Choral Scene

Joyful Resistance

Changing of the guard at Echo: I have been back and forth by e-mail over the course of April, with Alan Gasser, who has been part of Toronto’s choral scene for as long as The WholeNote has been around. In fact, back in our very first season, when we were still called Pulse and not afraid of being tongue-in-cheeky, he shows up in an April 1996 cover story by “Viola Jones” toasting the birth of TaxiCabaret, a seven-member cab service which will “combine singing ability with skill at piloting a taxi around town, serenading their customers on the fly.”

Fertile Soil - VIVA Singers Toronto at Trinity-St. Paul’s

The time: Jun 1 at 2:30pm: VIVA Singers Toronto. Metamorphosis. Featuring all seven VIVA Singers Toronto choirs, plus a special alumni choir, and guest artists Amiel Ang, percussion, and Tatsuki Shimoda, recorder.

The place: Trinity St. Paul’s United Church. Jeanne Lamon Hall.

What to Look For If You're Choir Curious

The other day, there was a detailed message on The WholeNote's voicemail. It was from a long-time Toronto resident who explained that she was wanting to join a choir for the first time in many years, wanting to reconnect with the sense of community she’d felt singing with others in her youth, especially now because she was confident being in a choir would help her recovery from a recent stroke.

Jean-Sébastian Vallée’s Toronto’s Mendelssohn Choir

The comforting smell of coffee lingered in the air as conductor Jean-Sébastian Vallée listened to the fading notes of the morning’s final song. More than a hundred people had gathered in red-carpeted Yorkminister Park Baptist Church on a Saturday this past September for a special Mendelssohn Choir Singsation workshop celebrating the choir’s 130th anniversary. TMChoir, as Toronto’s largest and oldest choral organization is now known, has offered Singsations since 1999.

Packed Oshawa banquet hall for RESOUND’s fifth anniversary

Chandeliers shone down on empty tables. A handful of other early-admitted guests chatted next to the cash-only bar as RESOUND Choir warmed up. Many of the 60 singers wore a gold pin with the choir’s symbol: a phoenix. Their dress for the evening was otherwise business casual.

The singers filed off their risers and front-of-house opened the doors. Within ten minutes, an audience of almost 300 packed the room.

I’d gone to LVIV Pavilion Banquet Hall in Oshawa mid-October for a concert called Sips & Shanties. RESOUND Choir was celebrating its fifth anniversary with a program of Canadian folk music and works by contemporary Indigenous composers. I was particularly curious to hear how they’d handle songs popularized by the Rankin Family, who formed a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood in Nova Scotia.