Choral Scene

Those of you dropping in on this column for the first time will have missed the start of a discussion of modern music begun here last month, revolving around the question: why did composers start writing music that sounded so weird?

Short answer: It’s a complex subject that touches on global economics, cultural history, evolutions in class and ethnic mobility, the changing nature of music education and concert-going, religion in society, European nationalism, industrialization and technological progress in instrument building.

So let’s move on. In practical terms, 1) choral audiences sometimes want to hear music they haven’t heard before and 2) choral composers want to keep composing new repertoire. So how do we bring the two parties together to meet on the dance floor? Like any healthy relationship, it takes a leap of faith and a bit of compromise.

So, to the audience member who runs for the doors at the hint of an unfamiliar or apparently unpleasant sound: you have to be willing to give these new musical experiences not just a first, but a second and third chance. The first time you went up on a two-wheel bike you probably wobbled and fell. But you persevered, ’cause you had some sense that on the other side of the challenge were new vistas of excitement, freedom and enjoyment.

And to those composers who write in a way that ignores the two reasons why the vast majority of people listen to music — pleasure and solace: you will simply lose your audience — a principled but self-destructive path that many mid-20th-century composers chose.

The musician who wants to connect with listeners must be willing to meet them at least part of the way. This means being open to musical elements that have appeal to non-musicians — traditional tonal harmonic systems, melodic contour that has a comprehensible arc and graspable structure, rhythmic grooves that are anchored in movement and dance, and other elements of popular, folk and indigenous music.

If you think this is the kind of pandering to which no artiste should stoop, go back and listen to pretty much every composer of note from the last 500 years — they knew their dance numbers and their folk songs, their pub cheers and theatre numbers and children’s lullabies and they infused their compositions with these elements, even as they extended the boundaries of where music could go and what it could express. They knew that to both thrive and survive, they had to consider the needs of the people around them as much as their own.

The point I made in last month’s column is that many modern composers are already doing this. The mid-20th century experiments of atonality and serialism, Musique concrète, aleatoric music and spatialization — I know, I know, even the names are off-putting — have almost been entirely abandoned. Or, they are being combined with an aesthetic that does not insist on purging music of the elements the non-specialist listener identifies as music.

English composer Thomas Adès writes very much in this conciliatory mode. His Dances from Powder Her Face is being performed on October 31 and November 1 and 2 by the Toronto Symphony, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and Toronto Children’s Chorus. The concert also includes Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and Carl Orff’s choral favourite Carmina Burana.

Carmina was a hit when it was first performed in Frankfurt in 1937, and has never waned in popularity. Orff wrote in a manner that wedded the varied and complex sonorities of the modern orchestra to music of deceptive simplicity. In some ways Orff’s music can be seen as the distant ancestor of the groove-based compositions of postmodernists Glass and Reich. Adès’ music also shares certain qualities with Orff’s, combining fun with edginess and possessing an earthy, sensual quality that seems to evoke bar fights and assignations rather than concert halls.

Dances from Powder Her Face, a Canadian premiere, is presumably a suite of music from Adès‘ chamber opera of the same name. The piece may or may not involve choir, but if not, and you want to hear some of his vocal music, take a chance and listen to the opera from which the Dances is derived. I think many listeners ought to be intrigued by some of the arresting vocal and instrumental writing that illustrates the scandal-ridden story of the Duchess of Argyll.

Britten’s Serenade is also a brilliant work. Many ensembles will be programming Britten’s works this year — 2013 being his birth centenary — and if you are willing to take a leap into unfamiliar 20th-century music, Britten is a very good place to begin.

Britten worked throughout his career almost entirely within the framework of “extended tonality.” What is this, exactly? Extended tonality is to traditional tonality as X-Man Wolverine is to pocket knives — that is, more dangerous but cooler.

On October 19 the Grand Philharmonic Choir performs Britten’s War Requiem, considered to be one of the 20th century’s masterworks. Premiered in 1962, it blends the traditional requiem mass text with poems by Wilfred Owen. Owen perished in the First World War, but not before writing poetry that ripped the veils of piety and patriotism away from the gruesome reality of WWI trench combat.

On October 20 the Elmer Iseler Singers will perform St. Cecilia Sings! A Tribute to Benjamin Britten, a concert that also includes music by Howells, Schubert, Vaughan Williams and Canadian Eleanor Daley, who has amassed a body of choral music that is becoming part of the standard repertoire of many Canadian choirs.

