Leonard Turnevicius

Phillips goes from backup to up front

A spate of concerts kicks off tomorrow night, Friday September 26, as vocalist Colina Phillips presents her “Get Happy” show in Ancaster’s Old Fire Hall, 334 Wilson Street East.

It’s a comeback of sorts for Phillips, her re-introduction to the music scene. The Nova Scotia born Phillips lived in Hamilton for a year when she was three, but cut her teeth professionally in Toronto in the late 1960s singing Motown covers with The Tiaras, a girl group consisting of Jackie Richardson, Brenda Russell, and Arlene Trotman. After being rejected for the Toronto production of Hair, Phillips found steady work as a session singer thanks to Tommy Ambrose. In that milieu, Phillips along with Shawne Jackson and Sharon Lee Williams became affectionately known as “the girls,” go-to gals whenever female voices were needed for advertising jingles, or backing up a big name. Consequently, Phillips sang back up for Anne Murray, Murray McLauchlan, Ronnie Hawkins, Long John Baldry, Ronnie Prophet, Fred Penner, Bruce Cockburn, Bryan Adams, Chaka Khan, Alice Cooper, and many others.

By the early 1990s, with session work trailing off, and her 1992 CD Blue Mood not exactly burning up the charts, Phillips segued into film production, working as a continuity supervisor on TV series such as Exhibit A, and Paradise Falls.

Two years ago, she moved back to Hamilton. “I just realized I feel more comfortable here. This just seems like my town,” said Phillips from her Dundurn Street home. “I had come back with the intention of getting going, and getting singing again. It was something on my mind to do, and I was slowly working up to it.”

Phillips’s Get Happy gig will include tunes such as Baby Face, Cape Breton Lullabye, and standards such as I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, and Over the Rainbow. She’ll be backed by the rhythm section from Kollage--Artie Roth on bass, Robi Botos on piano, and Archie Alleyne, who once gigged with Billie Holiday, on drums. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are $25. Call 905-304-8863.

On Saturday, October 4 at 7: 30 p.m., the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra opens its brand new series, Elegance, at Central Presbyterian Church, 165 Charlton Ave. West. This three concert series will feature a chamber-sized HPO performing popular fare. On tap are Haydn’s “Fire” Symphony, Bach’s Double Violin Concerto featuring Lance Elbeck and Bethany Bergman, and Beethoven’s First Symphony. Jamie Sommerville and company, who opened their Hamilton Place season two Saturdays ago with Mozart’s 39^th Symphony, will also take another kick at Wolfi, this time with the Overture to Der Schauspieldirektor. Let’s hope this Mozart will be a happier affair than the 39^th which was under rehearsed, contained sloppy playing from the HPO first violin section, and questionable tempos such as a breakneck Menuetto and sluggish Trio section. Ticket prices are $25 regular, $23 senior, $10 student, and $5 child. Call 905-526-7756.

Next Sunday, October 5, chamber music fans are caught between a rock and a hard place with two concerts to choose from. At 7:30 p.m., Jack Mendelsohn happily opens his chamberWORKS! season in the Dofasco Centre for the Arts, 190 King William Street. The “All’italiana” concert includes works written or influenced by Italian composers. In the first category are Rossini’s Sonata no. 6 for two violins, cello and bass, plus Martucci’s Piano Quintet. In the latter category is Russian composer Mikhail Glinka’s Divertimento brillante on themes from Bellini’s La sonnambula. With pianist Valerie Tryon tied up elsewhere this evening, Brantford native Bernadine Blaha, who currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, will be making her chamberWORKS! début. Tickets are $30 and $25 regular, $25 and $20 senior, $5 student. Call 905-522-7529.

The other chamber music concert begins at 8 p.m. in the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts, 126 James Street South. Chamber Music Hamilton has booked Valerie Tryon and the Belgium based Arriaga Quartet to perform Schumann’s gratifying Piano Quintet, a work Tryon has played and recorded with chamberWORKS! Also on the bill, Turina’s La Oracion del Torero, and Mendelssohn’s Quartet op. 44 no. 2. Ticket prices are $27 regular, $22 senior, and $10 student. Call 905-528-5628.

