Baroque and Early - my/maSCENA

Opera and Jewish Cantorial Music: a 21st-Century Update from Montreal

By Philip Ehrensaft on 16 September 2020 Baroque and Early, Vocal

Montreal’s Shaar Hashomayim synagogue is well known as a centre of Jewish music. The title track of Leonard Cohen’s penultimate album, You Want It Darker, brought the Shaar’s cantor, the lyric tenor Gideon Zelermyer, and its choir, directed by Roï Azoulay, to the attention of a wider public. Cohen, the grandson and great-grandson of past presidents of the Shaar, was a lifetime member of the synagogue, and is buried in the Shaar’s cemetery on Mount Royal. When Cohen inserted repetitions of the Hebrew word hineni (“here I am”) into the title song he was acknowledging that his end was near,…

Ad Litteram Acquires ATMA Classique Label

By Newswire on 30 March 2020 Arts Industry, Baroque and Early, Classical Music

PRESSE RELEASE, For immediate release Montreal, March 30, 2020 – Johanne Goyette, founder and president of ATMA Classique, and Guillaume Lombart, founder and president of Ad Litteram jointly announced that Ad Litteram, a leading company with more than 20 years of experience in the music industry, has entered into an agreement to acquire the ATMA Classique label, effective April 1, 2020. With this transaction, Ad Litteram Inc. will acquire Disques ATMA Inc.’s shares and the ATMA Classic label, ensuring the company’s sustainability while promoting a bold vision for the future, including an emphasis on video and the expansion of the…

Monsters Coming to the National Gallery

By Newswire on 28 December 2019 Baroque and Early, Newswire

Dec/Jan 2020 issue Monsters at the National Gallery! Christmas may be over, but “You better watch out” if you visit the National Gallery of Canada on January 25th, 2020. Why? Because… there be monsters. In fact, Monsters are already on display at the Gallery, in a special exhibition titled Beautiful Monsters in Early European Prints and Drawings (1450–1700), which runs until March 29th, 2020. But on January 25th, the monsters will creep off their canvasses and come to life in a one-time performance in the Gallery’s auditorium. The show features the Ottawa Baroque Consort, hosted by master storyteller David Brennan.…

Photo: Stephanie Sedlbauer

Annamaria Popescu: Never Too Late to Start Early

By Arthur Kaptainis on 27 November 2019 Baroque and Early, Vocal

Annamaria Popescu has both a harpsichord and a piano in her studio at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. “I require all my students to do early music,” says the mezzo-soprano and assistant professor, who will be one of the soloists in Handel’s Messiah as performed on Dec. 8 by the Orchestre classique de Montréal under Boris Brott. “And they start with Italian. Because if they start with Italian early music, they see the evolution. If they do a piece from the mid-1500s and from the 1600s and the mid-1700s, then when they do their Bellini song, they have a…

Akamus Flying instruments Photo : Uwe Arens

Fall Preview: Early Music

By Benjamin Goron on 5 September 2019 Baroque and Early

The perseverance of Orpheus The best-known musician of antiquity will attempt several more descents into the underworld this year to bring back his beloved Eurydice. The epic story of this accomplished lyricist will start quite far from Montreal. At the prestigious Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Theatre of Early Music will present Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice from Nov. 8 to 12 with Daniel Taylor in the principal role. Closer to home, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky and soprano Amanda Forsythe bring one of the most famous myths of music back to life with the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble on…

Il Cortegiano : Festival Montréal Baroque with the participation of Jardins Chorégraphiques, Ensemble Alkemia, Flûte Alors! and Les Voix Humaines. Photo : Guillaume Lamothe.

Some serious fun at the Montreal Baroque Festival

By Arthur Kaptainis on 26 June 2019 Baroque and Early, Concert Reviews

The governing theme of the Montreal Baroque Festival this year was sprezzatura, an Italian word defined as nicely-calibrated nonchalance by Baldassare Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier (1528). The choice allowed for a preponderance of Italian repertoire, a concentration on venues in Little Italy, a philosophical attitude toward late starts and, on Sunday, the spectacle of co-artistic directors Susie Napper and Matthias Maute locking arms on the stage of the Théâtre Le Chateau, each with a glass of wine, and thanking the various collaborators who made the 17th edition possible. “Concert” would not quite do justice to the show,…

Baritone Tyler Duncan in "Leonardo" by Jonathan Berger

Da Vinci Our Contemporary – The Legendary Renaissance Polymath Arrives Center Stage in Composer Jonathan Berger’s New Monodrama

By Charles Geyer on 5 April 2019 Baroque and Early, Chamber Music, Classical, Classical Music, Contemporary, Education, La Scena Online, Musical Theatre, Opera, Theatre, Visual Arts

PREVIEW: of the world premiere of Leonardo, a new operatic monodrama about Leonardo da Vinci by composer Jonathan Berger at NYC’s 92nd Street Y; and INTERVIEW: with composer/librettist Jonathan Berger. “Che cos’è uno starnuto?” Leonardo da Vinci asks himself – and his audience – at the top of composer Jonathan Berger’s new one-man opera, Leonardo. “What is a sneeze?” It may seem a disarmingly piddling question from one of history’s most titanic intellectual figures – but that is precisely composer Jonathan Berger’s point. “Leonardo’s greatest asset was his unabashed asking of simple questions,” Berger says, “and through those questions arriving…

Photo : Roger Mastroianni

Olivier Brault: A Quest for Eloquence

By Benjamin Goron on 3 April 2019 Baroque and Early, Violin

Olivier Brault is very much in demand internationally for his deft playing of, and expertise in, period instruments. His embrace of the Baroque era, with special emphasis on 18th-century French music, has given this violinist the credentials to stimulate interest in this repertoire through lectures to younger audiences and his work as a teacher at McGill University. His twin musical concerns now are the use of memory and its transmission, although his own journey was a winding one, beginning with a childhood visit to a great-uncle in Nova Scotia. A Love Affair with the French Trio Sonata “My mother was…

Mika Putterman – Reviving the Art of Early Flute

By Benjamin Goron on 28 March 2019 Baroque and Early, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Romantic

The modern flute is one of the most recent additions to the woodwind family. Developed in the 1830s, it gained full acceptance by the century’s end. Its new key system gave it a more even tone, greater sound projection and, not least, increased playing facility. As entrenched as it is in concert music, is this instrument, otherwise known as the Boehm flute, the only one worthy of interest? What about its predecessors? Is there anything to learn from these? Mika Putterman, for one, would certainly answer the last question in the affirmative. As a self-described “historical flutist,” she owns an…

International stars and prestigious beginnings at the Festival de Lanaudière

By Newswire on 21 March 2019 Baroque and Early, Classical Music, Orchestral

Unveiling of another part of the 2019 edition’s programming Featuring great artists from here and from France, Italy and Germany Joliette, March 21, 2019—The Festival de Lanaudière’s Artistic Director Renaud Loranger has announced four new concerts in the artistic programming of the 42nd edition of the Festival de Lanaudière. They feature the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM), Orchestre Métropolitain (OM), Venice Baroque Orchestra, and violinist Christian Tetzlaff. The Festival runs from July 5 to August 4 this year. The OSM has been invited to give the Festival’s opening concert on Friday, July 5. Renowned French conductor Alain Altinoglu makes a return…

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