Except for the occasional touring tango group, Toronto’s Payadora Tango Ensemble doesn’t seem to have much regional competition. It’s true that Quebec’s Quartango is in its third decade of mining the tango motherlode, but Payadora may well be the sole GTA group dedicated to the Buenos Aires genre. And while the group has been actively performing around town since 2013, except for visits to their YouTube videos, their April 25 Gallery 345 concert was this listener’s first live taste of Payadora’s artistry.

During an earlier stage of its development the tango was often played by an ensemble known as the orquesta típica. It included at least two violins, flute, piano, double bass and two or more bandoneóns. The concertina-like bandoneón has a fascinating lineage and current geographic distribution. Of 19th-century German origin, it’s been essential to most tango ensembles from its earliest days – as well as in the folk music of Lithuania.

Payadora’s instrumentation however is much leaner than the orquesta típica. The quartet’s lineup includes violinist Rebekah Wolkstein, accordionist Branko Džinović, pianist Robert Horvath and Joseph Phillips on double bass. These highly skilled, classically-trained musicians all pursue successful Toronto-based music careers when they are not performing tango.

But what is tango? The dance and the music which accompanies it originally developed in Argentina in the late 19th century among former communities of African slaves and European immigrants. The resulting hybrid dance, earmarked from early references for its sensuality, its complexity and couples’ improvisation, became a mainstay entertainment in the underclass urban districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The music for the tango was a hybrid of various European music genres, its performers making use of popular European instruments of the day: the guitar and the aforementioned bandoneón being perhaps the most characteristic.

By the early 20th century the tango was attracting professional Argentinian musicians, bandleaders and composers. Payadora’s repertoire includes key works of this period by Eduardo Arolas (1892-1924), Julio de Caro (1899-1980), Osvaldo Pedro Pugliese (1905-1995), Aníbal Carmelo Troilo (1914-1975) and Horacio Adolfo Salgán (1916-2016). In its April 25 concert, Payadora focused on instrumental tangos designed for listening in a concert setting rather than those intended for dancing.

While it was initially part of the soundtrack for the lives of Argentinian urban criminal groups and the poor, tango achieved wider national social acceptance and global recognition only later, when tango groups began to tour internationally. In the years just prior to the First World War, a veritable tango craze swept European and American cities. Payadora’s Wolkstein mentioned at the concert that the tango was especially popular in early 20th-century Paris where it was cultivated in a gentrified form, its attractions appealing to all classes. It was then subsequently reintroduced back to its homeland, becoming finally socially acceptable to a much wider audience.

Payadora performed tango compositions of the so-called “golden age” (roughly 1930s-1950s), but it also played a composition by perhaps the most famed composer who emerged from the tango world: Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), the very influential bandoneón virtuoso and bandleader. His piece Escualo (Shark) is imbued with a jittery version of the characteristic tango rhythm. It also deploys musical features reflecting his cosmopolitan compositional influences and tastes. These include rhythmically angular melodic lines, harmonies and instrumentation which may remind listeners of Stravinsky’s work, plus timbral textures produced via slaps on the bass and scrapes on the violin strings behind the bridge. Escualo serves as a good introduction to nuevo tango, Piazzolla’s signature extension of the genre, making use of extended forms, harmonies, dissonances and counterpoint.

Centred on the large repertoire drawn from the Buenos Aires tango tradition, Payadora has not neglected homegrown talents, premiering its pianist Horvath’s first tango composition Tavasz. Meaning “spring” in Hungarian, the composer’s mother tongue, it was a timely seasonal homage. The work began with a slow free tempo exploration on the piano, but then gained steam propelled by the tango rhythm, relying on virtuoso interplay between all four instrumentalists.

In addition to tango, Payadora also performed two Argentinian vernacular dance music genres. The zamba is set in a slow 3/4 meter – or is it in 6/8? – while yet another couples’ dance, the chacarera, also plays on similar hemiola syncopation. These two standards of Argentinian folklore received polished, sophisticated renderings by the musicians and served to expand the audience’s appreciation of that country’s musical expression beyond that of the tango.

