The Happenstancers Will Perform THE KING'S GRIEF

The Happenstancers have announced THE KING'S GRIEF, featuring 6 of Canada's most adventurous musical personalities, deconstructing opera to conjure an innovative future for chamber music.

In THE KING'S GRIEF, The Happenstancers present Judith Weir's micro-opera King Harald's Saga, expanding the work to concert-length, so as to create a multi-act structure. Additional works by Thomas Adés, Oliver Knussen, Thierry Tidrow, Mary Dering, John Dowland, and others function as incidental music and punctuate Weir's tragic narrative, in which a solo soprano (Reilly Nelson) acts as 5 characters within 3 acts. The contemporary works in this performance feature historical allusion and musical quotation, blurring the listener's sense of chronological location as they are pulled between the sounds of the past, present, and somewhere else entirely.

New songs by Canadian composer Thierry Tidrow (commissioned by The Happenstancers for this programme) are emblematic of this method, as Tidrow reconfigures the work of English Baroque composer Mary Dering. Each of Tidrow's 3 songs pairs the vocalist with a new grouping (solo cello; violin and bass clarinet; and mixed quintet) in a postmodern collage, at once historical and contemporary.

“We love to work in this way,” says artistic director Brad Cherwin, “exploring new music, imagining new shapes, and seeing how far we can push the format. To attach chamber music to a narrative — in this case the failed invasion of England by King Harald Hardrada of Norway in 1066 — and place ourselves into some sort of operatic frame, it gives us a chance to push our theatricality to a farther place. The project challenges us, excites us, to make nearly tangible some of the explosive emotional forces held within the music.”