Isaiah Bell, tenor; Alexander Weimann, keyboard
Join Isaiah Bell, one of Canada’s most promising young tenors, on a musical exploration of the self. This program transcends eras with music that includes traditional folk songs, works by Handel, Britten, and Schubert, all interlaced with Isaiah’s own philosophical poetry. This thoughtfully crafted concert examines our relationship with nature, our own personhood, and the existential questions in between. Alexander Weimann accompanies on EMV’s 1874 Broadwood piano and double-manual harpsichord.
“The star of the evening was surely tenor Bell. Moments of stillness, smooth-as-silk coloratura, careful attention to every note, even a fun treading of the line between Baroque-style straight-tone and full-throated operatic vibrato – Bell had the chance to offer it all, and he did so with poise.” – The Globe and Mail
This concert is generously sponsored by Mark De Silva
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Concert will remain available for one year from premiere date
Programme
Isaiah Bell
O Western Wind
Henry Purcell
The Fairy Queen
“When a cruel long winter”
Franz Schubert
Winterreise
“Wasserflut”
Vincenzo Bellini
Vaga luna
Trad.
“Ah toi, belle hirondelle” (a capella)
Georg Frideric Handel
Almira
“Liebliche Wälder”
Constant Lambert
A Summer Day
Alec Roth
Songs in Times of War
“Thoughts while travelling at night”
Handel
La resurrezione
“Ecco il sol”
Francesco Cavalli
La Calisto
“Piante ombrose”
Benjamin Britten/Trad.
The Last Rose of Summer
Trad.
La belle rose (a capella)
Joseph Haydn
Das Leben ist ein Traum
Healy Willan/Trad.
La plainte du coureur-des-bois
Texts & Translations
To view/download texts & translations for this concert, click here.
Programme Notes
Are we part of nature or are we separate from it? What happens when we see ourselves as individuals alone against the wild world? What happens when we don’t?
There are two of me. There’s the self who identifies with my name and personal history, who is deeply invested in the story of my flaws, longings, ambitions, success, setbacks. Then there’s the self who is more expansive, more generous, more permeable; the deeper self, without such a crisp outline, who belongs to something larger.
When I am identified with just the former, I usually feel myself stuck and struggling… alone on a journey, doing battle, reaching, clinging, defending. When I’m remembering the latter, I connect to a deep well of possibility; I cannot be lost if I am part of the greater world.
It seems to me that one of life’s natural cycles is always to be forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering: who we are, where we belong, what matters. We are amalgamations of the individual and the universal, fusions of the little self going about daily life and the big self listening for meaning, for connection.
The combined music and words of this concert attempt to point to that; it is a personal collection of notes and ideas, but it also represents a hope to transcend the personal. I often return to this quote from Virginia Woolf’s diary when attempting to draw life’s disparate experiences and influences together into something more:
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something so elastic that it could embrace anything, solemn, slight, or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends, without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life.
This recital is rather pointedly unmusicological, in the sense that the music is woven together by feeling alone. I always like to think that juxtaposing repertoire from different eras and styles makes it easier for us to hear each piece with fresh ears. I also love to follow how a certain feeling or idea appears again and again in different clothes. That said, the idea of “early music” is a thread that runs through all of these songs. There is music from Baroque masters (Purcell, Handel, Cavalli), and Classical and early Romantic music that feels connected to that tradition (Haydn, Schubert, Bellini). There is also early music in the form of folk songs, traditional tunes that survive by sticking in the ear, mutating as they pass from hand to hand. Here there are folk songs converted to art songs by modern-era composers (Britten, Healy Willan), as well as a couple of my favourite French Canadian songs sung a capella with my own personal mutations. There is also O Western Wind, the iconic anonymous medieval poem fragment that is, to me, the ultimate (and most pithy) image of a person’s desires positioned against the enormity of nature. I wrote the basic tune for it years ago, but it has kicked around in my head so long that it felt like an inherited folk song by the time I expanded it into this form for a 2020 pandemic project. Finally, there are two modern English art songs, by Constant Lambert and Alec Roth, on texts by the two pillars of ancient Chinese poetry, Li Po and Tu Fu. These heartbreaking miniature masterpieces have been inspiring artists for more than a millenium, and to me they feel as fresh as they feel ancient.
The spoken text that joins these songs may seem somewhat abstract, but I hope it can be heard as impressionistic rather than obtuse. I’ve used the haiku form (occasionally in a loose interpretation) to render the songs’ translations, and the concert’s through-line, with maximum concision.
Isaiah Bell, tenor
Canadian-American tenor Isaiah Bell sings across North America as a soloist in concert and opera. Having distinguished himself early as an interpreter of Handel, Benjamin Britten, and Bach’s Evangelists (Lincoln Center, Edinburgh Festival, Toronto Symphony), he has also found an artistic home in new creations. He was Antinous in the world premiere of Rufus Wainwright and Daniel MacIvor’s Hadrian at the Canadian Opera Company (2018), and brought “immense stage presence” and a “powerful, beautiful instrument” to La Reine-garçon (Bilodeau/Bouchard, 2024) at Opéra de Montréal. Reviewing his queer pandemic-era revamp of Poulenc’s La voix humaine, Opera Canada admired “a finely tuned performance, so perfectly married to his own sensitive and intelligent adaptation.”
Isaiah also composes and writes for the theatre. His chamber-opera/cabaret-theatre solo show The Book of My Shames has garnered overwhelming audience response: “impossibly beautiful” … “broke my heart wide open with the pure honesty, raw vulnerability and humanity of it” … “I honestly thought this was one of the most compelling shows I’ve ever seen.” The piece, a genre-defying, funny, and shockingly candid theatrical fusion co-created with director Sean Guist, has toured Canada in versions for piano, chamber ensemble, and orchestra.
Upcoming engagements for Isaiah include a return to La Reine-garçon (Canadian Opera Company, 2025), Haydn’s Creation with the Vancouver Symphony and the Elora Festival, and the world premiere of Leslie Uyeda’s opera Silence, commissioned to celebrate Opera NUOVA’s 25th season. He also returns to “Banned from the Concert Hall” (an irreverent mashup he co-created for Victoria Baroque and Early Music Vancouver) and “The Traveller,” an interweaving of the music of Robert Schumann with folk songs and original compositions and poetry. Isaiah also appears on the newly released world premiere recording of Mendelssohn’s transcription of the Matthew Passion, with the Bach Choir of Bethlehem.
Alexander Weimann, keyboard
The internationally renowned keyboard artist Alexander Weimann has spent his life enveloped by the therapeutic power and beauty of making music. Alex grew up in Munich. At age three he became fascinated by the intense magic of the church organ. He started piano at six, formal organ lessons at 12 and harpsichord at university (along with theatre theory, medieval Latin and jazz piano.) He is in huge demand as a director, soloist and chamber player, traveling the world with leading North American and European ensembles. He is Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia where he directs the Baroque Orchestra Mentorship Programme.
Alex has appeared on more than 100 recordings, including the Juno-award-winning album “Prima Donna” with Karina Gauvin and Arion Baroque orchestra. His latest album series “The Art of Improvisation” (Volume 1: A Prayer for Peace; Volume 2: Ad libitum; and Volume 3: Caravan Variations, released on Redshift, 2024) unites his passions for both baroque music and improvisation on organ, harpsichord, and piano.