On November 6 at Grace Church on-the-Hill, and again on November 15 at Temple Sinai synagogue, the Temple Sinai Ensemble Choir, Toronto Jewish Folk Choir and Upper Canada Choristers join forces during Holocaust Education Week to perform music that addresses the same theme as the Britten requiem — war’s destruction.

The evening includes an original composition by cantor/composer Charles Osborne titled I Didn’t Speak Out, based on the famous indictment of apathy in the face of evil attributed to German theologian Martin Niemoeller. The concerts are free. More information can be found here.

Finally, modern composition reaches back to ancient tradition, as the Pax Christi Chorale hosts the Great Canadian Hymn Competition on October 6. PCC has fashioned itself the sponsor of new works in an area that is notoriously conservative — hymn singing. As with concert music, the continued vitality of the tradition depends on new works. Hosting the event is one of Canada’s greatest singers, Catherine Robbin. More information can be found here. 

Benjamin Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist. He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at benjaminstein.ca.

In my last column before the summer I promised to address the reluctance of audiences to attend performances of new music, citing the extreme example of one determined listener who vetted a concert over the phone in order to make sure nothing on the program was too modern.

This is a problem not just for choral concerts, but for new music in general. The quantity of words committed to paper on this subject is responsible for the demise of several large forests. In brief, the two opposing stances are:

1) Modern music feh. Why should I pay good money to hear something that sounds like a battalion of cats attacking a giant mutant chihuahua while a chorus of bull walruses sings the Nauruan national anthem backwards?

2) Modern music is the future, this piece in particular is pure genius, and everyone in the concert hall gets it except you. What is your problem? Why can’t you get with the program? Go away and listen to Bach’s Minuet in G on auto-repeat. If you get bored, listen to a can-can by Offenbach or something.

Okay, it’s not always so bad, but it’s pretty darn close. Keeping it brief, let me see if I can both give a bit of historical context and offer a solution to the problem.

1) During the last century, classically trained composers wanted to innovate, like most artists do.

2) Some innovators composed music that sounded unpleasant — torturous, in fact — to many listeners. Never ask why this happened. Believe me, you don’t want to know. If you hear a composer start to talk about it, run away.

3) Some other innovators wrote music that wasn’t quite so scary, but it still was odd enough to spook those who were used to Mozart, Tchaikovsky, etc. This stuff sometimes had key signatures, but a lot of people still found it nauseating.

4) But nobody cared anyhow, because as it turned out, you didn’t have to listen to modern music anymore to be all cultured and superior. You could listen to the Beatles (rock), John Coltrane (jazz), or non-Western classical music (“exotic” instruments and timbres) and still feel like you were a cut above. A lot of this music was just as intricate as the new classical stuff but sounded way nicer.

5) Over time it became clear that nobody wanted to listen to the most difficult new music except weird people and snobs. The composers grew up and had children, but their kids weren’t weird snobs and they didn’t like it either. Most of them got into hip-hop, actually.

6) Eventually composers got tired of only being listened to by snobby weirdos, and started writing music again that non-musicians — that is, most normal people — could like and appreciate.

7) Now we have to convince everyone that new music isn’t as bizarre as the stuff their grandparents hated. A lot of it isn’t. Really! In fact it’s pretty tame. Composers want to be your friends. So will you please come back and listen?

Now, you may go to a concert in which nice pleasant classical music by dead guys is played, and then the stupid musicians will throw in some new stuff as well. Sorry about that — we kind of like to mix it up. Please don’t leave. You will upset the composers’ mums, ’cause they are all still alive and their feelings get hurt when you walk out or throw things at their sons and daughters. But don’t worry — if you happen to get stuck at a concert with totally discordant music, you have two sure-fire methods of recourse:

1) Before the concert, watch (on YouTube) the episode of Star Trek: TNG in which Lieutenant Worf listens to Klingon opera (“Unification II,” season 5, 1991). Then pretend Klingon opera is the music you’re going to hear. Be brave like Worf and listen to it.

2) Think of scary movies. Actually, think of any movie in which bad things happen. Listen (on YouTube) to Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront (1954) and Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho (1960). Not so bad, right? Next time you’re at a new music concert, close your eyes and imagine that you’re being menaced by a lunatic or getting beat up by dockyard thugs. This will render the musical experience much more enjoyable.