Hitting the road to Carnegie Hall

The Burlington Welsh Male Chorus is on the move.

Later today, the fifty-five member group plus their spouses will board two buses. By nightfall, they’ll be in Albany, New York. By tomorrow, they’ll be in Wenham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, for a concert at Gordon College.

Monday morning, they’ll head for Newark, New Jersey where they’ll team up to rehearse with about 350 other male choristers from eight countries. On Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m., they’ll take the stage of Carnegie Hall for a Celtic Celebration Concert which will feature renowned Welsh operatic baritone Bryn Terfel.

But the BWMC’s journey to New York’s fabled hall has taken more than just “practice, practice, practice,” that familiar punch line to the worn out joke about, “How do you get to Carnegie?”

For the BWMC, it also took an invitation from Haydn James, the conductor of the London Welsh Male Voice Choir. Two years ago, the BWMC as well as the Hamilton based Canadian Orpheus Male Choir traveled to London, England to sing in a concert under James at The Royal Albert Hall. When James told them that there was a future concert in Carnegie and asked if they’d like to participate, the Burlington men jumped at the opportunity.

With Mark Burrows of the Cardiff, Wales based Melody Music Company (a choir tour promotion company) handling the Carnegie Hall arrangements, the BWMC decided to make a trip around the Carnegie appearance by adding other concert dates, hence the stop in Wenham, as well as next Saturday’s concert in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

“One of the guys knew some Welsh person in Boston so that’s how we ended up going there,” said Ray Williams, a founding member of the BWMC as well as the COMC. As Williams explained, Scranton has a long history of Welsh immigration dating back to the 1880s with men coming over to work in the coal mines and iron factories. This will be Williams’s second visit to Scranton. He was a member of the COMC when they toured there under Lyn Harry in 1980.

For the Wenham and Scranton dates, the BWMC’s program will be salted with traditional Welsh hymns such as Cwm Rhondda, Gymru, Gwahoddiad, plus Rachie, a tune that’s frequently punted about among the crowds at rugby games.

About twenty-three of the BWMC’s members are from Wales, including Williams who worked in the coal mines from age fifteen before coming to Canada in 1969 at the age of 32. At least four of the choristers are Welsh speaking and they provide pronunciation assistance to those in the choir who can’t read the language, including their director, Richard Street.

But can the choristers read music? “Well, no and yes,” said Williams. “Let’s put it this way. It’s the simple thing if you know when the notes are going up and down, or we know where the full note or half and eighth note (are), but to say that we can read music isn’t really true.”

But the BWMC’s tour repertoire isn’t limited to Welsh chestnuts. There’s Alwyn Humphreys’s arrangement of The Divine Brahma from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, and James’s take on the Anthem from the musical, Chess, plus former director Lyn Harry’s version of The Rose.

In the first half of the Carnegie concert, the BWMC will perform Diane Loomer’s arrangement of Allister MacGillivray’s Away from the Roll of the Sea, as well as Noel Goemanne’s arrangement of Johann Pachelbel’s ever popular Canon in D.

After intermission, James will lead a 400 voice massed choir in tunes such as Bring Him Home and I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables, This Little Light of Mine, Give Me That Old Time Religion, and Take Me Home.

The night after Carnegie will find the BWMC taking on another concert in what’s become a fun sideline for them, singing backup for Jon Langford, a former punker from Newport, Wales, now an alt-country solo act based out of Chicago.

The appearance with Langford was originally scheduled to take place in New York’s Highline Ballroom, but Dave Stewart (formerly of the Eurythmics) is booked to play the club that night. So, Langford and the men will do their thing in the Knitting Factory, a club located in the Big Apple’s Tribeca neighborhood.

“It’s like you’ve got thirty geriatrics up on the stage,” said Williams of the BWMC’s collaboration with Langford. “It’s a bit like Rita MacNeil and The Men of the Deep sort of thing.” Except, of course, that Langford’s material ranges from bittersweet reflections on the land of song, sheep, and Tom Jones to post-industrial decay to debauchery, mining disasters, and the like.

