Steel pan player, composer and educator Joy Lapps-Lewis.You might ask yourself, “Is it really necessary to have a festival specifically for women in percussion?”

The answer, as it turns out, is a resounding “yes.”

Tracy Jenkins, co-artistic director of Lula Music and Arts Centre, had heard from several percussionists and drummers that there are still a lot of barriers for women who want to become professional percussionists. In response, in 2017 she co-founded Lula’s Women in Percussion festival—a series of concerts and workshops celebrating local and international women percussionists.

The festival’s second edition took place this September 26-30, presented in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum, Small World Music and Emerging Young Artists and featuring percussionists with roots in Brazil, Jamaica, Venezuela, Cuba, India, Korea, Japan and First Nations. The festival is shaping up to be a biennial event.

“Women are much more accepted these days as guitarists and piano players and, of course, singers, but they’re still not being encouraged—or sometimes are even overtly discouraged—from drumming,” says Jenkins. “For various reasons, drums are still viewed by some as mens’ territory. We wanted to create a space to present the work and have an atmosphere of celebration and include everyone, whatever gender they identify as.”

And they succeeded: the packed opening night of the five-day festival last month showcased four diverse acts—which included lots of supportive men both onstage and in the audience—and had a fun, celebratory vibe.

Y Josephine, a Venezuelan singer-songwriter and percussionist, opened the festival on September 26 with a couple of solo covers on cajon and voice (including, aptly, Miss Celie’s Blues, aka Sister), then teamed up with Carla Dias on bass and Anita Graciano on drums for a couple of originals.

Next, Joy Lapps-Lewis took the stage. The sight of a 37-weeks pregnant woman playing steel pan drums and leading a band of some of the most in-demand jazz players in the country seemed especially fitting for this event. Lapps-Lewis played shimmery melodies and fierce solos, while Rich Brown (bass), Jeremy Ledbetter (keys) and husband Larnell Lewis (drums) supported on a captivating set of original songs inspired by the women in her life.

Vulva Beats is a new percussion-forward eight-piece band and brainchild of Aline Morales, who has been a strong presence in the Toronto Brazilian music scene for many years. Morales said she started the group “to provide a multidisciplinary space for women to create and co-create.” The band’s set was a groovy mix of reimagined Brazilian, pop and hip-hop covers, and featured performances by Carlie Howell, Suzanne Roberts Smith, Chellz Gemmaria and Angela Vargas.

I asked Morales about how she came up with the name of the group; she explained that she felt that nothing better represented their cause. “Being a woman or identifying as a woman, we are emphasizing how capable we are in any industry. We are also honouring where we came from!”

The finale of the night was a group of Toronto-based samba drummers (mostly from the group T.Dot Batu led by Pato Irie Martinez) which featured Adriana Portela, who was brought in from Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where she is the musical director of the region’s first all-women drum band (profiled in this New York Times article). Portela lent a high-energy presence to the percussion-driven samba-reggae tunes, along with the always-charismatic Cibelle Iglesias and Jerusa Leao, who sang a few popular Brazilian tunes by women songwriters to round out a fun set.

Workshops were a big component of the festival, and several were offered free over the weekend at Lula, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum and Emerging Young Artists. Improvisation in Indian traditions, cajon and Brazilian samba-reggae were among the offerings.

I also caught some of the Japanese taiko demonstration on Saturday, September 28, led by Aki Takahashi and featuring a performance by the Japanese folk ensemble, Ten Ten. Taiko is a form of Japanese ensemble drumming, traditionally used in villages and temples as a means of communication in festivals, rituals, prayer and war. Highly physically demanding, taiko (which means “drum” in Japanese but can also refer to the music that the ensembles play) has been the purview of men until relatively recently.

“Taiko for women is really contemporary,” Takahashi said. “Normally there are only one or two taiko players in a village and they are usually old men who represent the village and community to the gods, and women are not allowed to touch or play the drums.”

As taiko has become more prevalent in North America, so too has ensembles where women form the majority of the members. In some cases, women’s taiko ensembles have served as a way to subvert the gendered expectations of the genre.

“People are learning that women bring a feminine quality to the art form,” explains Takahashi. “They can play with as much volume and speed as men, but they do it using technique and finesse rather than muscle.”

Lula Music and Arts Centre’s 2019 Women in Percussion festival ran from September 26-30 in Toronto.

Cathy Riches is a self-described Toronto-based recovering singer and ink slinger.

A performance by Caroline Laurin-Beaucage at Union Station. Photo credit: Thomas Payette.Fall for Dance North (FFDN) is celebrating its fifth anniversary in Toronto this October 2 to 6, and enjoying a stronger presence and larger following than ever before. 

If this is your first time coming across this festival, that isn’t surprising, as it was on the fringes of many people’s awareness in its early years and has only recently received greater attention – both for its goals of making dance as available and accessible as possible, and for its innovative and exciting programming.

At the heart of the festival are three mainstage programs showcasing various companies, choreographers, and dancers from around the world, many with live music accompaniment. Two programs alternate at Meridian Hall (formerly the Sony Centre), each with Canadian and international content, and embracing a wealth of different styles.

Program One is the most international, combining companies from New Zealand, Brazil and Denmark as well as Canada’s Toronto Dance Theatre, and all (except the TDT piece) Canadian or North American premieres.

Program Two is all Canadian, apart from the Kuchipudi (classical South Asian) dance style of Indian choreographer Shantala Shivalingappa. The Canadian works are an eclectic mix: a FFDN commission from acclaimed street dance artist Caroline “Lady C” Fraser with live music by re.verse; the National Ballet of Canada performing one of their signature short ballets by choreographer William Forsythe, with the National Ballet Orchestra playing the Schubert score live; and another FFDN commission from Montreal-based Anne Plamondon titled “Fiddle Embrace,” featuring live music and students from the Ryerson School of Performance.

At Ryerson Theatre is Program Three, showcasing Indigenous dance from around the world, including Australia’s Jasmin Sheppard, Taiwan’s Bulareyaung Dance Company, the New Zealand Dance Company and Canada’s Northfoot Movement/Cody Berry.

