Beat Columns (Live Music)

As the concert season shifts toward winter, Toronto’s new music scene is gathering momentum with a rich constellation of performances from four of the city’s core presenters. Among the many offerings, one work stands out for the way it merges spiritual form with ecological urgency: Mass for the Endangered by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. The piece will be performed on November 22 in a Soundstreams concert that also features works by Andrew Balfour, R. Murray Schafer, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, and Chris Hutchings. I recently spoke with Snider by phone about the piece and her current projects.

After the phenomenal success of Dave Malloy’s musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 this summer, Crow’s Theatre is joining forces again with the Musical Stage Company, and this time also with Soulpepper, to produce another Malloy musical: Octet, this September.

Now that the fall season has arrived, it’s a good time to dig into what’s new on the horizon, especially in venues that may be less familiar but offer unique possibilities for creative music-making. One such place in Toronto’s west end is the Annette Studios, which will host The Art of Improv on September 28, a series launched in 2023 by musicians Bill Gilliam and Eugene Martynec.

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.

The Aperture Room is the crown jewel of a beautifully preserved building at 340 Yonge St., a couple of blocks north of Yonge and Dundas, designed and built in 1922 for the Thornton-Smith Company – an antique furniture and interior design firm.

Opera-goers heading out of the current COC production of Wozzeck wondering what makes the show’s director/designer William Kentridge tick should make their way to the online Kentridge Studio – a website that is yet another layer to his art. If you do, check out the 1988 essay by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in the Reading Room titled William Kentridge’s Ubu Projects.

Single tickets of Opera Atelier’s 40th anniversary season production of Charpentier’s David and Jonathan went on sale January 13, 2025 and within minutes of the announcement, OA’s Marshall Pynkoski was there in our editorial inbox as well – his enthusiasm even more contagious than usual.

Back in the dark days of the pandemic, when concerts were little more than memories, I spoke with composer Cecilia Livingston for the December 2020-January 2021 issue of The WholeNote about Garden of Vanished Pleasures, a project she was involved with at the time. Originally presented as a livestream production by Soundstreams in early 2021, the piece went on to become a finalist in Opera America’s Awards for Excellence in Digital Opera. Now, it is set to receive a fully staged live performance by Soundstreams.

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.

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.