I hope this solves the problem and encourages you to take a chance on the new stuff. If not, I’ll have no choice but to write about this subject again, but seriously this time. Trust me, you don’t want that. Now, on to the concerts.

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is an example of a composer whose work has depth, edge and substance, but has also found popular, mainstream appeal with many audiences — especially choral audiences, which can be quite a conservative bunch. Soundstreams Canada has long been a central champion of Pärt’s music in Canada, and their house choir, Choir 21, boasts some of the strongest choral singers in the region. This is a chance to hear this music masterfully executed.

The concert on October 1 will include the Canadian premieres of two Pärt works, Adam’s Lament and L’abbe Agathon, and the world premieres of two Canadian works, James Rolfe’s Open Road, and a new commission (written for a very special reason which will be revealed at the concert) by young Canadian-Estonian composer Riho Maimets. I do not know his work, but I am familiar with Rolfe, and I can assure wary concert-goers that this will certainly be a moving and delightful concert. If you are new to modern choral works, this is an excellent chance to experience composers and musicians working at the top of their game. Guest conductor Tõnu Kaljuste is one of the world’s great choral musicians.

Another notable choral visit takes place in October, but registration for the event is under way even as I write. American choral composer, arranger, author and conductor Alice Parker is coming for SING!, a three-day workshop and community songfest from October 25 to 27. Parker is a choral legend (now well into her ninth decade) who has devoted her life to choral music. During the weekend Parker will lead community singing, give a workshop on hymnody in worship, lecture at the University of Toronto, preach at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church and conduct a massed choir of over 200 singers in a grand finale concert. The gala finale will include a who’s who of Toronto choral groups: the University of Toronto MacMillan Singers, U of T Women’s Chamber Choir & Men’s Chorus, Exultate Chamber Singers, Orpheus Choir of Toronto, Cawthra Park Secondary School Chamber Choir and Yorkminister Park Baptist Church Choir.

The weekend’s events require no registration — this is an amazing opportunity for choral aficionados to watch or work with a master musician. The event is co-sponsored by Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, the Royal Canadian College of Organists and the Southern Ontario Chapter of the Hymn Society as well as by the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. For more info email the head of U of T’s choral program, hilary.apfelstadt@utoronto.ca.

Incidentally, Hilary Apfelstadt, as well as running choral activities at U of T, has further embraced Toronto’s choral culture by taking on the directorship of the Exultate Chamber Singers. One of Toronto’s top community choirs, established by John Tuttle (another choral legend), Exultate makes choral music at the highest level.

New music needs new singers and new energy, and there is always room for another choir in the city. This year choral fans can welcome the newly established Aslan Boys Choir and their artistic director Thomas Bell.

Targeted at boys aged 8 to 13, the choir’s mission statement is “to prepare boys for life and leadership through musical excellence and cultural enrichment.” Aslan is apparently still auditioning — if you have a child who enjoys choral singing, you can contact the choir at 416-859-7464 or aslanboyschoir@gmail.com to arrange an audition.

I would certainly encourage interested parties to find out more — chorus singing was a revelation to me at that age and opened up my awareness of both choral music and yes, modern composition.

I will be highlighting other modern works of the concert season in the months to come. A tip of the hat to west coast soprano Carolyn Sinclair for the Klingon opera solution to modern music. On with the show! 

Benjamin Stein is a Toronto tenor and lutenist.
He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com.
Visit his website at benjaminstein.ca.

In my last column I promised to address the reluctance of audiences to attend performances of new music, even to the point of vetting concerts over the phone to make sure nothing on the program is too modern.

One reader wrote in to observe that time often sifts through and discards the inferior music of past eras, leaving a core of proven masterworks that form the basis of performers’ standard repertoire; with a finite amount of time and resources for concert-going, it is reasonable to concentrate on works that have some guarantee of quality and durability.

I wrote back and pointed out that time was actually an unreliable source and judge of quality. Many composers whose work was neglected to various degrees after their deaths were revived by later musicians, found an audience, and now are considered important. Into this category fall Bach, Mahler, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, as well as composers popular with early music audiences such as Dowland, Gesualdo and Biber.

Hearing well-known works repeatedly can be both pleasurable and a way to a deeper understanding of these compositions. But there is great fun, satisfaction and real excitement in feeling that you are singing (or listening to) something new and unusual.