The festival also features free programming at Union Station. This begins with open studio rehearsals from September 23 to 25 of two of the works being presented later on the mainstage, and continues October 3 to 4 with an experimental piece by Caroline Laurin-Beucage from Montreal, which anyone can come along and watch for as long as they choose. To finish off – and to fully involve anyone who wants to literally experimentally dip their toe into the world of dance – is The Big Social, a full day of free dance classes in Union Station’s newly renovated west wing, hosted in partnership with Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, Lindy Hop Revolution, and Bulent & Lina Tango; this sounds like great fun.

Tickets for the mainstage shows are $15, and programming at Union Station is completely free.   There is also a rich program of masterclasses, pre- and post-performance talks, and an International Presenters Program that connects local artists and companies with a network of international programmers, producers and presenters. 

Excited by all I have heard and read about FFDN and wanting to know more, I spoke with founding artistic director Ilter Ibrahimof.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited.

WN: How did you come to co-found Fall for Dance North in Toronto?

II: In 2013 and 2014, while I was living in Montreal, I had the pleasure of acting as an artistic advisor to the Fall for Dance Festival in New York (where I used to live). I always loved the festival's model and the excitement that it creates for the art form of dance. I thought, we should have a Canadian edition of the same event! And I thought that it should happen in Toronto, because looking at the dance ecology in Canada, it was clear that Toronto was the city that had the most potential to support a truly international dance festival. During a meeting with the Sony Centre's programming team in the winter of 2013, I impulsively proposed the idea, and to my delight and surprise they said yes...and they were dead serious about it. We presented our inaugural festival in 2015 (which is when I officially moved to Toronto) and are so happy to be celebrating the fifth anniversary this year.

WN: What makes FFDN unique among other dance festivals?

II: I'm proud to say that our festival is one of the most diverse, affordable and accessible dance events anywhere in the world. Because we present mixed evenings with a variety of dance styles at the highest quality we can find, you see audiences that come to see a certain company get exposed to many others, which helps them develop a broader taste. Not to mention, they get to sit side by side and make friends with people whose cultural experiences and interests are very different than theirs.

WN: How are the curatorial decisions made? As part of that decision-making process, how do you make sure you know about new and emerging Canadian choreographers and composers so that you can commission new works?

II: Myself and the rest of our programming team travel extensively and attend as many performances as possible throughout the year, to be able to keep our thumb on the pulse of the dance world in Canada and the rest of the world. Over the many years I've been working in the dance field, I was lucky to develop an extensive network of colleagues that I regularly connect with, to share ideas and find ways to work together to make presentations and tours happen. As an artistic director, of course at the end of the day I need to listen to my gut feeling and make the best instinctual decisions possible.

WN: Why do you think it is so important to make dance accessible to as many people as possible?

II: Everybody in the world knows how to move. Dance is in all of us. It's an art form that has the ability to connect on a universal level and be relevant to all cultures. It is a unifying force that I believe has the power to heal and change people's hearts and minds. But to produce and present professional dance productions is a very expensive business. Our festival team works very hard to break the price barrier and offer our signature $15/any seat for any performance. 

The New Zealand Dance Company. Photo credit: John McDermott.WN: Of all the events in the festival this year, are there any in particular that you would recommend for someone new to the dance world?

II: This is a difficult question! Of course I would recommend them to see everything. And chances are, they can probably afford to do that. That being said, I'm really excited about the world Indigenous program that we are presenting at the Ryerson Theatre, with companies from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan.

WN: Do you see FFDN expanding further in the future, perhaps moving out to more locations around the city, or around the country?

II: At the moment we are concentrating on gradual growth in Toronto. We started with only three evenings at Sony Centre in our first year, and this year we are in two theatres presenting seven performances (Meridian Hall and Ryerson Theatre), which means almost 17,000 tickets on offer! Then there is our free programming at Union Station, which reaches many more thousands. We have plans to expand further in the near future, but we are trying to do it thoughtfully and carefully. It's been wonderful to create a truly international dance festival right here in Toronto that we can all be proud of.

Fall For Dance North runs October 2 to 6, 2019, at Meridian Hall, Ryerson Theatre, and Union Station, Toronto. For details and ticket information, please see www.ffdnorth.com.

Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director, and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare, and new Canadian plays.

A young boy watches a relaxed performance at the TSO. Photo credit: Jag Gundu.Printer’s gremlins, as they are called (although the glitch in question was mine, not our printer’s) came to play on the otherwise GORGEOUS cover of our 25th-season-opening September issue. “MUSIC AND HEALTH: Relaxed Performances Bring Barriers Down,” proclaimed the middle of the three teasers at the foot of the page. But as several readers have discovered, and pointed out, you will search the current magazine in vain for a story with that title or on that topic.

The closest fit to the title is Art of Song columnist Lydia Perović’s story in the issue, “Mysterious Barricades and Systemic Barriers,” page 40. That story starts out as an interview with soprano Monica Whicher about the Toronto contribution to a string of coast-to-coast one-hour concerts, all titled Mysterious Barricades, which took place this past September 14 on the final day of World Suicide Prevention Week. You can find the full 16-hour livestream of the event, along with videos of the individual concerts, here.

And the “barriers” in the second half of Perović’s title refer to the obstacles faced by musicians (along with many other participants in “the gig economy”) in need of systematic, affordable therapy of one kind or another. And those barriers, unlike those referred to in the optimistic teaser on our September cover, show few signs of coming down.

All that being said, you can stop searching in vain through the current issue for an item about how “relaxed performance is bringing barriers down,” because you won’t find it. Yet.

The story in question, by our Music and Health feature writer Vivien Fellegi, will appear in the upcoming October issue of the magazine. The story grew out of Fellegi’s attendance this past April 27 at a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert titled “Let’s Dance,” conducted by Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, a veteran of the movement. “Relaxed Performance,” as the term is used in Fellegi’s upcoming story, refers to performances designed specifically with neurodiverse audiences in mind – and in many cases, involves making live music events less prohibitive for people with autism spectrum disorders, sensory and communication disorders, learning disabilities, or anyone who wants a more casual concert experience. 

It was the TSO’s first foray into the area, but will not be its last. Already they have announced two such performances in the upcoming season (Feb 22 and May 24), and “Relaxed Performance” is even included as its own search category in the orchestra’s 2019/20 season concert listings. Having failed to honour the promise on our September cover that Fellegi’s Relaxed Performance story was within, it would be an equal disservice to steal its thunder here. It will be worth the wait. 