The intimate Gallery 345 concert closed with an enthusiastic encore. It was clear that Payadora’s fans – attracted by its musicians’ playful unforced technical virtuosity, rhythmic precision, and evident commitment to the tango repertoire and ethos – are ready for much more.

Payadora Tango Ensemble performed at Gallery 345 in Toronto on Tuesday, April 25.

Andrew Timar is a Toronto musician and music writer. He can be contacted at worldmusic@thewholenote.com.

There are few of us about – the Netrebko timbre sceptics: music lovers who are more puzzled than attracted by the colour of the voice by the world’s best known soprano, Anna Netrebko. There are going to be even fewer here after her Toronto and Canadian debut on April 25 at the Four Seasons Centre, in recital with tenor Yusif Eyvazov and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky and the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra under the baton of Jader Bignamini. I must admit I went in as one, but came out finally able to understand much of her scenic appeal. Anna Netrebko live is a veritable bête de scène, that rare performing artist who is at absolute ease on stage, well-prepared and spontaneous both, always generous, with something of a serene childlike instinct for play.

Hers is an unusually dark and cavernous soprano, with ample lower register and confident and equally ample bright top. In live performance, it’s a voice-kaleidoscope with never a dull moment. Her repertoire has changed over the years from the bel canto of the youthful years to Verdi, the Russians, and the first Wagner forays recently – and there’s a Strauss Salome in the near future. At the FSC recital presented by Show One Productions she sang the Act 4 Marfa’s aria from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride; Cio-Cio-San’s ‘Un bel di vedremo’ – usually sung by brighter and smaller-engined soprano voices, so this was a treat; ‘Stridono lassù’ from Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci; and a luxurious, dramatically precise Moon aria from Dvořák’s Rusalka. With Yusif Eyvazov, she sang a cheerful little duo from Lehar’s Das Land des Lachelns, ‘Tu che m’hai preso il cuor’. The duet and the final scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Onegin closed the concert.

The audience that packed the FSC was rowdier and more enthusiastic than is the Toronto operatic average, which was a welcome change. The Hvorostovsky fans were particularly vocal and it’s no wonder: as the baritone is not yet taking on a full performing and touring schedule, every concert is an occasion to relish. He sang Rigoletto’s ‘Cortigiani vil razza dannata’, an aria each from Rachmaninoff’s Aleko and Rubinstein’s The Demon, the famous “Tri karty” aria from Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame, and in the encore on behalf of the entire trio, probably the best known Russian romance song of all times, ‘Ochi chyornye’, while Netrebko waltzed around the stage. (And does she got rhythm. Can we have more of the dancing Netrebko on stage, opera directors?)

All that said, it was Yusif Eyvazov who actually stole the show. Is it ungentlemanly to say that the diva’s husband, when it strictly comes to singing, impressed the most? Because I am about to say it. Perhaps because he is still fairly young and up-and-coming with more to prove than either of the two established star colleagues, Eyvazov came spectacularly well-prepared in a program that had two of the best known tenor arias of all time – ‘E lucevan le stelle’ from Tosca, and ‘Vesti la giubba’ from I Pagliacci. He made both of these frequently recorded and performed arias uniquely his own. Eyvazov’s tenor is of a rare beauty of tone and consistent throughout the range, with a free and secure top. Volume is always impressive and impressively controlled. What he has in common with his spouse is the unfussy presence in the singing role – there is no withholding and no distance. To the lesser-known tenor arias ‘E la solita storia’ from Cilea’s L’Arlesiana and ‘Prosti nebesnoe sozdanye’ from Pique Dame he immediately gave a living, breathing character. There is much to look forward to from Eyvazov in the years to come.

Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto. Send her your art-of-song news to artofsong@thewholenote.com.

When asked what was the initial inspiration for Century Song, Neema Bickersteth says she wanted to see if she could sing and dance at the same time. 

