet, which came next, but unexpected was Plummer’s intro note that, although he had performed both Romeo and Mercutio in the past, now that he is “grown up” he was going to take on Juliet who has (as I recall him saying) “some of the best poetry ever written about the beauties and agonies of love.” He launched into a heartfelt, lovely rendition of Juliet’s soliloquy “Gallop apace you fiery footed steeds.” Prokofiev’s dramatic Romeo and Juliet music was interwoven perfectly through this section. Next were excerpts spoken and musical from Cymbeline and then, again an expected inclusion, Prospero from The Tempest, a play believed by most scholars to be Shakespeare’s own farewell to the theatre and a part that Plummer played to acclaim at the Stratford Festival not long ago.  Unexpected to finish was a happy, short quote from Much Ado About Nothing: a cheerful, upbeat note to finish a magical evening of superbly interwoven words and music.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra presented “Christopher Plummer’s Symphonic Shakespeare” on June 26 at Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto.

Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is equally crazy about movies and musicals.

Back in April of this year, I had the opportunity to speak at length with pianist Eve Egoyan for my WholeNote column in advance of her concert on April 14 at the Music Gallery. When I asked her about upcoming projects, she spoke about her major project to be premiered at the Luminato Festival – SOLO FOR DUET: works for augmented piano and images, which received its premiere this week on June 19 and 20. One of the things I remembered her saying was how this was the most extroverted performance she’s ever done. Known for creating a depth of intimacy between herself and the audience at her performances, this new adventure was certainly an example of risk-taking by the performer, and I was curious to experience how this new venture played out.

The title of the piece, with its somewhat contradictory references to a work that is a ‘solo’ but yet a ‘duet’, turned out to be an accurate description of what unfolded on the stage. Moving beyond a mere concert presentation of the six chosen works by six different composers, a coherent flow was established between the pieces using theatrical elements and costume, a result of the work by director and dramaturge Joanna McIntyre. The other core elements of the entire program were the use of projected images as well as performing on a Disklavier, a keyboard that doubles as a digital version of the player piano, capable of performing programmed sequences and processing the sound. Present throughout the entire evening was a felt sense of the ‘other’ with whom Egoyan was in dialogue with, whether that be the composer, the images, or the music itself.

From the beginning, a distilled presence was established as the music began in darkness.  Using an extremely gradual fade-in of the light, slowly we began to see the score on the piano, the performer, and a long expanse of fabric weaving its way on the floor like a river. The first work, Thought and Desire by Linda Catlin Smith, was a love song between two people using text by William Shakespeare. Egoyan’s voice could gradually be heard as she sang the melodic line created by the short chordal harmonic progressions. Switching to a completely different persona for Homonymy by John Oswald, Egoyan put on her shoes, grabbed a whip and emotionally declaimed a series of words in partnership with a profusion of stream-of-consciousness of similar words projected on the screen – a play on the possibilities of the homonym. Oswald makes great use of the Disklavier for this piece, with programmed sequences joined at times by Egoyan playing live, along with piano preparations and inside-the-piano gestures and objects.

Nicole Lizée’s signature aesthetic of merging glitched film with virtuosic musical performance was mesmerizing in a piece entitled David Lynch Études. Using footage from Lynch’s Wild At Heart (1990) for example, Egoyan was synced up with the performers onscreen to create an aura of surreal obsession. Surface Tension is a series of five visual/musical works created by Egoyan and David Rokeby that appeared in three parts spread out over the last half of the concert. Rokeby’s interactive software created visual worlds in response to Egoyan’s performance, with the concept of ‘duet’ very much in evidence as she improvised  in dialogue with unfolding images that moved from simple to complex designs.

