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.

The Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra closed its season Sunday afternoon with Beethoven on period instruments. It was the fourth iteration of this bill and nearly filled the 1,100-seat Koerner Hall. The program was guest-conducted by Bruno Weil, a distinguished German musician with a well-deserved reputation as a probing interpreter of Viennese classics.

Jeanne Lamon, music director from 1981 to 2014, ceded that title to Elisa Citterio from Italy, who joined the orchestra at the start of this season. On Sunday, Lamon was back as guest concertmaster, so that Citterio could play the Beethoven Violin Concerto: the Mount Everest of violin concertos, and not a work one usually associates with period instruments.

Every classical music lover knows the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but few know the work in a sound the composer himself would have recognized. Citterio and Weil applied themselves to the lofty rhetoric with spirit and without inhibition or apology. Citterio in particular added an indefinable element of soul and serenity that lifted her performance well above the realm of hidebound “authentic” recreation. From her first entry, she revealed a vital engagement with the music that was anything but dry, thanks to her temperament. In the lengthy opening movement (which never sounded long) she scanned the soaring phrases with sensitivity to harmonic underpinnings, and resisted lapsing into mechanical recitation.

The sound of the timpani (kettledrum) a crucial structural element, had a zesty “bite” to it. Cadenzas were not the customary ones by Fritz Kreisler, but composed by Carlo Citterio, Elisa's brother. The siblings collaborated to adapt the cadenzas to her own ideas. (The one for the Finale was just a bit long.)

Tempos were brisker than usual, as Weil cultivated heightened clarity and transparency of inner parts while faithfully tracing the drama. In Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6, which ended the program, the vernal score sounded freshly-minted, especially the outer movements. Weil conducted the opening stanza almost as a sequence of upbeats, the pungent woodwinds springing to life. The “Awakening of joyous feelings upon arrival in the countryside” was actually joyous, not too heavy.

Though the three middle movements didn't scale the same heights, the Finale again showed Weil as a fount of rhythmic and stylistic energy, a musician to his fingertips. Meanwhile, the Tafelmusik orchestra gave every indication that it likes (even loves) what it does. As it gets set to embark soon on a three-week tour to Australia, one can only wish that its spirit will persist – alongside the relationships with Elisa Citterio and distinguished guest conductors such as Bruno Weil.

Tafelmusik presented “Beethoven Pastoral Symphony,” featuring violin soloist Elisa Citterio and guest director Bruno Weil, on May 3 to 6 at Koerner Hall, Toronto.

Stephen Cera, a pianist, journalist and concert programmer, played recitals with Jacques Israelievitch not long before the untimely death of the late TSO concertmaster. He lectures widely about music, writes about international classical music events for MusicalAmerica.com, and maintains a blog at www.stephencera.com.

Gerald Finley has a baritone which casts a bass shadow. A voice dark and ripe and opulent that doesn’t lighten gladly, but the ear won’t mind two hours of it because Gerald Finley the dramatic interpreter and wizard of inflection comes with it.

Finley and one of the most in-demand accompanists today, Julius Drake, presented a German and Russian program at Koerner Hall this past Sunday, April 22. The first part assembled poems by Goethe set to music by Beethoven and Schubert, two almost exact contemporaries (the older man died 1827, the young one the year after) whose songs however belong to two different eras. Beethoven is not known for his vocal music and next to Schubert’s songs his come across as plainer, simpler melodies, playful or curious rather than stirring. In Finley’s hands the songs grew to become little scenes, delivered smoothly in his precise enunciation.

Schubert’s Goethe was a different Goethe. The set was capped with arguably the best known Schubert song, the infanticidal Erl King, but began with the long Prometheus lied, D 674. The Prometheus of this poem is defiant, not yet punished by Zeus, proudly creating humans after his own image. At the time of its creation the song could have signified political rebellion against the powers of the state, or personal rebellion of young creative men against their fathers, but the text has lost much of its resonance for audiences of our time and is potentially overlong and self-important. Not here: again, Finley worked his magic with the text and the song became a meaningful cri de coeur.

An den Mond (To the Moon) stood out from the set by its languid pace and silvery lyrics, while An Schwager Kronos (To Coachman Chronos) swept though in a gallop.

The secondhalf, all-Russian, was shared between Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky’s four songs came out as positively moderate next to the Rachmaninoff set. Rachmaninoff gives the pianist a lot to do, and is no stranger to a sweeping cinematic statement. An orchestra might have been present in the downers-with-high-dramatic-peaks O nyet, molyu, ne ukhodi! (Oh No, I Pray, Don’t Leave), O, dolgo budu ya (In the Silence of the Night), and Na smert chizhika (On the Death of a Linnet) but it was indeed just these two men onstage. A lot of chiaroscuro is required there, which Finley created through sensitivity to the text rather than vocal timbre (which stayed consistently as dark as plush velvet). Julius Drake from the keyboard supplied Romantic excess where Rachmaninoff calls for it.

One number in the Rachmaninoff set was actually fun: Sudba (Fate) – a song in which the singer voices more than one persona, in the vein of Schubert’s Erlkönig – had Finley (and us with him) delighting in the onomatopoeic sound of fate knocking on various people’s doors. The final song in the official program was the astonishing and astonishingly exaggerated Vesennye vody (Spring Streams), which starts by cranking up to 10 and stays there for its remaining two minutes. But Finley and Drake made it sound almost natural.

The encore was reserved for songs in the English language – Barber, Copland, Healey Willan, and a Britten arrangement of The Crocodile, a folk song recounting how a man ended up eaten up by the gigantic reptile and spent ten years inside it, “very well contented.”

As was the audience on this night.

Gerald Finley and Julius Drake presented a recital program on April 22, at Koerner Hall, Toronto. They continue to tour this program to Washington DC, Georgia and NYC. Finley will have an extra stop in Montreal, with pianist Michael McMahon (Info).

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