Is Toronto Summer Music (TSM) going to be an excuse for you to hang out with friends? It was a question that came up early in this late April 2017 conversation with TSO concertmaster, New Orford String Quartet violinist and U of T associate professor Jonathan Crow, who was in our studio to speak with us mostly about his new role as the third artistic director of TSM. (WholeNote publisher David Perlman and managing editor Paul Ennis are asking the questions.)

To hear the full conversation with Jonathan Crow click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts for the entire list.

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In the well-known Edward Lear nonsense poem from which Ruth Howard’s unorthodox Toronto community arts organization derives its name, the Jumblies set off to sea in a Sieve, less than than adequately provisioned, and thirsty for adventure. On their return some twenty years later, everyone remarks on how they’ve grown. In this conversation Howard traces Jumblies’ journey from its early roots in the Community Play movement, to their May-June 2017 Touching Ground Festival which, while true to the company’s twenty year tradition of professional caliber neighbourhood-based art-making, breaks new ground both for Jumblies and offers new perspectives, and hope, for traditional arts organizations seeking fundamentally new ways of engaging with the communities in which they are based.

To hear the full conversation with Ruth Howard click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts for the entire list.

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"Good luck with the editing” was almost the first thing world-renowned Canadian countertenor Daniel Taylor said to Bryson Winchester, WholeNote podcast recording technician, when we sat down for this particular conversation. And indeed, pinning the mercurial Taylor down to one topic of conversation is a tough task, as his innate musicality takes him deeper into teaching and music directing, along with an intensive concert and recording schedule remarkable for its range, both in terms of geography and repertoire.

As it turned out, we managed to touch on several topics of interest.

To hear the full conversation with Daniel Taylor click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts for the entire list.

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Toronto-based “lifelong theatre person” Jennifer (Jenny) Parr works as a director, fight director, stage manager and coach, and is equally crazy about movies and musicals.

So reads the little bio on our website at the end of her recent online concert report for The WholeNote on the Toronto opening night of the new musical Sousatzka.

It was the “fight director” angle that provided the spark for this conversation taking place at this particular point in time, but by the end of our chat I’d say we’d at least touched on all the aspects of her life alluded to in that little bio.  

To hear the full conversation with Jenny Parr click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcastsfor the entire list.

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Russell Braun dropped by our studio on March 2, just back in town after his umpteenth Mendelssohn Elijah in Ottawa (around two and a half decades after a prescient Robert Cooper first picked him out of a University of Toronto student lineup to perform the role). “No-one in their 20s should do it,” he says now, with a laugh. Unsurprisingly for those who know him, with rehearsals for Louis Riel due to start March 19, he wasn’t exactly planning to rest up. Both of his sons, he told me, are heavily involved in baseball so he’s heading off the next day on a side trip to their respective spring-training camps in Florida, “en route” to London for a March 13 performance of Senza Sangue (Without Blood), a one-act opera by Peter Eötvös, based on a novella of the same name by Alessandro Baricco. His character in Senza is in his 70s, he informed us.

To hear the full conversation with Russell Braun click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcastsfor the entire list.

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Stewart Goodyear returns to discuss upcoming programs, performing and more.

To hear the full conversation with Stewart Goodyear click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts for the entire list.

Or click here to download the podcast. (Right click and "Save as..." if it's playing directly in your browser.)