The technical prowess of the Disklavier really came to the fore with the final two works. EVƎ (solo piano for Eve Egoyan) by Michael Snow was created through a translation process. Snow began by improvising on the Disklavier keyboard that was subsequently transcribed into musical notation designed by Rokeby. Egoyan’s genius of being able to embody and translate notation into her own expression brought the work to life such that it felt like the two creators were merged into one. As the concert wound down to its close, Egoyan gradually removed parts of her costume, let down her hair and took off her shoes. This more naked visual image of the performer was a perfect visual complement for the moment when she premiered a work of her own creation – DUET for Solo Piano. The piece was born out of the desire to have the piano sound like she wished it could. What we heard from this exquisite work, my favourite of the evening I might add, were the subtle detuning of pitches, pitch glissandos, and the impression at times that a larger ensemble was playing. In the end the piece perfectly embodied that fluid space between solo and duet.

Eve Egoyan presented SOLO FOR DUET as part of the Luminato Festival on June 19 and 20, at the Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

Luminato’s Swan Lake/Loch na hEala is not Swan Lake as a ballet fan would expect. There are no kings, no queens, princes or princesses, and yet – there is enchantment, dancing and magic; there is beauty at the heart of darkness.

The setup is odd, almost disconcerting: on a bare stage with a metal platform stretching across the back, random step ladders around the edges, with abandoned sets of white wings scattered here and there, an older man wearing nothing but dingy underpants is tethered by a rope around his neck to a concrete block at the centre of the stage, bleating like a goat or sheep as he walks in his wide restricted circles. He is there as we enter to find our seats, and still there as the lights dim for the show proper to begin.

To the moody haunting music of Irish/Nordic trio Slowly Moving Clouds (onstage and playing throughout), three men in old fashioned black suits and hats (looking a bit like Mennonites) approach the man/sheep and proceed to ritually “slaughter” him through choreography using bright red towels to signal the spilling of blood. (By the end of the show we will have seen this man's journey, a descent from man to vicious beast, retroactively making more sense of this animalistic beginning). At the end of this ceremony the man is dressed in nondescript dark shirt and pants, set up on a stool with a microphone to speak into but refuses to say anything until given a cigarette and some food. Once he has these, he begins to tell a tale: Teaċ Daṁsa's version of Swan Lake, Loch na hEala (with echoes as well of the Irish legend The Children of Lir), which he soon begins to become part of and reenact for us, taking on the roles of three dark characters who together embody this story's version of von Rothbart, the dark sorcerer of the classic ballet who turned captive maidens into swans.

The first of these characters to whom we are introduced is the most crucial, as it is he who creates the swans – a false priest who threatens the handicapped girl he abuses and her sisters, promising that they will be turned into “brute beasts” if they dare to breathe a word of what they have seen. He and the other two ‘dark’ characters, a corrupt local politician and an easily corruptible policeman who help to take the story on a tragic downward spiral, have been described by Irish critics as Irish “mythic demons.” Indeed, there is a definite archetypal quality to these men, although they are also very definitely contemporary, as is the story and setting. Acclaimed Irish actor Mikel Murfi is extraordinary, as these three ‘demons’ and the narrator.

The only other speaking character is an ancient, poverty stricken, wheelchair-ridden widow, the mother of the 'prince' in this version of the story – her 36-year-old son Jimmy, clinically depressed at the recent loss of his father and the looming loss of his ancestral cottage which his mother is determined to have replaced by a cheap modern “council house.”

The ugliness of the modern setting and story is so striking that at first the universality is not apparent, and the visceral connection made by Irish and British audiences to the production is not the same for a Canadian audience distanced by an ocean and by a different cadence of speech.

What is magical and striking, however, is how the ugliness of the modern setting sets off the transcendent beauty of the two central pas de deux for Jimmy and Finola, the abused girl who becomes a swan whom he meets in a lake behind his house. This first meeting of the two misfit outsiders is breathtaking, and had me on the edge of my seat in wonder at the emotion and vulnerability expressed by the choreography (and through the exquisite dancing of Alex Leonhartsberger and Rachel Poirier). Director and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan grew up in a place where the swans returned for winter and he seems to have absorbed their physicality and passed it on to his dancers, who echoed a real pair of swans in the tentative beginnings of their dance and the twining gentle beauty of their coming together.

