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Published on: 1/16/2002
Last Visited: 1/16/2002
Ubukata and his partner Stephen Ralls have been grooming and sharing such moments with their audiences for two decades.
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Ralls and Ubukata are both pianists and vocal coaches, who decided in 1982 that Toronto needed a public outlet for the kind of art-song soirees they worked up occasionally at the Rosedale home of some music-loving friends.
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Ralls and Ubukata find comment for everything, whether from the letters of Tchaikovsky or the recollections of some doyenne of Parisian salon life in the 1890s.Every song has an anecdotal or thematic purpose.It's as though the motto from E. M. Forster's Howards End -- "Only connect" -- had been applied to music.
"We appeal to a lot of people who don't think of themselves as music lovers, and who wouldn't dream of searching out a recital by an unknown young singer," said Ralls, in his soft Oxbridge voice.They're quite ready, however, to follow those same unknown singers on a guided tour of Finzi's England or Debussy's Paris.
Ubukata and Ralls met in 1977 at the school and festival established by Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England.
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Both were mad for Britten's music, which Ralls had performed with Britten's own English Opera Group, and with the composer's lifetime consort, Peter Pears.
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The two pianists quickly became mad for each other as well, and when Ralls moved to Canada the following year, it seemed obvious that they should be artistic partners as well.
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Ralls found work at the University of Toronto's opera division, which he now heads.
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Britten's aesthetic is still mirrored in the pair's musical choices, which are anchored firmly in lyrical and tonal music from France, the British Isles, Russia and Germany, from about 1890 to 1950 -- "roughly the lifetime of Francis Poulenc," Ralls said.Italian, Spanish, American and modernist songs haven't had much exposure at Aldeburgh Connection concerts.But there have been 16 works commissioned from Canadian composers, including Harry Somers, John Beckwith, Derek Holman and John Greer, with texts by Margaret Atwood, Emile Nelligan and Dennis Lee, who lives on the same west-Annex block as Ralls and Ubukata.
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Ubukata and Ralls also have their eye on posterity, mainly through a scheme to transfer their hundreds of concert tapes onto archival CDs, with money from the Trillium Foundation.
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Ralls, who is 57, and Ubukata, who turned 52 last fall, plan to maintain their connection for as long as they can read a score, coach a young singer, and regale old friends with a revealing anecdote about a favourite composer.
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