This new recording features works for solo voice and piano by Canadian composer John Beckwith. Drawing on the poetry of e.e. cummings and Canadian writers Margaret Laurence, bpNichol and Miriam Waddington, Beckwith provides the listener with songs both humorous and dramatic. Also featured are some of Beckwith’s wonderful arrangements of traditional Canadian songs.

NOTES by William Aide

Singers and poetry are the best things and we all owe a debt to composers who know how to bring them together. My debt to John Beckwith began with the Six Songs to Poems by e.e. cummings which I premiered with Mark Pedrotti in 1983. It still strikes me as one of the best cycles anywhere--four lighter songs and satires (who can resist the birdcalls of “o purple finch,” or the witty Al Jolson treatment of “Jimmie’s got a goil”?) prepare for the poignant centrality of the fifth song and the radiant defiance of the final song. This upbeat sextet should be every baritone's party piece.

Easily one of Beckwith's most winning works, the sung monologue, Stacey, draws six one-sided conversations with God from Margaret Laurence's novel, The Fire Dwellers. Stacey MacAindra's wry and clear-eyed perception of her frustrated hausfrau self offers operatic opportunities sopranos can't afford to miss. This moving work demonstrates Beckwith's adroitness in choosing the right texts and maximizing their effect without one wasted note. And what fun for me to pick up Tommy Dorsey's trombone while Stacey sways again to her favorite dance music.

Avowals is, without doubt, the craziest piece I've ever performed, wilder even than Beckwith's Keyboard Practice for 10 keyboard instruments. Originally intended as a "cabaret monodrama," the work is a tour de force for the tenor, who must emit everything from a baby's gurgling to a Verdian high B flat while he lopes through the perilous terrain of bpNichol's grand pun. "Avowals" as love protestations call forth three of Beckwith's grooviest popsong riffs, while in the final pages the bare vowels both exalt and extinguish our heroic tenor/crooner. As for our pianist, he had to sprout a wider wingspan and a well-oiled swivelstool to negotiate the virtuoso shifts to and from harpsichord and celeste. This is music to test performers and pin an audience's ears back.

The six arrangements are selected from two of Beckwith's folksong sets--Young Man from Canada (tenor) and I Love to Dance (soprano). Six ethnic traditions of Canada are represented in as many moods and languages. In each, the piano illuminates these fine tunes--as Mennonites breaking into part-singing (“Muede kehrt”) or in Bartokian drones and zimbalon tremoli (“De szeretnék”). Spareness characterizes these eloquent accompaniments, with the exception of the boisterous and tricky piano part to the title song, “Young Man from Canada.”

In the Three Songs to Poems by Miriam Waddington the composer responds cogently to Waddington's picturesque conceptions and grasps yet again what the human voice can do with words. It is the latest in Beckwith's richly-storied contribution to our country's vocal literature. I hope this recital endorses the obvious, that John Beckwith is a composer who knows his poetry so well he wants to sing it.

BIOGRAPHIES

JOHN BECKWITH’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in March 2007 with a concert of his music and a one-day symposium on aspects of his career, organized jointly by the faculty of music of the University of Toronto and the Canadian Music Centre. Beckwith’s more than 130 compositions include works for stage, orchestral, choral, chamber and keyboard media. His vocal music extends from youthful settings of poems translated from the classical Chinese through works based on invented vocables to collaborations with contemporary Canadian writers such as Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood, Jay Macpherson, bpNichol, and especially James Reaney (with whom he wrote four operas and a series of words-and-music “collages” for CBC Radio). Beckwith is also author, editor, or co-editor of several books of musical criticism and research, his particular topic being the music of Canada.

WILLIAM AIDE has premiered over thirty works by Canadian composers, including five concertos with orchestra. His extensive collaboration with singers has produced Centredisc recordings with Roxolana Roslak, soprano, and Phyllis Mailing, mezzo-soprano, and a live performance of Schumann song cycles with Lois Marshall for CBC Records. Centrediscs has also issued his compendium of chamber works with piano by Talivaldis Kenins. Other CDs include the Études and Préludes by Chopin and, with Ofra Harnoy, the Cello Sonatas by Brahms. Aide has authored a book of memoirs, Starting from Porcupine, and two volumes of poetry, Sea voyage with pigs and Letters to a musical friend. After forty years of university teaching, he retired in 2003 from the University of Toronto faculty of music, where he was the inaugural holder of the R.E. Edwards Chair in piano performance.

BENJAMIN BUTTERFIELD has appeared with opera companies and orchestras throughout Canada and also in Germany, France, Italy, the U.K., the U.S.A., New Zealand, and Israel, performing a wide range of standard classical and baroque repertoire as well as modern works by Ravel and Stravinsky. Among his several CDs on the CBC Records, Marquis, Koch International, and Dorion labels are the Juno-Award-winning Serenade and Canticles of Britten. In September 2006, Butterfield took up new duties as professor of voice with the School of Music of the University of Victoria, while continuing an active schedule of solo engagements.

KATHRYN DOMONEY studied voice with Frances James in Victoria and with Helen Simmie at the University of Toronto. She is a former member of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio, and her operatic roles have ranged from Purcell through Janacek, including premières by Harry Somers and Timothy Sullivan. In recent seasons, she has been a recitalist for CBC Radio, the Aldeburgh Connection, Queen’s University, and the Mozart Society of Toronto, and soloist with orchestras and choirs in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Orillia, Guelph, and Victoria. She is also in demand as a festival adjudicator.

TERI DUNN, born in Ottawa, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in voice from the University of Toronto, where her teacher was Mary Morrison. She has appeared with leading Canadian ensembles, drawing special notice for her performances of Bach and Purcell, and also in demanding avant-garde repertoire such as George Crumb’s Federico’s Songs for Little Children, which she recently recorded for Naxos. She has given premières of works by the Canadians James Rolfe, John Hawkins, Micheline Roi, Abigail Richardson, and Jeff Ryan. Ms Dunn is also active as a conductor, coach and voice teacher.

DOUG MacNAUGHTON, a graduate of the Brandon University School of Music and the University of Toronto Opera Division, made his début with the Edmonton Opera in 1982 and has since sung with opera companies in all parts of Canada. In addition to standard opera, oratorio, and chamber music, his repertoire includes musical theatre (from Sullivan to Les Misérables) and works by the Viennese modernists (Ode to Napoleon, Wozzeck). He has been featured in twelve world premières, notably Traces for baritone and orchestra by Istvan Anhalt. MacNaughton also teaches voice and guitar.