I confess that before the concert that served as the catalyst for Fellegi’s story this past spring, I was only dimly conscious of the term “Relaxed Performance” as an emerging practice. Since being made aware, I’ve seen it popping up all over! Which seems like a very good thing. 

Here, in no particular order, are four examples:

YPT (Young People’s Theatre) has two relaxed performances in every run. Looking just at their next two shows: for A Million Billion Pieces, these performances will be Wednesday, December 4 at 10:30am, and Sunday, December 8 at 2pm; and for The Adventures of Pinocchio they will be Friday, December 13 at 10:15am and Saturday, December 14 at 2:30pm.

Banff International String Quartet Competition, in partnership with Autism Calgary and Xenia Concerts, presented a relaxed concert on August 31 at Calgary’s Indefinite Arts Centre at the close of this year’s competition, by 2016 Competition winners the Rolston Quartet.

Soulpepper theatre company has had one relaxed performance already this season (Betrayal, September 15), and another two have been scheduled for the upcoming run of Peter Pan (December 19 at 11am and December 22 at 1pm).

The National Ballet of Canada will present a relaxed performance of YOU dance, the company’s community engagement program, at the Betty Oliphant Theatre this Saturday, September 21, at 5:30pm.

In closing, a request: if you are aware of other examples of relaxed performance opportunities, either recent or coming up this season, please let us know at editorial@thewholenote.com. That way we can participate, more systematically, in the process of raising awareness not just of the barriers, but to the ways they are coming down.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

banannaJessica Ackerley (left)On August 23, guitarist Jessica Ackerley released A New Kind of Water, a quartet album that features saxophonist Sarah Manning, bassist Mat Muntz and drummer Stephen Boegehold. Recorded at BC Studio in Brooklyn, A New Kind of Water was mixed by homonymous studio founder Martin Bisi. BC Studio has been the studio of choice for a wide variety of projects, from Sonic Youth’s album EVOL to the Herbie Hancock song “Rockit” to work by John Zorn and more. The connective tissue through all of these recordings is a certain kind of gritty aesthetic, a frank musical realism that is reflected – literally, in an acoustic sense – by the cavernous, unfinished walls of the studio’s live room.

While working with Bisi and recording in BC Studio proved to be integral components of the album, A New Kind of Water is the culmination of years of music-making and career growth. Ackerley has been based in New York since 2011; she first moved to Brooklyn, but now resides in Manhattan. Originally from Alberta, she attended Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and Rutgers University in New Jersey. It was at Rutgers – where she earned a master’s degree, and worked with American jazz luminaries such as Vic Juris and Victor Lewis – that Ackerley started to seriously explore composition. Through multiple residencies at The Banff Centre, she continued to develop her artistic voice, with mentorship from Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey and Zakir Hussain, amongst others.

A New Kind of Water.A New Kind of Water is Ackerley’s second full-length album as a leader; her first, Coalesce, was released in 2017. Coalesce – a trio album – also featured bassist Muntz, with Toronto’s Nick Fraser in the drum seat. While Ackerley “didn’t want to do a second album all over again as another trio,” she also “didn’t want to do a strictly quartet record” either, and A New Kind of Water certainly doesn’t feel like a conventional quartet record, in the sense where songs are written as blowing vehicles to fit a particular ensemble. Instead, the ensemble shifts to accommodate the music, both for individual songs and for specific sections within songs. “Space, Frame, Contain,” the album’s opener, begins with a duo between Ackerley and Muntz, with Boegehold and Manning entering later on. This approach to instrumentation is a big part of Ackerley’s interest in exploring the different situations within a single piece of music: ones that “[allow] things to ebb and flow,” to be “added and subtracted,” throughout a piece. Ackerley doesn’t “like the idea of cutting and pasting,” or of “haphazardly patching together” different sections of music, especially sections with varying compositional frameworks (such as a free section and a specifically-notated melodic section). Instead, Ackerley strives to create meaningful, natural connections between musical statements, both on individual songs and throughout her album as a whole.

These connections are made possible by the trust and rapport between Ackerley and her band, with whom she’s collaborated in a variety of settings. Ackerley has played the music on A New Kind of Water with Muntz as a duo, played a duo set with Manning, and has worked frequently with Boegehold in his project. Having these ongoing working relationships in a variety of settings allows for what Ackerley calls the “magical moments” in a song: “everything lines up, and everyone knows what to do in that moment, and something beautiful comes of it.” It is a sensation that is immediately palpable on A New Kind of Water, and is especially important in music (such as Ackerley’s) with significant sections of free improvisation.

In addition to her busy schedule as a performing musician, Ackerley is also active as a teacher and musical programmer. Amongst other ventures, she recently curated The Brink Guitar Festival, which took place in Brooklyn from March 28 to 31 of this year. Co-presented by Spectrum and Main Drag Music, the festival is a “celebration of the guitar and the musicians in New York City who continue to push its boundaries within the improvised and creative music scene.” The festival grew out of a monthly series at a guitar shop, loose in genre, with the basic format of four 15-minute sets of solo guitar music. With performances from figures such as Miles Okazaki and Dan Weiss, Naeemah Maddox, and Ackerley herself, the festival is part of Ackerley’s work in highlighting the diversity of the guitar at a time when, according to Ackerley, it is “fading from the mainstream, in terms of being a voice at the forefront of musical arrangements and songs.” It’s also part of the ongoing work of creating and fostering community for creative improvised music; as Ackerley puts it, “allowing people to showcase their music in a live setting – and even just seeing improvised music – is a really special thing.”

As the title suggests, one of the overarching themes of the album is a consideration of water. “One of the things that was really important to me in the execution of this album,” Ackerley told me, “was the sense of ebb and flow, and the ability to adjust to any kind of circumstance, whether it be improvisational or compositional.” It is through this process of ebb and flow that Ackerley found an apt metaphor for the way in which each of the band members can find the space to explore their own musical voice within the body of her music. When listeners first come to A New Kind of Water, Ackerley hopes that listeners will consider a “sense of water”: of “a river, or a waterfall, or the ocean,” of water’s “constant movement,” and of the power and tranquility that attends water in its various forms.

Jessica Ackerley’s A New Kind of Water was released on August 23, 2019, and is available for purchase on Bandcamp. 

