Reflections of Eden
An exploration of the place of humans in the natural world.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 8PM
Trinity St. Paul's Centre
For Immediate Release - Toronto, January 12, 2005: Toronto’s Talisker Players return to Trinity St. Paul’s on Wednesday, February 16, with Reflections of Eden. The playful programme contains selections from the large repertoire of music inspired by animal poems. On a somewhat more serious level it is an exploration of the place of humans in the natural world. Along with guest artists Tamara Hummel, soprano and Vilma Indra Vitols, mezzo soprano, the Talisker Players promise an evening to divert and engage the intellect.
The concert features one of the seminal works of 20th-century vocal repertoire, Lukas Foss’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, written in 1978. At once adventurous and meditative, it is a setting (for voice, piano, flute and percussion) of one of Wallace Stevens’ best-known poems. Talisker Players also remount Euphrosyne Keefer's The Osprey - a neglected gem from the Canadian repertoire: The work is a setting of E.J. Pratt poems for voice and string quartet. Keefer was an immigrant from Britain who spent 20 years raising a family in the Canadian north before returning to her early training as a composer.
The programme also includes Shakespeare’s Aviary for voice, clarinet, viola and piano, a recent work by Toronto composer Alexander Rapoport - a charming exploration of incidental poems about birds from various Shakespeare plays. Reflections of Eden also features two pieces by Lee Hoiby, the prolific and inventive American composer of vocal music: The Life of the Bee (poetry by Jeffery Beam) for voice, cello and piano; and Rainforest (prose-poetry by Elizabeth Bishop) for voice and wind quintet. The evening ends on a high note with Francis Poulenc’s whimsical Le Bestiaire, for voice with string quartet, flute, clarinet and bassoon. The quirky setting of very short verses by the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, muse somewhat anthropomorphically about the lives of various animals.
Winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, soprano Tamara Hummel is an alumna of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio with recent credits at Tanglewood, Glimmerglass Opera and Ravinia. The Vancouver native holds a Master of Music Degree from the Manhattan School of Music and has also attended the Mozarteum in Salzburg on a Johann Strauss Foundation Scholarship. Praised for the "purity and control of her sound" (National Post), Tamara recently made her Vancouver Symphony debut and performed contemporary music with both Tapestry New Opera Works and Continuum. Her 2004-2005 season includes engagements as varied as an Italian Opera evening with the Hamilton Philharmonic, an Opera Ontario/NUMUS production of SALOME DANCER and her debut at the Algoma Fall Festival. She returns to Tapestry New Opera Works for several of their workshops devoted to the creative process.
After completing her M.A. in philosophy, mezzo-soprano Vilma Indra Vitols went on to full-time music studies at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. Operatic credits include the title role in Bizet’s Carmen for Summer Opera Lyric Theatre, Nancy in Britten’s Albert Herring with the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh, England, and Hansel in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel with the Canadian Opera Company’s Outreach tour. She has appeared with Opera Atelier’s productions of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Lully's Persée at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. A frequent performer of new music, Vilma has had works written for her by several Canadian composers including John Hawkins and Talivaldis Kenins.
As always, this Talisker Players concert includes the spoken word. In this case the readings are from the writings of popular natural historians – like Lewis Thomas (“Notes of a Biology-watcher”), Dianne Ackerman (“The Moon by Whalelight”) and David Quammen (“The Song of the Dodo”), who explore the world and our place in it with humour and insight.
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Media Contact: Francine Labelle/flINK
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labellefrancine@rogers.com
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