From that initial experimenting grew a beautiful, moving, and yet enigmatic piece of music theatre that defies definition. It is part opera, part dance, part video installation, and all intriguing collaboration by Bickersteth and her creative partners both onstage and off. Musicians Gregory Oh on piano and Ben Grossman on percussion and computer are visible and intimate partners in the live experience, and Kate Alton (choreographer), Ross Manson (director), and video creators fetFilm, Germany Hinrichs and associates Cameron Davis, Kaitlin Hickey and Jeremy Minnagh, have worked together with Bickersteth to create a seamless combination of many elements into a short (50-minute) but satisfying whole.

Without being too specific or detailed, Century Song gives us a glancing glimpse of the history of black women in Canada over the last century, in a format that references and evokes Virginia Woolf’s Orlando without losing its own identity. There is a deep seriousness to the piece and yet also a sense of fun that grows as it moves along the timeline from the early 1910s through the later 20th century to the modern day. Interestingly, the fun elements come mostly through some very clever time-hopping and era-juxtaposing video sequences, featuring Bickersteth in many guises.

The decision to stick with vocalises – wordless songs – felt right, though by the end I felt that if there was a longer version, or a companion piece, that I would want words to be back in the recipe. I had first encountered Neema Bickersteth back in 2010 as a talented singing actor in both Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis at the SummerWorks Festival and then in Staniland and Battson’s dramatic oratorio Dark Star Requiem at Luminato, so I was curious to see her in this concentrated spotlight and in the role of creator as well as performer. Century Song is a great showcase and an intriguing hors d’oeuvre to what she may create in the future. The answer to her beginning question? Yes, she can sing and dance at the same time, and beautifully.

Century Song has toured across Canada, the UK, and to Belgium and runs in Toronto until April 29 at Streetcar Crowsnest, Crows Theatre’s very attractive new home at Dundas and Carlaw. $15 Rush tickets are available in person half an hour before the show.

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.

You don’t know what you’re missing if you’ve never seen the Show Choir Canada competition. It’s every bit as intense and crazy as you imagine, and more – but also mostly just plain fun. This marks the seventh year that producers George Randolph (Founder of the Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts [RAPA] in Toronto) and Peter Dacosta (of Dacosta Talent) have been hosting Canadian and international show choirs in competition. There’s a friendly air and a spirit of collegiality, but make no mistake: the competition is real.

Each performance is about 20 minutes long. No one performs any one song or any one style. Music theatre, pop, rock, soundtrack...anything really, if the choir can make it work. The songs blend together, sometimes more gracefully than others, sometimes a hard stop and a new scene begins. Fame, a show choir from Woodbridge, does a set of Beatles songs including “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “All You Need is Love,” and “Help.” Each song is a distinct new scene. Throw in dancing, acting, staging and lighting and these are little mini shows, made up of skits all focused around music.

Hours of group rehearsal, dance classes, acting workshops, singing lessons and personal rehearsal time are behind every show choir. Participants love it. Sophie Koren, from St. George’s “G Major” show choir from Montreal, QC, says, “I joined when I was in grade 7; this is my fifth year. There are only a few of us that have been doing that this long.” G Major are the defending champions, having taken the grand trophy in 2016. But everyone is wary of the American group this year.

Totino-Grace High School “Company of Singers” is leading off the evening performances. From Fridley, Minnesota, the Americans are bringing a much longer history and institutionalization of show choirs to the competition. From the minute they start, you can see what that means. Their performance was called “Ready Set Go,” featuring “Shut up and Drive” by Rihanna, “For Good” from Wicked, “Change in Me” from Beauty and the Beast, and several other songs. Dazzling costumes, a company of almost 50, a full band in regalia, and artistic staff backing it all up. There’s a lot of money behind this ensemble and it’s obvious compared to the others.