Colin Story is a jazz guitarist, writer, and teacher based in Toronto. He can be reached through his website, on Instagram and on Twitter.

The cast of What Goes Up learning frisbee. Photo credit: Dahlia KatzOn August 19 to 22 on the 17th floor of the new offices of Canada’s newspaper The Globe and Mail, a remarkable new initiative for fostering the creation of new musicals is taking its first public steps.

REPRINT is the first project of a new program called LAUNCH PAD, created by the combined forces of The Musical Stage Company and Yonge Street Theatricals – and it sounds thrilling.   Three creative teams have spent the last ten months creating new short (approximately 20-minute) musicals, each inspired by an article and/or photograph from The Globe and Mail’s archives.

A photo of screaming fans at the Beatles concert in Toronto in the 1960s inspired the team of Anika Johnson, Barbara Johnston and Nick Green to create Fan Girl, set in a contemporary (2019) YouTube world of fans and idols. The famous widespread blackout of 2003, as captured in the photo of a couple sitting in a Riverdale Park looking out over a Toronto without lights, led to the creation of Cygnus by composer/lyricist Anton Lipovetsky and book writer Steven Gallagher, all intrigued about how major events like this can bring people together unexpectedly. And in perhaps the most unexpected choice of all, it was photos of frisbee players on the Toronto Islands in the 1980s that caught the imaginations of composer Colleen Dauncey, lyricist Akiva Romer-Segal and book writer Ellen Denny (whom readers will remember from playing the leading role in Britta Johnson’s musical Life After) and led them to create What Goes Up—an exploration of the little-known world of Freestyle Frisbee competition (which bears the same relation to the sport of Ultimate Frisbee that figure skating bears to hockey).

Each short musical has its own specific director and music director team, but all three shows share the same cast of four actors. Guiding the project as a whole are program co-directors  Robert McQueen (acclaimed director of Life After, Fun Home, and many more) and New York City-based orchestrator, musical arranger and music director Lynne Shankel (previously in Toronto for Life After).

Fascinated by this project, its structure and its ambitious goals, I reached out to The Musical Stage Company’s artistic director Mitchell Marcus to find out more.

The following interview has been condensed and edited.

WN: The upcoming REPRINT is the first project of LAUNCH PAD, a new initiative from The Musical Stage Company and Yonge Street Theatricals. Can you tell me what inspired this idea and what your goals with the program are?

MM: Because musical theatre is in its infancy in Canada, some of our most innovative and interesting writers likely have not had many (or any) chances to bring a musical to full production. This is problematic, as creating a good song or an interesting story is only the first phase of being a great musical theatre writer – musicals are a highly collaborative form and so much of the work happens not just in a writer's head, but through 'in the room' experience, where pieces are rewritten and honed over and over again in a collaborative setting.

LAUNCH PAD was intended to bridge this gap for a large group of people, in a country with limited capacity to develop tons of full-length musicals each year, and to offer exciting voices the chance to take their work through a full developmental process. Long-term, we hope that it gives us an army of artists (composers, lyricists, book writers, directors and music supervisors) who understand the trajectory and phases of developing new musicals, and who develop a common language around how to do development work.

WN: The performances of REPRINT will take place on the 17th floor of the offices of The Globe and Mail newspaper, and each of the three short musicals is inspired by a photograph and/or headline from the Globe’s archives. Can you tell me what inspired this specific location and context?

MM: In 2016 we invited writers to respond to the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The resulting short musicals were exceptional, and the experience for the audience was superb – having a common collection as a prompt, and allowing the audience to experience the final product in the space that houses the collection, really demonstrated the artistic process. It struck us that newspaper articles similarly offer a wonderful prompt. News tells us stories through facts. But it's ripe for inspiring characters, circumstances, worlds and conflicts. In particular, because of their glorious 17th floor space in their new building, we thought that The Globe and Mail would have both the right archive and the right performance space to help audiences see the hidden 'theatre' in our collective history.

WN: There are three teams involved in REPRINT, each responsible for creating and preparing one of three short musicals – teams that include composer, lyricist, book writer, director and musical director (though some team members wear two “hats”). How were these teams chosen?

MM: Because the goal of the program is to build an army of people who have a common expectation around new musical development, we chose a collection of people who are excellent in their craft, who we feel (based on their past work) can make a major contribution to the development of new musicals in Toronto, and who would benefit from fine-tuning their work on a full-length development process. Remarkably, other than two composer/lyricist teams, no one had partnered together previously. This was a huge risk, and the artists took an enormous leap of faith letting us pair them up in combinations that we felt would be fruitful based on what we knew of their work. Thankfully, I think the matches turned out to be fantastic!

The cast and creative team of REPRINT. Photo credit: Dahlia Katz.WN: There is one small team of four musical theatre actors who will perform all three shows. How were these people chosen, and how has having this set number of very specific performers affected the creation of the shows? 

MM: We went in search of actors who fulfilled two criteria: [first], we needed very versatile performers, as we had to choose a cast before the works were written. Second, we knew that these pieces would be seriously "in development" until the very first audience, so we needed actors who could learn music and lines quickly, and who thrived in an environment that was constantly changing. After we created a shortlist based on those criteria, we tried to find an assortment of ages, genders, looks, types, etc. so that we would be covered no matter what the musicals ended up requiring.

WN: Can you tell me about the process that the teams have gone through to create their new musicals for REPRINT

MM: In the fall, the writers were given access to the news and photo archive at The Globe and Mail. First step was to select a prompt which spoke to them alongside a rough idea for the musical. The writers created a first draft and had a chance to work with their directors, music supervisors and actors in a two-day workshop in the winter, after which they received notes from their teams, from our organization, and from two international mentors who were attached to the project. They then created a second draft in the spring and again had a two-day workshop and notes. Over the summer, they had the chance to go on a writers' retreat to fine-tune their final draft. And then, during the three-week rehearsal period, they had the chance to continue to hone the work as it was staged. In between, we also had sessions with international experts in musical theatre to talk about effective methods of collaboration, and at the end of the process, international guests come to see the works and then meet 1-on-1 with the writers about their musicals.

WN: This is an exciting experimental process for creating new musicals. Have there been any surprises for you along the way? What can audiences expect?

