Beat Columns (Live Music)

Just 8760 little hours ago, in December of last year, most of us were hunkering down, keeping safe, and preparing for a very different winter than we’d enjoyed in years past. Visits home were cancelled; stockings were half-heartedly stuffed; home-office chairs swivelled disconsolately from Zoom meetings to Zoom cocktail hours. This year, however, things are looking just a little bit brighter: vaccination rates are up, case rates are down, and – though the threat of the pandemic looms, ever present on the periphery – it is looking as though we may indeed have a more conventional (and decidedly more sociable) holiday season. 

As of December 16, we will officially be at the five-month mark of music being back in Toronto and environs in the kinds of venues I usually cover in this column. For some audience members, this has meant five months of being back in venues, watching musicians return to the stage after a lengthy intermission, and witnessing restaurants, bars and concert halls sort through the thorny logistics of making COVID-safe adjustments, training new staff and, often, enacting new payment policies to ensure a more equitable and fair disbursement of funds to musicians. For other audience members, the return to live music has been slower, whether because of worries related to COVID transmission, a change in lifestyle, or – as has happened for so many people – a move, enabled by a shift to remote work, from a dense urban area to somewhere with more affordable housing options and more accessible outdoor spaces. 

Whatever the case may be, there are quite a few exciting shows happening in December. If holiday shows are your thing, there are a number of options, including the Kensington Holiday Bash (December 10, Grossman’s Tavern), A Charlie Brown Christmas and Castro’s Christmas Party (both December 12, Castro’s Lounge), Tom Nagy’s Christmas Experience (December 17, The Jazz Room), and the Jason White Christmas Special (December 18, also at The Jazz Room).

Thanks to Soundstreams and their commitment to programming Canadian music, there will be a chance to hear two works by the celebrated composer Claude Vivier on November 19, 2021, during the broadcast of a livestream concert event.

Vivier’s musical influence in Toronto stretches back to the late 1970s when his works were regularly performed by Arraymusic, and has been ongoing ever since, even though his tragic death in 1983 put an end to the creation of new works by this celebrated composer. The upcoming concert was recorded in Koerner Hall and features two works by Vivier: Love Songs (1977) and Hymnen an die Nacht (1975), as well as the world premiere of Oceano Nox by Christopher Mayo, composed as a tribute to Vivier. 

On November 20, the Shaw Festival’s winter season hits its full stride, with the openings of both its holiday offerings: A Christmas Carol, and Irving Berlin’s full-scale musical extravaganza Holiday Inn.

In 2019, Holiday Inn was notable as the first musical to be programmed as part of the Shaw’s winter holiday season. It was also notable as the directing debut of one of Canada’s most versatile theatre artists: actor, playwright, teacher, and now director, Kate Hennig.  

The production was such a popular success that it was the natural choice to bring back this year with the same creative team, and many of the original cast, to celebrate the reopening of the theatres as well as the holiday season.

One-woman show. A listening room. A melding of narration and sound-making. Personal and universal. A monologue but also very much a dialogue with the musical tradition. I’m seated at a picnic table in Leslie Grove Park with Toronto-based soprano Zorana Sadiq, trying to tease out what her new creation opening at Crow’s Theatre on November 9 is going to be like.

For almost anyone with an internet connection, streaming services are a hugely popular source for entertainment, requiring only a compatible device to access a near-infinite variety of entertainment. Classical music occupies a miniscule slice of the market, but medici.tv and a few other, smaller services, nevertheless present a wide range of performances and documentaries for enthusiasts everywhere, performed by an equally wide range of musicians, orchestras and ensembles. In December last year in this column, I wrote that early music specialists, The Toronto Consort, had joined the party by launching Early Music TV (earlymusic.tv) – the Consort’s response to external circumstances, as the global pandemic ravaged performing arts organizations around the world.

I recently connected, twice, with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir’s recently appointed artistic director, Jean-Sébastien Vallée (the eighth conductor in the choir’s 127-year history). The first time was on September 20, when I visited a TMC rehearsal; the second on October 4, for a chat in The WholeNote office. Both visits were on Mondays, because, at time of writing anyway, Mondays are Vallée’s only Toronto day.

The air was electric with anticipation as a top-notch staged-concert production of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Goldman’s iconic musical Follies at Koerner Hall on the weekend of October 16/17 signalled the return of indoor live musical theatre to town. For most of us this was the first indoor live performance we had seen since lockdown back in March of 2020. 

There are hopeful signs of live-music life at the RCM’s Koerner Hall. On November 27, virtuoso pianist Stewart Goodyear, joined by the Penderecki String Quartet, perform the world premiere of his piano quintet based on themes from Beethoven, after which Goodyear takes on Beethoven’s monumental Symphony No. 9, in Franz Liszt’s transcription for solo piano and voices, accompanied by members of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, soprano Jonelle Sills, mezzo-soprano Beste Kalender, tenor Zachary Rioux and baritone Korin Thomas-Smith, all current or recent students of The Royal Conservatory. I caught up with Goodyear for an email conversation that touched on his response to the pandemic, his relationship to Beethoven and how he is feeling about his first public appearance in Toronto since the pandemic.

The crunch of a crisp brown leaf underneath one’s foot; the chill of the wind as it comes off the lake; a Conservative premier embroiled in a minor controversy about his comments regarding immigration and labour. Though the pandemic is far from over, it certainly seems as though Southern Ontario is getting back to its typical autumn rhythm. 

Things are much different, however, than they were at this time last year: with a proof-of-vaccination system in place, steadily declining case numbers, and capacity limits gradually being lifted for a variety of indoor business spaces, we may be forgiven for permitting ourselves a sense of cautious optimism. It is a great relief to be able to contemplate the idea of meeting friends for a drink and a show without feeling an immediate sense of imminent dread (although I suppose this is somewhat dependent on the show and the friends in question).

Back in my M.A. thesis-writing days in the late 1980s at the University of Warwick where I was studying English and European Renaissance Drama, I latched onto the phrase “necessary theatre” to describe a kind of theatre that is calling out to be created, that needs an audience, a shared community, in order to enable us to see the world around us in a new way – so that we are inspired to react, to do something to make the world a better place. 

A decade or so later, in 1999, the phrase took on an entirely different resonance, as the title of a book, The Necessary Theatre, by Sir Peter Hall, which to this day stands as a powerful manifesto for state support, rather than private patronage, of theatre as an art form. Left to its own devices, he argued, if theatre has to support itself it will stagnate, falling back on the tried and true. (Not that state support is, in and of itself, necessarily a guarantee that stagnation will not ensue, particularly when that support is directed primarily toward large organizations competing for resources, who must meet budget targets for what they do.) 

What is equally necessary for the very best theatre to happen, Hall argues, is for permanent companies of actors and technicians, secure in their premises, to feel they have permission to push the boundaries of their art.