The second “black swan” pas de deux – which in the classical ballet pairs the prince with the evil sorcerer's flashily beautiful daughter Odile who, disguised as the good (white) swan Odette, wins the prince for herself – is here a second meeting of Jimmy and Finola, each more damaged than before but still inescapably drawn to each other.

As in the ballet, both Jimmy and Finola die at the end, but in this case there is a “coda” of sorts which, while it felt the other night a bit detached from the story, seems to be intended as a recovery or rediscovery of joy as all the cast dance and move around the stage in an improvised tumble of real swan feathers – punctuated at the very end by the sad figure of Finola, sitting on top of the ladder downstage right looking out over the audience.

A wonderful beginning to the 2018 Luminato Festival.

Swan Lake/Loch na hEala ran from June 6 to 10 at the Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto.

The Luminato Festival runs in various locations throughout Toronto, from June 6 to 24.

Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is equally crazy about movies and musicals.

Over the course of five seasons and 71 concerts, Pocket Concerts continues to realize their goal of providing an intimate classical music experience. Co-director, violist Rory McLeod, says it’s the immediacy of the music that comes through in the venues they choose, most of which are hosted by local music lovers in their own homes. But there was a slight difference in the June 3 season finale: the hosts’ regular venue being unavailable, their enterprising search for a substitute led them to Only One Gallery, a large space with exposed brick walls in an alley off Brock Ave. just north of Queen, that comfortably seated 60 spread across four widely spaced rows.

The room’s acoustic was electric with a transparency that generated the immediacy McLeod mentioned to me. The choice of music and musicians undoubtedly contributed as well. The two pieces featured in the concert – Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello and Schoenberg’s string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) – were works that McLeod had long wanted to program. Once he had worked out the logistics of bringing together string players from as far away as Halifax and Winnipeg, he was able to go ahead. The disparate nature of the participants made the Sunday afternoon recital into a kind of mini-festival, with Mark Lee, assistant concertmaster of Symphony Nova Scotia, violinist Elizabeth Skinner of McGill, Keith Hamm, principal violist of the COC, Leana Rutt, assistant principal cellist of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Julie Hereish, assistant principal cellist of Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, and McLeod himself on viola.

Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello opened the proceedings. Filled with Czech folk music, rhythms and dance, it was a showcase for the ardent playing of violinist Mark Lee and cellist Leana Rutt. Lee foregrounded the rich variety of sound from exposed and plaintive to jagged and rhythmic, from the earthy power of a Roma-flavoured peasant dance to the sensuality of the agitated finale. Rutt’s cello proved a compliant partner, from bittersweet accompaniment to melodic dialogue, all resoundingly live in the space.

Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night is an intense emotional journey inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmer, in which a woman confesses to her lover that she is pregnant by another man, but over the course of a moonlit walk through a bare, cold wood, the lover tells the woman that he will accept the stranger’s child as his own. The level of sensuality in the music rivals Wagner. The shift to D Major, which echoes the man’s acceptance of his lover’s confession, is a broad stroke of hyper-Romanticism, beginning the transfigurative process that occupies the last half of the work. The door to the gallery from the alleyway was open during the concert and, in a kind of pathetic fallacy, a burst of fresh air entered the space to herald the comforting harmonies that follow this key change. Moody, tense and filled with climactic waves in its first half, the piece settles into a lovely upward figure that rises from the strings to set the tone that all will be well in life and art. It was as if, in going on such a powerful, musically complex journey with this work, Schoenberg had reached the limits of conventional tonality.

All Pocket Concerts include wine and snacks following the music, an intimate impromptu cocktail party that encourages audience and music-makers to interact. So it was I learned that it took only a full day of rehearsal the previous Saturday to prepare for the concert we had just heard; a tribute to the professionalism and musicianship of the performers.

An ad hoc quartet of Hamm, Skinner, McLeod and Hereish performed two encores: arrangements of Nordic folk tunes by the Danish String Quartet. The first, a Danish fiddle tune, flourished in the string quartet format; the second, Peat Dance, had a distinct Scottish feel and an energy which the audience clearly appreciated.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.