MM: The biggest surprise has been how well the teams have thrived in this complex structure – and how truly helpful I think this has been to solidify a practice of developing new musicals for them and for us as an organization. 

For audiences, I think it will be absolutely thrilling to watch three original pieces that are each so different and yet so compelling. It will be a tour-de-force to see these actors transform from show to show. Plus, REPRINT will demonstrate the breadth of imagination that exists in both the minds of our talented local writers and the black and white pages of the newspaper.

Fan Girl
Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston (music & lyrics)
Nick Green (book)
Tracey Flye (director)
Adam Sakiyama (music director & supervisor)

Cygnus
Anton Lipovetsky (music & lyrics)
Steven Gallagher (book)
Ann Hodges (director)
Wayne Gwillim (music director & supervisor)

What’s Goes Up
Colleen Dauncey (music)
Akiva Romer-Segal (lyrics)
Ellen Denny (book)
Lezlie Wade (director)
Shelley Hanson (music director & supervisor)

All three musicals will star Brandon Antonio, Kaylee Harwood, Michael De Rose and Kelsey Verzotti.

REPRINT is onstage from August 19 to 22 at The Globe and Mail Centre, Toronto. It will be filmed for broadcast via podcast in 2020. The original articles that inspired the works can be viewed online here.

Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare and new Canadian plays.

Syreeta Hector in Black Ballerina. Photo credit: Jason Tse.The SummerWorks Performance Festival is celebrating its 29th year of showcasing new and groundbreaking multidisciplinary theatre, music, and dance in Toronto from August 8 to 18.

Though similar to the Fringe in that there are many wildly different companies and artists to see, SummerWorks is very different in that the Fringe chooses its shows by lottery, while Summerworks chooses its shows by a careful process of application and selection. Under artistic director Laura Nanni’s leadership, the festival’s jury process has led to increasingly fearless, risk-taking programming, giving both artists and audiences an opportunity to explore many of the often difficult ideas and topics at the forefront of our contemporary world.

This year there are over 400 performers in over 30 events, based mostly in the Queen Street West area near the Theatre Centre, but also at individual sites around the city. Looking at the lineup of music theatre works, five in particular  stood out for me. While all completely different, they do have two things in common: each piece has an urgent story to tell – and in each case, music is an integral part of the telling.

Cliff Cardinal. Photo credit: Nadya Kwansibenz.1. Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special
Theatre Centre, BMO Incubator, August 11-17

Perhaps the most high-profile music theatre work in the Summerworks Presentations series is Cliff Cardinal’s CBC Special. A highly anticipated follow-up to Cardinal’s multi award-winning solo show Huff, it teams him again with his director/dramaturge Karin Randoja. While Huff  was hard-hitting in its depiction of the lives of a group of Indigenous youth dealing with substance abuse and a high risk of suicide, audiences also found it hilarious and this same combination of dark humour and grounded storytelling is expected in this new solo show, though this time it will probably be on the lighter side. Cardinal (son of acclaimed Canadian actor Tantoo Cardinal) grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation listening to CBC Radio, but not hearing the experiences of his family and community being represented very much in its programming. To address that gap, he has created his own ‘CBC broadcast’ and filled it with dark and catchy folk songs, miraculous stories of familial resilience, and legends of Turtle Island survival, with an aim of entertaining – as well as giving untold stories their time on the air.

2. Audible Songs from Rockwood
Theatre Centre, Franco Boni Theatre, August 10-18

On the darker side is Audible Songs from Rockwood, a “concert staged for theatre” based on the album of the same name by Simone Schmidt and her band Fiver. The songs in turn are based on the case files of women incarcerated at the Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Kingston, Ontario between 1856 and 1861. Yes, prison and criminalized insanity make for a dark musical show, but this is part of what makes SummerWorks important – that it does not shrink from telling these uncomfortable stories.

Schmidt, a veteran songwriter, spent two years conducting research in the prison archives, retrieving the stories of these women. This led to an acclaimed album of songs that have now been turned into a theatrical event (co-created with director Frank Cox O’Connell and designer Shannon Lea Doyle), which uses these story songs as a starting point to ask questions about not only the historical definition of sanity, but also the contemporary ramifications of a system of incarceration built upon the foundation of a colonial settler agenda. Schmidt, who has a distinctive husky alto voice, leads the cast of three which includes Carlie Howell and Laura Bates.

3. Crossing Into Lullaby
Theatre Centre, BMO Incubator, August 8, 10, 11

In the Lab series of works at an earlier stage of creation, Crossing Into Lullaby takes as a starting point an old family story of an undiagnosable sickness that binds the living to the dead. More enigmatic fable than historical fact, the show revisits this story in a re-telling by creator Dian Marie Bridge and a team of multi-disciplinary artists, and harnesses voice work and electronic soundscapes in an attempt to cure the sickness by breaking the bindings of the story’s characters’ unspoken fears and laying them to rest. The use of music to heal in the story and production is particularly intriguing.

Syreeta Hector in Black Ballerina. Photo credit: Jason Tse.4. Black Ballerina
Theatre Centre, BMO Incubator, August 11, 14, 18

Another show in the Lab series, Black Ballerina, starts from a very real and very personal point of view – that of creator and performer Syreeta Hector, a young but already highly accomplished dancer and educator of mixed Indigenous, African, Canadian and French descent.

Trained at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre as well as the National Ballet School’s Teacher Training Program, and having received a master’s degree from the Dance Program at York University, she uses this new solo show to explore questions of identity and dance form, specifically the clash between her own blackness and the usually white bodies of the classical ballet world. She promises to dig into these issues, including the need we all feel to fit in, through storytelling, movement and music (an original score by Zarnoosh Bilimoria). To give even more depth and detail to her vision is movement dramaturge Seika Boye (It’s About Time, Dancing Black in Canada 1900 - 1970). It will be fascinating to see the range of movement the show employs.

5. The Breath Between
Theatre Centre, BMO Incubator, August 8, 10, 12, 16

The Breath Between, created and performed by the young artists of the AMY (Artists Mentoring Youth) Project, seems to strike a true note of hope in the context of calamity. Set in a future following a climate catastrophe where everyone is forced to live under the control and cover of “the Dome,” the queer youth of Tkaronto emerge to take part in the first Pride event in years, only to discover that it is not the celebration they had hoped it would be. A small band of them break out of the dystopia and journey into space to explore the meaning of community, connection, and home. While the format of an interweaving of monologues, poetry, movement and music is not in itself ground-breaking, it sounds as though the content is refreshing in finding positivity despite the surrounding dystopia. The young characters share stories of their resilience, but even more importantly, their dreams of what new worlds we can make together – even in apocalyptic times.