“Show Choirs are big business in the States,” shares Randolph. “However, with our competition, we have judges from the US as well. What they like about our competition is that it isn’t just about extravagant sets…it’s stripped down to a more pure state. Show choir is about the voice. Bottom line. It’s about the vocals.” A recurring theme in the commentary from the judges is too much unison singing. There are songs being sung in too low a key, major triads being built on top of minor keys, and a mismatch between music and style that affects the overall performance. And unfortunately, just a lack of male voices in harmonies, even amongst the co-ed groups. 

After each choir the judges provide feedback. Three judges, Linda Southard of Chicago, Kevin Chase of Iowa City, and Jeannie Wyse of Toronto, lead the evaluations. Steve Lehmann judges the live bands where applicable. The evaluations are affirming and fair, looking to improve rather than admonish. It’s tough to get feedback on the spot like that. But these performing artists are anything but ordinary.

Everyone is bringing their A-game as best as they can. Koren, of G Major, speaks more about being a defending champion. “Returning to defend is a different feeling,” she says. “But last year, being overall grand champions was wow! [This year] we had to kick ourselves in the butts. We need to stay strong. Our director even said to us, winning the first time is not the hard part. Winning the second time in a row is the hard part.” But she feels confident. “It’s a struggle, but we did our best. Our absolute best. We fully left everything on the stage. We’ll see what happens.” G Major ultimately wins second place, the first place prize going to Totino-Grace.

Randolph shares the story of the success that he hopes the competition continues to foster. He mentions Jahlen Barnes, currently part of the Shaw Festival and signed talent with DaCosta. “This, giving someone the opportunity…for Jahlen, getting into a show choir, getting a full scholarship to RAPA, signs to Dacosta, and now, he’s singing for Stephen Schwartz at the Panasonic.” This is the dream.

It’s a dream that many others are aspiring to. Carter Djam, from Totino-Grace, tells me about getting into show choir. “I play basketball, football, and track – all about sports,” he explains. “But one of my friends kept asking until I finally had to say yes. I fell in love with it at that point. This is my life now. I want to go to school for performing. My life has changed around the subject.” You can see him onstage, acting on point, dancing with all the right energy. He’s still got many years of show choir competitions ahead of him, years more of performing arts.

For Randolph, “It’s about sharing in the creative process, meeting new friends, new relationships...what the students directly benefit from is more self-esteem, confidence. It’s very self-empowering. Because they have found a place that can identify with and have a voice, and be understood.”

The 2017 Show Choir Canada competition took place on April 7-8, 2017 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Toronto.

Full 2017 Grand Competition Results available online:
http://www.showchoircanada.com/championships/results

Full 2017 Junior-Mid Level Competition Results available online:
http://www.showchoircanada.com/jr-mid/results

Non-Arts Large Ensemble

GRAND CHAMPIONS – Totino-Grace, “Company of Singers” (Best Vocals, Best Choreo, Best Combo)
2nd Place – St. George’s of Montreal, “G-Major” (Best Show Design)
3rd Place – Beaconsfield CHS, “BHS Crescendo”
4th Place – Richmond Hill HS, “Vocal Fusion”

Arts/Community Division

1st Place – Milton Show Choir “Gleam” (Best Vocals, Best Choreography, Best Show Design)
2nd Place – Unionville High School “Synergy”
3rd Place – Fame School of the Performing Arts

Non-Arts Small Ensemble

1st Place – Our Lady of Lourdes, “The Pitches” (Best Choreo, Best Show Design)
2nd Place – All Saints CHS, “Flash” (Best Vocals)
3rd Place – J. Clarke Richardson, “Vocal Thunder”
4th Place – Michael Power/St. Josephs, “Power House”
5th Place – York Mills, “Cheat Notes”
6th Place – St. Francis, “Sound FX”

Individual Awards

Top Vocalist : Brendan from All Saints CHS
Top Dancer: Emily from Unionville HS
Top Male Triple Threat: Ryan from St. George’s
Top Female Triple Threat: Mojo from J Clarke Richardson

Follow Brian on Twitter @bfchang. Send info/media/tips to choralscene@thewholenote.com.