I first met Ron almost 45 years ago when we were both studying with Robert Bick at York University. Bick had recently returned to Toronto from Brattleboro, Vermont where he had been studying with the great French flautist and teacher, Marcel Moyse, who, before the Second World War, had been the flute teacher at the Paris Conservatoire.
Tafelmusik Baroque Ensemble is making good use of its emerging hybrid artistic leadership model: a three-player artistic co-directorship (Brandon Chui, Dominic Teresi, and Cristina Zacharias), mentored by Principal Guest Director Rachel Podger. Together they are in the process of putting together a storied season. February and March alone will bring 11 performances of four different programs.
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.
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.”)