Please see www.summerworks.ca for a full schedule and information about all the shows and events. Tickets for most shows are $15-35, and some events are free.

Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare and new Canadian plays.

JenShyu Photo1 StevenSchreiberbannerJen Shyu, who performs at the Guelph Jazz Festival this year. Photo credit: Steven Schreiber.Though many summer festivals have already wrapped up their 2019 editions, the season isn’t over yet. There are a number of late-summer festivals slotted for August and September, both in southern Ontario and further afield. Whether you prefer to make a day trip out of town or stay close to home, there are upcoming musical offerings that suit your end-of-summer plans.

Here are five music festivals to consider visiting before the end of the summer.

1. Guelph Jazz Festival
September 11-15
Guelph, Ontario

Founded in 1994, the Guelph Jazz Festival always promises varied and risk-taking programming, with a range of local and international artists. This year – the festival’s first under the artistic co-leadership of Scott Thomson (artistic and general director) and Karen Ng (assistant artistic and general director) – features several notable experimental artists, including vocalist/dancer/multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu’s interdisciplinary solo show Nine Doors and Nova Scotia-based jaw harp player chik white. The festival has organized a Friday Night Street Music Party, 7pm to midnight on September 13 in Guelph’s Market Square. Festival details at www.guelphjazzfestival.com

2. The 21st-Century Guitar
August 22-25
Ottawa, Ontario

This summer, the University of Ottawa Piano Pedagogy Research Lab, the International Guitar Research Centre (University of Surrey), the Canadian Music Centre, and the Ottawa Guitar Society have joined forces to co-host The 21st-Century Guitar, a conference focusing on interdisciplinary perspectives towards guitar performance, composition and pedagogy.

Featuring guitarists from classical, experimental, folk, and numerous other genres, the conference promises a wide range of guitar-centric music – including presentations of solo and duo pieces from Canadian and international composers, a selection of works using 8-channel sound and surround video projection, and performances by a giant ‘guitar orchestra’. Details at www.21cguitar.com

3. Prince Edward County Chamber Music Festival
September 13-22
Picton, Ontario

Running from September 13 to 22, the PEC Chamber Music Festival is one of several music events taking place in Prince Edward County each summer. Now under the artistic leadership of the New Orford String Quartet, the PEC Chamber Music Festival promises an impressive program of top-notch Canadian artists. With performances this year by the New Orford String Quartet, Gryphon Trio, soprano Julie Nesrallah with collaborative pianist Robert Kortgaard, and brothers Jamie and Jon Kimura Parker in a program for two pianos, the festival is full of concerts perfect for a mid-September day trip. Info at www.pecmusicfestival.com.

4. The Fifth Canadian Chopin Piano Competition
August 23-29
Toronto, Ontario

At the end of August, the Canadian Chopin Society will present the fifth edition of the Canadian Chopin Piano Competition, hosted at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto. Presented in conjunction with the renowned International F. Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland, the Canadian competition is open to Canadian pianists in both Junior and Senior divisions.

In addition to competition rounds open to the public, the Canadian Chopin Society will also present Polish pianist Krzysztof Jablonksi, the competition jury chair, in a solo recital of Chopin’s music at Koerner Hall. Details at www.rcmusic.com

5. Summer Music in the Garden
Thursdays and Sundays until September 15
Toronto, Ontario

The Toronto Music Garden continues its annual summer programming until mid-September this year, offering a variety of free outdoor concerts from now until the end of the summer. Upcoming highlights include performances by Eastern European vocal quartet Blisk; Laüsa, a group rooted in the traditional music of Gascony in southwest France; local cello duo VC2; and Aiyun Huang and Mark Fewer, in a program of works for percussion and violin. More information at www.harbourfrontcentre.com.

Jake Epstein. Photo credit: Jacob Cohl.On July 12, I went an hour and a half early to Kensington Market in the hope of being first on the waiting list to get tickets for the brand-new solo musical at the Toronto Fringe Festival: Boy Falls From The Sky: Jake Epstein at Supermarket. Others had beaten me to it and I was number 3 in line, but I took my chances and waited.

The run had sold out very quickly, perhaps because of how well known Jake Epstein is from his time starring on TV in Degrassi: The Next Generation, and more recently on Designated Survivor and Suits – or perhaps because he was so brilliant as Bruce Springsteen in The Musical Stage Company’s 2017 theatrical concert Uncovered: Dylan and Springsteen. In any case, the word of mouth from long before the start of the Fringe was that this was a “must-see” production.

Written and performed by Epstein and supported onstage by music director Daniel Abrahamson on  piano, the show was developed with director Robert McQueen (Fun Home, Life After) and is produced by Derrick Chua for Past Future Productions. 

This is Jake Epstein’s first solo show, and is based on his own experiences of both the highs and unexpected lows of following – and achieving – his dream to be a performer on Broadway. The stories, interwoven with songs throughout, start off with relatable memories such as family road trips to New York, Epstein and his sister singing along in the back seat to recordings of Broadway cast albums from Lion King to Les Mis, imitating the voices of their favourite performers. Inspired by the audience reaction to the child performers they see in the musical Big, he auditions back home for the Claude Watson School for the Arts, and soon is auditioning for professional productions in Toronto and landing the role of the Artful Dodger in the Mirvish production of Oliver. Later he wins a leading TV role on Degrassi: The Next Generation, but when he auditions for the Juilliard School in New York he doesn’t get in – just one of the many self-deprecating stories about unexpected setbacks that he shares with us along the way. However, meeting with two strangers on the street outside Juilliard, they ask to take a selfie with him because they love him in Degrassi and he is inspired to stay in New York  and soon lands leading roles in North American touring productions of cutting-edge musicals American Idiot and Spring Awakening.