The reader and I agreed in a pleasant email exchange that an active, engaged audience was needed, to be receptive to musicians who champion both new and neglected works. Only with these kind of listeners can time and successive audiences find which composers speak to them most deeply.

For those interested in being part of a vanguard of new, varied and interesting choral projects, there are fascinating opportunities this July and August at Stratford Summer Music.

The festival, somewhat overshadowed in the past by the town’s renowned Shakespeare festival season, has in recent years emerged as a hub of innovative summer programming. This year, their focus is on choral music.

This year Stratford Summer Music is inviting interested choral singers of all ages, abilities and experience to participate in a series of events titled “We Sing the World – a Choral Symposium,” over the course of four days, July 18 to 21. The musicians leading rehearsals, panel discussions, concerts, workshops and lectures are a mixture of Canadian and international choral music experts. The festival’s two themes are the environment and world culture; the workshops and discussions will address how world culture and environmental concerns are influencing and shaping choral music in the new century.

Participants will form a chorus that will rehearse during the symposium and perform a concert at the end of the weekend. Registration information can be found at stratfordsummermusic.ca.

The festival’s programming is stylistically diverse, situating classical choral singing within the larger context of world music and modern vocal techniques. Concerts will include appearances by the famous Vienna Boys’ Choir (July 26 to 28); Johannesburg’s Mzansi Youth Choir (August 22 to 24); Anúna, the Irish national choir (as part of the choral symposium); and an August 4 concert by the Toronto Mass Choir, one of the city’s best gospel music ensembles.

The festival is also devoting a substantial part of the summer to an exploration of the work of legendary Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, perhaps the most internationally renowned Canadian composer alive. On July 18, the opening day of the choral symposium, Schafer celebrates his 80th birthday.

Schafer has been an iconoclast from the beginning, rebelling against the stultifying conventions of the classical concert paradigm from the 1960s onward, setting his music dramas in lakes and woodland locales. Schafer’s innovations seem prescient now, as young classical musicians are venturing away from the concert hall with increasing frequency and looking to bars, clubs and other non-traditional spaces to try to connect with audiences. (His Music for Wilderness Lake will be performed along the Avon River at 7am from July 19 to 21).

At the same time, there are strongly traditional elements in Schafer’s work that connect him to European Romantic strains in myth, opera and literature. His work often depicts metaphysical struggles between good and evil, light and dark. Sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is sometimes presented as a destabilizing, threatening force.

Activities focusing on Schafer’s work include an 80th birthday dinner July 18, an exhibition of hand-drawn scores opening July 17 (Schafer’s scores are notable for their unusual artistry and draftsmanship, incorporating visual imagery as well as traditional music notation), lectures, symposia and concerts.

Other concerts and festivals of note:

At the Elora Festival, there are many opportunities to see the Elora Festival Chorus, which is appearing in at least eight separate shows. Notable concerts with an anniversary theme are “Coronation: Crowning Glory” on July 20, which is a celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation, and a centenary celebration of the birth of Benjamin Britten on July 28.

The Tafelmusik choir and orchestra take part in a very intriguing blend of dance and music on June 21 and 22, as part of the Luminato Festival. The ensembles accompany choreographer Mark Morris’ interpretation of Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.

Handel’s setting combines John Milton’s two poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, in a metaphysical dialogue. L’Allegro (roughly, the lively one) is happy, active — something of a party animal, actually — and Il Penseroso (the introspective one) is pensive, ruminative, even a bit gloomy. The two poems are companion pieces that explore opposite approaches to life, spirituality and sensation.

Handel and his librettist interspersed the two poems, creating a dramatic tension between the classic Eros and Thanatos principles. Recognizing that whichever text came last would get the final word on the argument, they added new text and a third character, il Moderato, that attempts to mediate and find a middle path between the two extremes.

Whether this succeeds as a dialectical synthesis is a matter of opinion. The new text comes down rather on the side of il Penseroso, and l’Allegro — whose approach strikes me as more fun — is treated as a bit of an unruly teenager in need of curbing. But this was very much in harmony with the aesthetic of the time, which was ultimately about balance, grace and proportion in all things. Handel’s music mines the text and finds many opportunities for word painting and expressiveness. The show also incorporates the images of poet/draftsman/painter William Blake and has been a hit since its premiere in 1988.

The Kokoro Singers, based in the southern Ontario region, perform “Earth, Air, Fire, Water” on June 9 in Guelph and on June 15 in Dundas. The concerts feature works by Hatfield, Whitacre, Ticheli and Thompson.

