First Hear! Here! concert sold out

Pianist Robert Kortgaard and soprano Sally Dibblee will be performing before a full house when they bring Love is My Reason to the Yarmouth County Museum next Monday evening, Sept. 15. Tickets for the show, which promises an intimate evening of songs for voice and piano, are now sold out.

Among the audience will be as many as 10 students sponsored by the Yarmouth Rotary Club. Continuing a long tradition of supporting local youth and music, the club purchased 10 tickets to be distributed through area music teachers to deserving students who might not otherwise get to experience live classical music performance. The local Rotary club is a longtime sponsor of the Yarmouth school band program and regularly sponsors recreational opportunities for youth.

Monday’s program includes a variety of musical genres spanning more than 200 years from Mozart to the music hall sentimentality of Ivor Novello. Operatic selections from Puccini’s La Boheme intermingle with 19th century art songs from German Romantics like Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. And amongst the songs for voice are three piano solos including Butterfly, by Edvard Grieg and a Franz Liszt transcription of the Venetian Regatta by Rossini.

Kortgaard promises to send members of the audience away, “with a song in their hearts.”

Dibblee and Kortgaard are among Canada’s most sought after musicians. A resident of Toronto, Kortgaard holds a Master's degree from the Juilliard School in New York City, has performed as a soloist with major Canadian orchestras, and has given recitals throughout Canada and the United States, as well as in England, Finland, Portugal, Italy, Indonesia, the Czech Republic and China. He is one of the country's most respected concert pianists, and a favourite collaborator of many of Canada's finest instrumental soloists, vocalists and chamber groups. He is a frequent partner of sopranos Measha Bruggergosman, Wendy Nielsen, mezzo-soprano Jean Stilwell and cabaret diva Patricia O'Callaghan. His performances are frequently heard on CBC Radio and he has recorded for the Centrediscs, Marquis Classics/EMI, CBC Records, Teldec and ATMA Classiques labels. He is the artistic director of the Indian River Festival in Prince Edward Island, which recently earned an ECMA award as event of the year.

Dibblee is fresh from her lead role in a staging of the opera Madame Butterfly by Opera Pacific, which earned her rave reviews in the most recent edition of Opera Canada.

“Sally Dibblee … was a tour-de-force of vocal control and expressive flexibility. She missed neither musical note nor demure, Japanese shuffle-step in the role’s huge expressive stretch from naïve, 15-year-old geisha to adoring mother and grief-striken, abandoned wife,” writes Robert Jordan.

Her engagements in 2007-2008 and beyond include Violetta in La traviata in New Brunswick, Nedda in I pagliacci and Pat Nixon in Nixon in China for the Vancouver Opera, Donna Elvira in Calgary, Mimi in La bohème with the Toronto Symphony and Lauretta in Gianni Schiccihi and Nedda in I pagliacci for the Calgary Opera.

On the concert stage, she has been soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Lloyd Webber’s Requiem, with Messiah for the Winnipeg Symphony, the Elora Festival Singers, and the Bach-Elgar Choir of Hamilton. In recital, Dibblee appears often with The Aldeburgh Connection in Toronto, on CBC, and at the Elora Festival. Her performance of Le Souvenir: Canadian Songs for Parlour and Stage, a recording of Canadian Heritage Songs, has been released as a CD on CBC Centredisc label.

The duo’s appearance in Yarmouth is part of a fall Maritime tour. Monday’s concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at the museum at 22 Collins St. There will be a gala reception after the concert. Although tickets have sold out, a waiting list has been started. Contact Joan Semple 902-742-8765.

Hear! Here! in Yarmouth is a new committee formed to help secure concerts by classical and jazz musicians here in Yarmouth. This concert has been made possible through partnership with the Tri-County Women’s Centre and with support from Via Rail and the Yarmouth Rotary Club.