When in 2012 he is cast as the alternate for the lead in the troubled Julie Taymour/U2 musical Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, it’s a dream come true (complete with actually flying around the Broadway theatre), but he gets hurt and doesn’t want to tell anyone back home. A year later he has another iconic chance – to create a leading role in a new Broadway musical, Carole King’s husband and songwriting partner Gerry Goffin in Beautiful. Once again there are brighter and darker sides to the story, and as a result he spends more time back home in Toronto.

A recurring theme in Boy Falls From The Sky (yes, the title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to his role in Spiderman) is Epstein not wanting to seem ungrateful for his luck and the success he has achieved, marked by the repeated singing of snatches of “give them the old razzle dazzle.” Luckily for us in the audience, eventually he did tell the full stories of what his life on tour and on Broadway was really like, and friends and family encouraged him to turn those stories into this show.

This is excellent musical theatre storytelling by a performer with natural star power – including the ability to make everyone in the audience feel as though he is talking to them alone. Add to that the edgy energy of a BYOV “Bring Your Own” Fringe Venue in Kensington Market and the fact that the star and writer is a hometown boy made good, and the 70 minutes speed by too fast and are over too soon.

Jake Epstein's Boy Falls from The Sky is from the first moment engaging and fun, his presence electric and yet relaxed, his timing perfection and the laughs strongly rooted in self-deprecating honesty. I loved this show – as I had hoped I would.

Boy Falls From The Sky: Jake Epstein Live at Supermarket ran from July 4 to 13 at Supermarket, Toronto, as part of the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival.

Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare and new Canadian plays.

The Dover Quartet in Koerner Hall. Photo credit: James Ireland.The afternoon before the Dover Quartet’s concert at Toronto Summer Music in Koerner Hall on July 17, second violinist Bryan Lee gave a public masterclass in Walter Hall that offered a preview of the Dover’s approach to performance. The masterclass presented three chamber music works by Debussy, Mozart and Dvořák played by fellows of the TSM Academy. Lee thought that the McGill-based Iceberg String Quartet’s playing of the fourth movement of Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor needed more of a sense of gesture – they were holding back, he said. Lee had followed the score without taking notes, giving detail-oriented comments with an authoritative sense of clarity: “Find different types of non-competing sounds so they come out in the texture,” he said. “And do something extremely uncomfortable – it felt really tame.”  It could be really exaggerated – by a factor of ten – he said.

After a second group of fellows played the first movement of Mozart’s String Quintet in D Major, No.5 K593, Lee said: “I think the larghettos need more rhetorical time and the allegro needs more joy and drama.” Later he said that some chords were “kind of crunchy,” provoking some smiles. He told the fellows who played the last movement of Dvořák’s Piano Quartet No.2 in E-flat Major, Op.87 that they needed to pick spots to really emphasize, and take more time to appreciate everything going on in the music so that it didn’t feel like a big run-on sentence.

All of which shed light on the masterful performance of the Dover Quartet the next day. They made each note count and every gesture meaningful. Britten’s String Quartet No.1 in D Major, Op.25’s nakedly quiet opening bars with Camden Shaw’s expressive cello pizzicatos broadened into a series of distinct voices by the entire quartet, contributing to an implacable sense of unity as the music rose to a level of urgent passion. They played the brief second movement with flair and authority and brought out the achingly romantic melody and profound sense of calm in the third movement, the work’s emotional centerpiece; the finale’s light-fingered passages were simply astounding. With their superb sense of Britten’s sonic architecture, the Dovers’ reading felt definitive.

Intense and propulsive, they held nothing back in Bartók’s String Quartet No.3, mining its igneous beauty. After intermission, they brought out the lyricism and sense of optimism inherent in Dvořák’s popular String Quartet No.12 in F Major, Op.96 “American,” and balanced its folk-infused amiability with a sense of restraint that flowed easily and organically. Typically crowd-pleasing was the second movement’s melt-in-your-mouth tune that seemed to dissolve into thin air. A spontaneous standing ovation brought the Dovers back for a sublime take on Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood.

Joel Link, violin; Charles Richard-Hamelin, piano; Camden Shaw, cello; Milena Pajaro-van Stadt, viola. Photo credit: James Ireland.Two days later on July 19 in a sold-out Walter Hall, three members of the Dover Quartet – first violinist Joel Link, violist Milena Pajaro-van Stadt and cellist Camden Shaw – joined pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin for what turned out to be my personal highlight of TSM 2019 thus far: an impassioned performance of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.1 in G Minor, Op.25. Lush and warm, well-balanced – no one was hiding – with an intensity that conveyed the score’s riches (including hints of the composer’s Second Piano Concerto), the first movement set the stage for what was to follow. The grace of the second movement and the lyrical wonderland of the third led to the angular, animated, assertive finale with its wild abandon. No standing ovation was ever more deserved. 

The Dovers brought out the best in Richard-Hamelin, who began the evening with Rachmaninoff and Chopin. He has an agreeable tonal disposition for chamber music, his round tonal texture making each note meaningful, but always within the boundaries of the ensemble as a whole. His solo Rachmaninoff – the composer’s five Fantasy Pieces, Op.3, written when he was just 18 – was lyrical and warm, with a balanced rubato that enhanced the music’s melodic core. The famous second piece, Prelude in C-sharp Minor – a piece that audiences loved and Rachmaninoff grew to hate – was followed by three more, including the tuneful exoticism of the Serenade in B-flat Minor. Richard-Hamelin finished his solo selection with Chopin’s Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, Op.22, the dreamy Andante – with its second theme reminiscent of a Ballade – settling into the big footsteps of the Polonaise.

A key element of Toronto Summer Music’s Academy program is the opportunity for its fellows to perform with some of the world-class musicians who act as their mentors during their stay here. In a brief email exchange with Richard-Hamelin [published in the summer issue of The WholeNote], Richard-Hamelin told me that inspiration was the most important thing a mentor can do. “A great mentor, over a very brief period of time, can make you love the music you’re playing to a point where you don’t want to stop working until you’ve done justice to it.” The fruits of Richard-Hamelin’s own mentorship were on display last Saturday, July 20, in Chausson’s Concert for Piano, Violin and String Quartet Op.21. The instrumentation made for many possible pairings – violin and piano, violin and string quartet etc – and the music’s exuberance was contagious, leading to a spontaneous standing ovation. The fellows included the Iceberg Quartet and violinist Gregory Lewis, one of CBC’s “30 Hot Canadian Classical Musicians Under 30.” Richard-Hamelin’s sensitivity shone through and Lewis’ confidence was apparent in a work that ultimately favoured the violin. 