On June 15 the Cabbagetown Classical Youth Choir performs its annual spring concert, which features excerpts from Mozart operas and other works. The choir’s mandate is to give singing opportunities to children of families in difficult economic circumstances, and they are soliciting funding to help with this worthy goal. The concert is the finale of an operatic workshop for youth, and features a special appearance by legendary Canadian bass-baritone Gary Relyea.

From England, the Bradfield College Tour Choir is visiting Canada. This youth choir has performed all over Europe, and in the US as well. Their musical director, Anne Wright, is originally from Toronto. They are singing in Niagara Falls on July 4, and in Toronto on July 3 and 6. The July 3 concert takes place at Casa Loma.

Hamilton’s Arcady Singers sing several concerts as part of the Brott Music Festival, which takes place in venues in Burlington, Hamilton and Ancaster. On June 20 they will be featured in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; on August 1 they take part in a concert performance of Verdi’s Aida; and on August 15 the festival’s grand finale is Mahler’s Symphony of A Thousand, which is really an oratorio for choir and soloists.

On July 28 the Hart House Singers perform “The REAL Glee: Songs made famous by Yale, Harvard and Hart House Glee Clubs.” Glees — part songs for small ensembles — have been around for centuries. The modern high school glee club is a mixture of standard choir and show choir, a kind of choreographed choir/music theatre hybrid. But up to the middle of the 20th century, glee club music was a collegiate phenomenon with a particular aesthetic and style. It combined folk songs, school songs, 19th century parlour music and archaic sounding Latin lyrics in a manner that has almost disappeared. This concert — which will also feature modern songs that might be more familiar to the Glee television audience — is a chance to revisit and enjoy this charming repertoire.

The Elmer Iseler Singers appear in Parry Sound at the Festival of the Sound on July 18, in a mixed concert of popular Canadian music that includes Srul Irving Glick’s The Hour Has Come. This tuneful and accessible piece, premiered by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir in 1985, has become something of a Canadian choral standard. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir also appears at the festival on August 11, singing Orff’s Carmina Burana.

Speaking of unconventional locations, the Westben Festival (various dates between June 8 and August 4) takes place in Campbellford, which is in the mid-Ontario region of Northumberland County. All the concerts take place at the Westben Barn. Westben Youth and Teen Choruses will be taking part in a version of Bizet’s Carmen July 4 to 7, a concert of selections from Broadway musicals June 9 and a performance of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy June 29.

That’s all, folks. Enjoy the music and have a great summer! 

Ben Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist. He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at benjaminstein.ca.

More than any other musician before Wagner, Beethoven exemplified the idea of composer as spiritual leader, the artist as visionary genius who compels the support of performers, teachers and historians to realize his dreams and ideas.

Beethoven is an approachable genius, though. His achievements are leavened and humanized by his vulnerability, his awkwardness bordering on misanthropy and his loneliness. Through the insights we garner from his letters and notebooks we are witness to his very human struggles with friends, family and colleagues, to his frantic rewriting and experimentation with his own work.

With few exceptions, every note of Beethoven’s oeuvre feels like something is at stake. To be involved in a performance of his work sometimes seems, in a small way, like sharing in his struggles. As much as any of his works, the Missa Solemnis — performed in Toronto on May 15 by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir — exemplifies this phenomenon.

It’s generally accepted that Beethoven did not write sympathetically for voices. He was certainly not alone in this. In many instances Bach appeared to think of the voice as an instrument with a human being attached. Many of both composers’ solo and choral vocal lines, beautifully wrought, are only possible to execute faithfully as long as the singer does not have to breathe for minutes on end.

The choral section of Beethoven’s famous Ninth Symphony is a half-hour long vocal rollercoaster ride that taxes both the solo quartet and the choir with sustained high tessitura writing, dynamic extremes that require skilled vocal control, long instrumental-style passages with no room to breathe, all combined with the challenge of being heard over the wall of sound created by brass, winds, strings and tympani.

The Missa Solemnis is the same thing, multiplied by three.

It is the extreme nature of the vocal writing in the Missa Solemnis that makes it especially challenging. Beethoven’s cruelly high melodic lines and virtuosic instrumental writing were well beyond the capabilities of the players and singers of the time, and the first performance of the work (in Russia, 1824) was famously ragged. It was not published in its entirety until after his death.

