Beat Columns (Live Music)

Renowned neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin paused as he sang the word “strings” and looked over the neck of his guitar to the audience in the University of Toronto’s Desautels Hall. The air felt charged. Instinctively, we knew what he wanted. For a brief moment, many of the two-hundred-plus gathered began singing along, some harmonizing at the end of a song we’d all just heard for the first time.

There is a particular joy to watching music theatre, arising from the story being told in both words and music: a natural exuberance, another level of emotion, music as an international language that can carry us further than words alone can do. The Grand Theatre in London understands and celebrates this, giving us a 2024/25 season, under the title “A Time for Play,” with even more music theatre content than usual, anchored by four major musical productions as well as the always sold out Jeans ‘n Classics concert series.

Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Dark Tales: On November 9, right after you thought all the pumpkins, goblins and spider webs had been put away for another season, Toronto composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and New Music Concerts will present an innovative evening of ghost stories, with a new work entitled Dark Tales: An Immersive Journey into Music, Light and Legend. During a recent conversation, Ho described this new work, commissioned by Duo Concertante, as a music drama in five movements based on five stories from Tom Dawe’s book An Old Man’s Winter Night.

Such is the nature of usually writing about shows ahead of time that I don’t often enough get to go to the shows I write about. On August 3, however, I travelled to Stratford Summer Music to take in Gregory Oh’s performance of Lessons in Failure. I had interviewed him back in May for the summer issue of The WholeNote and was quite taken by his stories of making mistakes during key moments of his performance career.

Musical Flights takes the COC on the road.

In a canny move, the Canadian Opera Company takes their orchestra, music director Johannes Debus and four soloists on the road for five concerts previewing the COC’s upcoming fall and winter productions: Nabucco, Faust, Madama Butterfly and Eugene Onegin. Gripping stuff, but not exactly light summer fare, so the performances also include a generous sprinkling of Broadway, from shows such as Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, West Side Story and The Sound of Music.

When I was first contemplating applying to the University of Toronto’s Jazz Studies program, there were many factors that made the prospect appealing: the downtown location, the stellar faculty, the impressive (and at times intimidating) skill level of the student body. Nothing, however, quite captured the allure of the program as much as the promise of the weekly small-ensemble performances at The Rex.

Three remarkably dissimilar music theatre productions, all in one place and performed by one company, have been thrilling audiences since previews in the spring – at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

One day in the golden late ’80s in Hong Kong, almost past the reaches of Elaine Choi's memory, she balanced on her mother's piano bench. She was about three years old. Her mother helped one of her small fingers find middle C. The note resonated through the black upright Yamaha, as it did for the many piano students who filled Choi’s childhood home. Choi's own lessons with her mother turned out to be the beginning of an impressive international music career bridging East and West. But not as a performance soloist. Instead, Choi found success in one of music's most collaborative genres – as a conductor for choral music.

New Brunswick violinist Katya Poplyansky first participated as a fellow in the TSM emerging artist program in the summer of 2018 and returned the following summer.

If I were talking only to long-time readers of this magazine right now, I would suggest you do some online homework before carrying on with reading this story, by heading off to one particular spot on the Toronto Summer Music (TSM) website. Once you arrived, I’d ask you to scroll your way up through the two lists of musicians you’ll find there – the alumni of the TSM’s two Academy programs (chamber and vocal music) from 2012 to 2023. (The lists are easy to find even if you don’t have a link: just go to “Alumni” under the tab “Academy.”)