Before intermission, the Dover Quartet’s Camden Shaw and his heartfelt cello playing shepherded two fellows in Dvořák’s charming Piano Trio No.4 in E Minor, OP.90 “Dumky,” one of the most lovable pieces in the repertoire. 

Toronto Summer Music continues at various locations throughout Toronto until August 3.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

Soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, pianist Steven Philcox and the New Orford String Quartet. Photo credit: Sean Howard.Toronto Summer Music’s 2019 season opened on July 11 in a festive mood before a full Koerner Hall audience, with a gala roster of performers emblematic of the talent this year’s edition promises.

Artistic director Jonathan Crow astutely chose the CBC’s Tom Allen to host the proceedings, introduce the artists and connect whatever dots needed connecting vis-à-vis this year’s TSM theme of “Beyond Borders.” This Allen did with his inimitable enthusiasm and an engaging and informative patter was – part ringmaster, part colour commentator. His backstory of the Turkish-Viennese linkage, anecdotes of violinist-composers Pablo de Sarasate and Fritz Kreisler, as well as how Ravel came to write Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, brought an extra sense of immediacy to the performances.

The evening began with Jon Kimura Parker’s unpretentious playing of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A Major, K331 “Alla turca.” Parker’s unadorned simplicity suited the first movement’s theme, its variations elegantly shaped, the whole an expression of Mozart’s melodic heart. After a brisk Menuetto, the finale’s famous Turkish march put TSM’s celebration of the cross-cultural influences that have pervaded classical music on display, thanks in part to Parker’s fancy fingering and rhythmic integrity.

Adrianne Pieczonka, fresh from her celebrated turn in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Met in May and her recent assumption of the post of first vocal chair and head of the vocal department of the Glenn Gould School, soared in Ravel’s Five Popular Greek Songs. Reminiscent of Cantaloube’s Songs of the Auvergne in their wild abandon and evoking the purity of the outdoors, Pieczonka (with pianist Steven Philcox) gave us an experience rich in joy.

Kerson Leong, violin, and Rachael Kerr, piano. Photo credit: Sean Howard.Just before intermission, violinist Kerson Leong (and pianist Rachael Kerr) brought the audience to its feet with a dynamic, kinetic, authoritative performance of Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen. Just 22, Leong, a protégé of Jonathan Crow, dazzled the crowd with his command of his instrument and stage presence. He returned after the break with a Kreisler set that began with a tasteful rendering of La Gitana, moved to Kreisler’s arrangements of Cyril Scott’s Lotus Land and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No.17, and concluded with the well-judged pyrotechnics of Tambourin chinois.

After Parker came back to perform Chopin’s Ballade No.4 – presenting its evocative sonorities in a compact tonal palette – it was left to Pieczonka to conclude the evening with John Greer’s arrangement for string quartet and piano of Richard Strauss’ ineffable Four Last Songs. Pieczonka, Philcox and the New Orford String Quartet made it memorable. The power of the first song, the joyousness of the second suffused in beauty by its end, and the transformative journey into heavenly bliss by the fourth – this was the outlier to the Crossing Borders theme, unless you consider it the ultimate border crossing. Violinists Jonathan Crow and Andrew Wan’s exquisite support of Pieczonka was palpable.

Soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, pianist Steven Philcox and the New Orford String Quartet. Photo credit: Sean Howard.The following evening found the New Orford on the Walter Hall stage celebrating ten years together. Crow recalled before introducing the quartet’s encore, François Dompierre’s lovely, wistful Pavane solitaire, that their first-ever concert had begun with Haydn’s String Quartet Op.20, No.2, followed by a string quartet by Canadian composer Sir Ernest MacMillan and Beethoven’s Op.132. Their concert on July 12, ten years later, began with Haydn’s Op.20, No.4 followed by the world premiere of Canadian composer Christos Hatzis’ String Quartet No.5 “The Transforming” and Beethoven’s Op.59, No.3. Such is the cyclic nature of programming.

The New Orford’s playing of the Haydn’s first movement was buoyant and exacting, attentive and cohesive; the immaculate sense of ensemble that resulted typical of their professionalism. The affecting slow movement, filled with yearning, showed off the quartet’s precision and first violinist Andrew Wan’s deftness. After a jaunty Menuetto, the concluding Presto, with its scurrying orchestral quality, was sheer brilliance.

Commissioned by TSM for the New Orford String Quartet, Hatzis’ String Quartet No.5 “The Transforming” is “a deeper view of crucifixion and resurrection as metaphors for everyone’s life and the future of the world,” the composer said in a 30-minute lecture an hour before the concert. His initial reaction to the commission when he heard the name New Orford was that it would be a licence to be “difficult” – such was his admiration for the quartet’s remarkable music-making skills. Hatzis talked about how chamber music can create interpersonal relationships through putting everyone’s ego aside, because a quartet as a whole is a person in its own right; how Beethoven’s late quartets owe much of their power to that characteristic; and how this latest quartet is the culmination of a 25-year cycle that began with his first quartet in 1994.

The first movement, Pesach, came across as complex and mesmerizing, with intense silences and dramatic chords reduced to repetitive three-note phrases. The second, La Pieta (Jerusalem), was inspired by Renaissance paintings but is defined by Hatzis’ use of Hubert Parry’s anthem of the British Empire, Jerusalem, its beauty declaimed by pianissimo descending notes and the inscrutable hymn based on the text by William Blake. “Every time I hear that hymn I get chills,” Hatzis said in his lecture. Regeneration, the final movement, with its celestial arpeggios tuned in just intonation in C, begins with a quiet sul ponticello pizzicato that passes through an intensely calibrated build-up to a new order. The use of quarter tones introduces a new vocabulary. Kudos to the New Orford String Quartet and first violinist Jonathan Crow for their definitive performance.

After intermission, the third of Beethoven’s Razumovsky quartets brought the concert to more familiar terrain and produced the third spontaneous standing ovation of the opening two concerts. While the first movement was not as surefooted as we have come to expect of the New Orford, the rest of the composer’s middle-period masterwork was a model of elegance culminating in a flourish of a finale.

Toronto Summer Music continues at various locations throughout Toronto until August 3.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

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