The Plain Sense of Things

The revelation of poetry in "plain English," with a deeply humane spirit .

Tuesday, May 14, 2002 at 8PM
Trinity St. Paul's Centre, Toronto

For Immediate Release - Toronto, April 24, 2002: Were American poets the rap artists of the 19th century? One thing is certain: in all their diversity, American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries share a vision that springs from the language of common speech. Perhaps because of this, their rhythms and imagery are irresistible to composers. The ever-adventurous Talisker Players wrap up their season with The Plain Sense of Things – an exploration of the revolution wrought by American poets of the 1900s, on Tuesday, May 14 at 8pm, at Trinity St. Paul's Centre. The Plain Sense of Things (the title is from a poem by Wallace Stevens), features music by American and Canadian composers and spotlights special guests Doug MacNaughton (baritone) and Mehgan Atchison (soprano) with Toronto's newest chamber music ensemble.

From the extravagant self-consciousness of Walt Whitman to the streetwise slang of Carl Sandburg, Americans changed the face of poetry forever with their insistence that great ideas could be expressed in the language of common speech. The Plain Sense of Things includes the world premiere of Chicago Portraits, commissioned by Talisker Players from Toronto composer Alexander Rapoport. The group's flexibility of instrumentation allowed Rapoport the freedom to set Carl Sandburg with a jazzy, down-and-dirty feel. The evening features another world premiere: The Brain is Wider Than the Sky, a short setting of poems by Emily Dickinson by the young American composer Daniel Wade, whose dramatic setting of W.B. Yeats' The Second Coming was performed on Talisker Players' very first chamber music concert in November 1999.

Talisker Players also perform the Canadian premiere of The Rewaking, poems by William Carlos Williams set to music by the American composer John Harbison, renowned for his recent opera The Great Gatsby.

Finally, two hidden gems of Canadian music complete the programme: Henry David Thoreau's poems The Fall of the Leaf set to music by Eugene Weigel, an American composer who emigrated to Canada in 1972 and was, for 50 years, the violist in the famed Walden Quartet; and Six Songs for soprano and string quartet, a recent work by Canadian composer James Rolfe on the poetry of Walt Whitman, which was premiered in Toronto last year.

Both Weigel's The Fall of the Leaf and Rolfe's Six Songs are examples of an important aspect of Talisker Players' mission, which is to discover good pieces that have been given one performance and then been filed away (the "world premiere syndrome") and make them part of the standard repertoire.

Readings from First Loves, a collection of essays by contemporary poets about the poems that first inspired them to write will punctuate the evening. The excerpts chosen are about the poets featured on the programme, and refer in various ways to the revelation of poetry in "plain English", with a deeply humane spirit.

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Media Contact: Francine Labelle/flINK
416-654-4406
labellefrancine@rogers.com

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