But in writing music that outstripped the capabilities of the musicians of the time, Beethoven founded the idea of the composition as artistic and spiritual summit, to which musicians must aspire and strive. Wagner and Stravinsky would continue this tradition, forcing musicians to develop new technical prowess, matching their abilities to new sounds that the world had never experienced. The Italian verismo vocal training of the late 19th and early 20th centuries founded a tradition of vocal heft that could deliver the heaviness of sound required by late Beethoven composition and the music that followed in its wake.

The Missa Solemnis is infused with the same spirit as the Ninth Symphony and other late period Beethoven — a musical expression of faith locked in combat with doubt. Extremes of mood convey an almost desperate sense of Beethoven’s desire to connect to the world around him.

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is perhaps the only group in the region that can marshal the forces for such a mammoth work. A large-scale choir in the 19th century mode, the TMC is well equipped to be able to handle the technical elements of the work and to have a fighting chance to avoid being swamped by the orchestra. This is a massive undertaking for any ensemble and a chance to hear it live is not to be missed.

The Missa Solemnis is a kind of apotheosis of the European mass tradition, but innumerable other mass settings exist to cater to all tastes. A homegrown Canadian example that draws on one important strain in our history is the Celtic Mass for the Sea written by Scott MacMillan, a legendary folk musician from the East Coast. For their “Celtic Tide” concert on June 1 the VOCA Chorus has assembled a kind of Canadian Celtic supergroup, experienced and renowned players who bring their deep knowledge of Irish folk tradition to the music.

The VOCA Chorus, led by veteran conductor and pianist Jenny Crober, has made a specialty of combining classical works with folk and popular elements. Their Celtic-themed concerts have been increasing in popularity each year, and tickets for this current concert are reportedly in high demand.

Celtic Mass for the Sea was commissioned by the CBC in 1988 and has garnered many performances since then. The work blends the exuberant nature of Celtic rhythms with the resonance of the ancient mass text. Macmillan is planning to travel to Toronto to attend the performance and will give a pre-concert lecture on the work.

Further on the subject of modern Canadian works: I took part in a concert recently where the hapless ticket seller was quizzed about the nature of the music involved. The potential concert-goer wanted to make certain that whatever works were on the program would not be too “modern.” Assurances that the most modern composer of the evening died in 1986 were barely sufficient.

Yes, this happened. It’s common enough, really, so there’s no point in being all snobby about it. Many people actively fear contemporary music, and I’ll address that in depth in future columns. But folks, your friends, neighbours and colleagues are exploring new works in their various choirs every week. All of them, or at least most of them, make it back after rehearsal with their sanity intact. If they can do it, so can you. Here are a few concerts to consider this month.

This year’s celebrations of Ruth Watson Henderson’s 80th birthday continue with a concert of her works by the Oriana Women’s Choir on May 25. Read my appreciation of Watson Henderson’s work in my October 2012 column.

On May 4 and 5, Waterloo’s DaCapo Chamber Choir performs “Leonardo Dreams,” a concert featuring works by the ensemble’s conductor Leonard Enns, fellow Canadian Glenn Buhr and American Eric Whitacre, all of whom write very well for choir and whose works have enjoyed repeated success with audiences.

Enns’ and Watson Henderson’s works are also featured in a concert by Barrie’s Lyrica Chamber Choir on May 25, along with works by Healy, Estacio and Mozetich.

On May 24 and 25, another woman’s chorus, Etobicoke’s Harmony Singers, performs an all-Canadian program of popular works, with songs by k.d.lang, Joni Mitchell, Barenaked Ladies and Michael Bublé. On June 2 the VIVA! Youth Singers perform Dean Burry’s A Medieval Bestiary, which is a cantata specially written for children’s voices. Burry’s work is both well wrought and appealing, and ought to be a very good introduction to classically styled music theatre for children.

On the subject of youth choirs, I recently had the pleasure of doing some vocal coaching for the Bach Children’s Chorus. It was an education to watch conductor Linda Beaupré — as experienced a choral musician as we have in Toronto — work with the next generation of choral singers. Her Bach Chamber Youth Choir, performing on May 11 with the Bach Children’s Chorus, is a rare youth ensemble catering to mid- and older teens interested in choral singing.

Finally, a free concert: the Caribbean Chorale of Toronto performs at the Church of St. Stephen on May 5. 

Ben Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist. He ca e contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at www.benjaminstein.ca.