Tenor Asitha Tennekoon’s May 8th recital at the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto explored the idea of Belonging. The first set, Vaughan Williams’ setting of six poems from Housman’s On Wenlock Edge explored a geographically settled but psychologically unsettled sense of self. The accompaniment of piano quintet (Steven Philcox, piano; Yolanda Bruno and Aysel Taghi-Zada, violins; Laurence Schaufele, viola and Amahl Arulanandam, cello) provided lots of colour for these sometimes lyrical, sometimes dramatic, but always death-obsessed poems. Tennekoon sang them with perfect diction and great expressiveness, navigating the tricky dialogue in “Is my team ploughing?” very effectively.
Asitha Tennekoon
Ian Cusson’s Where There’s a Wall was the first of two sets exploring the immigrant experience. It sets five poems by Joy Kogawa dealing with her childhood experiences in an internment camp for Japanese-Canadians in WW2. Accompaniment here is just piano and in characteristic Cusson fashion, the singer and piano are more in dialogue than in sync. The songs are quite demanding; employing some non-standard vocal and piano technique and with a range of styles in the accompaniments. They were presented with great clarity and quite beautifully.
Next came a premiere; a WMCT commission from Danika Lorèn for tenor and piano. The Thread of Life sets poems by Christina Rossetti written in response to her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life and explores the (false?) dichotomy of autonomy and connection. It starts with the pianist playing minimalist arpeggios, more or less divorced from the plaintive vocal line, but gradually they come together in some more richly textured sections leading into a final, improvised, celebration of connectedness. The unusual demands posed by a piece like this were skilfully worked by Tennekoon and Philcox.
Pianist Steven Philcox
After the break we got Nico Muhly’s Stranger for tenor and string quartet. This sets prose fragments about the immigrant experience. These include a first hand account of arriving at Ellis Island, verses from The Bible enjoining us to treat the stranger as one of our own, and a letter home from a labour camp for Chinese immigrants. It’s a complex piece with chromatic, almost atonal, but very beautiful music for the strings and an understated vocal line. Once more, the playing and singing was very high class. Parallels of then and now are all too obvious.
The recital finished with Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915 for tenor and piano. I’m not sure whether this was to send us home on a happy note or was meant ironically. It’s a reminiscence of untroubled (white) childhood in the American south and is comfortably (too comfortably?) lyrical. There’s no sense of the tension of belonging/not belonging here though I suspect that Tennekoon (or indeed myself) would not feel this sense of untroubled belonging in Knoxville then or now.
In many ways this was a challenging programme for performers and, to a certain extent, the audience. All the difficulties were overcome with aplomb by the musicians and the rather full Walter Hall reacted with enthusiasm suggesting there is still an audience for a carefully curated song recital.
Full details of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto’s Music in the Afternoon new 2025-26 season can be found at www.wmct.on.ca