On the first Sunday in October, the BWMC will be backing Langford again, only this time in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, a free, three day event that’ll surely attract the granola bar crowd, and given the city’s reputation, where the grass will probably be anything but blue. The festival will also feature big name acts such as Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Odetta, Elvis Costello, Earl Scruggs, and others. The BWMC is taking it all in stride. “They’re getting to know us all over the place,” said Williams.

Murphy, Mozart & Mahler at HPO opener

For students across the country this week, it’s back to the three ‘R’s: reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic.

For the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s time to prepare for the three ‘M’s.

‘M’ as in Murphy. Kelly-Marie Murphy, that is. Murphy was born in Sardegna, Italy and was raised on military bases across the country. She studied composition with Allan Bell at the University of Calgary, and received her doctorate from the University of Leeds, England. Her works have been performed by cellist Shauna Rolston, French hornist Jamie Sommerville, harpist Judy Loman, among many others.

Murphy’s And So Be Changed to Lightning in the End, was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to close their New Creations Festival in 2005. While she was writing the work, Murphy learned that Bell was to undergo a liver transplant (which he survived). She re-read Philippe Jaccottet’s Que la fin nous illumine in English translation, and latched onto the poem’s final line as her title. “The piece is about that fight to survive,” explained Murphy from her Ottawa home. “It was no longer a bidding farewell to a new music festival. It was that strength of hanging on in the face of everything against you.” Scored for full orchestra, it features four trumpets which are to play in four corners of the stage.

‘M’ is for Mozart. Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, that is. He composed his Symphony in E Flat in 1788, three years before his death. Nineteenth-century myth would have us believe that poor Mozart never heard this work as well as his Symphony in G Minor and the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony performed in his lifetime.

But Herr Mozart was a pragmatist, composing works with a specific performance in mind. Did he have his E Flat symphony performed at one of his subscription concerts later that very year? Or did he take it with him on his tours to Germany in the following two years? The possibility exists, but alas, we may never know for sure.

What we do know for sure about Mozart is that, similar to Haydn and Beethoven, he would write out his reprise sections from memory. But in the E Flat Symphony, there are different phrase markings for the main theme in the opening section compared to its restatement in the reprise some 150 bars later. Are these discrepancies simply Mozart’s careless errors or important adjustments? The work has nonetheless been an audience favourite since the early 1800s.

Lastly, ‘M’ is for Mahler, as in Gustav Mahler. Back at the première of his Fourth Symphony in Munich in 1901, Mahler stood on the conductor’s podium and heard the audience hoot in derision at the end of the first two movements. Had they been put off by the chirping flutes and sleigh bells of the symphony’s opening gambit? Or the second movement’s Totentanz (Dance of Death), tempered by its easy-going Ländler rhythms in three-eight time? Or perhaps the solo violin, instructed to play scordatura, each string tuned one note higher to sound, as Mahler wrote, “wie eine Fiedel”, imitating the coarse sounds of a fiddler on the street? (In performance, the concertmaster usually brings two violins on stage, one of them tuned a notch higher beforehand.)

If they’d come to hear something in the magnitude of Mahler’s Second Symphony, a monumental work with a hair-raising ending, they were in the wrong place. Mahler’s Fourth isn’t of that ilk.

The Fourth is, however, the last of Mahler’s symphonies to use the Wunderhorn songs. And in its fourth and final movement, a soprano gleefully sings of enjoying “heaven’s delights” where “everything awakes to pleasure”, all ending on a note of angelic calm.

The three ‘M’s will be heard next Saturday in Hamilton Place when Maestro Jamie Sommerville mounts the podium to lead the HPO in their season opener. The soprano in the Mahler will be Nathalie Paulin, whose career has blossomed since she last soloed in Hamilton a decade ago in Mozart’s Requiem with the HPO and the Bach Elgar Choir under Mario Bernardi.