Sunday, November 12th
Doors: 2:00 pm // Event: 2:30 pm – 5 pm ET
Free with RSVP
CMC Centrediscs presents : Dean Burry’s The Highwayman
CMC Centrediscs is excited to announce the release of Dean Burry’s The Highwayman!
Join us on November 12 at 2:30 p.m. ET for a shadow puppet performance followed by wine and refreshments.
Alfred Noyes’ narrative poem The Highwayman made an early impact on me when I discovered it in a faded book in my elementary school library. I remember committing it to memory for a school concert, delivering the sumptuous descriptive language with all the drama a 10-year-old imagination could muster. The poem stayed with me since that time.
Despite its slightly “old-fashioned” nature, it has endured as one of the most popular poems of the twentieth century. The story tells of a dashing robber riding through a stormy night to reach an English country inn for a tryst with his true love, Bess. The robber is betrayed to the British Army and Bess is forced to make a choice between her lover’s safety and her own brutal death.
The musical ensemble is inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 (1912). Both works are narrated, divided into a number of short sections, and employ the moon as their central image. While the music of The Highwayman is often influenced by the atonality of that earlier work, it also veers at times into other referential styles as the drama of the narrative dictates.
Newfoundland-born and Toronto-based librettist, composer, and educator Dean Burry has written twelve nationally and internationally-performed theatrical works for young people, including The Hobbit, The Secret World of Og, The Scorpions’ Sting, The Bremen Town Musicians, Le nez de la sorcière, The Vinland Traveler, Angela and Her Sisters, Pandora’s Locker and The Sword in the Schoolyard. His opera The Brothers Grimm, commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company in 1999, has been presented over 600 times and is considered “the most performed Canadian opera in history” (Bill Richardson, CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera). From 2015 to 2017, Burry served as Artistic Director for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company. He has been a key player in the Education and Outreach Department of the Canadian Opera Company since designing the celebrated After-School Opera Program in 1997. As Program Leader and Music and Stage Director, he has created over fifty operas with young people in various Toronto communities and/or implemented many highly successful outreach programs for such organizations as the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, Ontario Arts Council, The Royal Conservatory of Music, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Toronto District School Board. He is also a professor of new and Canadian music at the Glenn Gould Professional School of the Royal Conservatory. Burry was the 2011 recipient of the Ontario Arts Foundation’s Louis Applebaum Composers Award for excellence in the field of music for young people. Recent premieres include Tempest in a Teacup in Guiyang, China and The Bells of Baddeck at the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Hungarian-Canadian, mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó is highly sought after in both North America and Europe as an artist of supreme musicianship and stagecraft, and is known for her promotion and performance of contemporary Canadian works.
In the 2022-23 season, Krisztina will perform with Calgary Opera (50th Anniversary Opera Gala), Honens International Piano Competition (Finals), Victoria Symphony (Ian Cusson’s Songs from the House of Death), Houston Symphony (Handel’s Messiah), Early Music Vancouver (Festive Cantatas), Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Bach’s St. John Passion), Music of the Baroque (Bach’s St. Matthew Passion) and a tour of George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence.
Krisztina’s career has seen her on all the major opera and concert stages across Canada. She regularly performs with the Canadian Opera Company, Vancouver Opera, Tapestry Opera, Early Music Vancouver, and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.
Outside of Canada, she has performed with San Francisco Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Stadttheater Klagenfurt, Wexford Festival Opera. In 2018, Krisztina made her Royal Opera and Netherlands Opera débuts in George Benjamin’s new opera, Lessons in Love and Violence, the recording of which received a Grammy nomination for Best Opera Recording.
She has been nominated for Outstanding Performance by the Dora Awards twice, and was in Kopernikus (Claude Vivier) with Against the Grain Theatre (Toronto) which won a Dora Award for Best Ensemble.
Her discography includes Found Frozen: Songs of Jeffrey Ryan (Centrediscs), New Jewish Music, Vol. 3 (Analekta), Ana Sokolovic – Sirens (Naxos), and Talisker Players Where Words and Music Meet (Centrediscs).
Digital projects include Canadian Opera Company’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Canadian Art Song Project’s Four Short Songs (2014),Tafelmusik’s The Voice of Vivaldi, Festival of the Sound’s Arias and Antics, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder (Vancouver Opera), An Italian Baroque Festive Celebration (Early Music Vancouver); performing in recital for the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts and Behind the Keys for Vancouver Bach Choir, and Tapestry Opera’s S.O.S. Sketch Opera Singers.
Ms. Szabó finished her postgraduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, England, after completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario studying with Darryl Edwards. She has been the recipient of the Emerging Artist grant from Canada Council and has been honoured by her home town of Mississauga , Ontario with a star on the Music Walk of Fame in its inaugural year. Krisztina lives in Vancouver and Toronto with her husband, Kristian Clarke and their daughter, Phoibe. Ms. Szabó is Assistant Professor of Voice and Opera at the University of British Columbia School of Music.
