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October 18, 2021 // Toronto, ON – Lawrence Cherney, Founding Artistic Director, Soundstreams, today announced additional details about the company’s world premiere production of Love Songs, as part of the company’s 2021/22 season. The digital broadcast of Love Songs will premiere on November 19, 2021. 

Claude Vivier’s travels to Bali and the Iranian city of Shiraz in the 1970s was for him an initiation into mysticism and poetry. These travels led to an intensely personal voyage; Love Songs, for seven singers, runs the gamut from childhood songs and nursery rhymes to the deepest contemplation of our place in the universe. Also in the program will be Vivier’s Hymnen an die Nacht. Couple these works with the world premiere of an homage to Claude Vivier by Christopher Mayo, Oceano Nox, and you have an evening of pure magic. 

Artistic Director Lawrence Cherney added: “Claude Vivier was preoccupied with Death, Sex and Eternity. He led a dangerous life, taking risks equally with his person and with his art. But from the extremes of human experience, he brought us back a glimpse of the eternal in 49 extraordinary works. This Love Songs program is another in a series of Soundstreams’ Vivier productions over several seasons. This year includes live presentations in Toronto in April and a European tour in May, featuring linchpin appearances at a Claude Vivier Festival hosted by London’s Southbank Centre.” 

The new work by Mayo, Oceano Nox, is an homage to Canadian composer Claude Vivier. In the 2014 biography by Bob Gilmore, Vivier’s school friend, Gilles Beauregard, recalls that the first composition of Vivier’s he saw was a setting of the poem “Oceano Nox” by Victor Hugo. There is no record of this piece of juvenilia besides Beauregard’s recollection – the piece itself is lost. Hugo’s “Oceano Nox” is a poem about sailors lost at sea, their memories decaying in the minds of friends and family as their bodies decay at the bottom of the ocean. In trying to focus in on Vivier’s lost composition, this work stumbles upon quotations from two other settings of Hugo’s poem: a choral setting by Georges Alary from 1899, and a song by Laure Collin from 1869. 

ARTISTS 

David Fallis, music director
Vocal ensemble: Carla Huhtanen, Lindsay McIntyre, Vania Chan, Robin Dann, Bud Roach, Alex Samaras, and Keith Lam
Gregory Oh, piano
Ryan Scott, percussion 

REPERTOIRE 

Claude Vivier Love Songs
Claude Vivier Hymnen an die Nacht
Christopher Mayo Oceano Nox 

Individual tickets are available now through RCM Tickets to Soundstreams Insider members, and then the general public on October 25, at this link. Visit Soundstreams.ca for more information.   

LOVE SONGS
Premieres November 19, 2021
Digital Broadcast, lasting approximately 45 minutes
Single Tickets are PWYC, ranging from $7 to $22. 

The digital production of Love Songs is sponsored by BMO. 

Love Songs is made possible with the generous support of ACTRA Toronto, Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, Toronto Musicians’ Association, Steinway & Sons, and Yonge Suites. 

Oceano Nox was commissioned with funding from the Ontario Arts Council. 

Soundstreams is one of the world’s leading contemporary music companies, and the largest global presenter of new Canadian music. Founder and Artistic Director Lawrence Cherney is committed to showcasing the work of Canadian and international composers, and has commissioned over 170 new works, and programmed hundreds of unique and compelling concerts including chamber music events, multi-choir spectaculars, operas, music-theatre works, and seven highly successful international festivals. Soundstreams serves a broad community of music lovers through the yearly Main Stage series, and free outreach and education programs that include Encounters, the Insider program, RBC Bridges, and SoundMakers. Years of collaboration with artists from diverse cultures have laid the groundwork for Soundstreams’ leap onto the world stage, with productions like Claude Vivier’s Musik für das Ende, the Cree- and Sámi-language Two Odysseys: Pimooteewin / Gállábártnit, and Hell’s Fury: The Hollywood Songbook enjoying international success and rave reviews through The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times.
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