Rocking Horse Winner remount: tenor Asitha Tennekoon reprises his role as the childlike Paul. Photo by Dahlia Katz.This time last year, the opera community was celebrating as companies large and small started to announce their first “normal” year of programming. Even as live performance began creeping back after the initial lockdowns, opera presenters struggled to balance reduced seating capacities and ticket sales, and shutdown-related revenue loss with the budgets needed to mount full scale productions – especially those presenters whose audiences have grown accustomed to productions with full operatic scale.

Read more: Visions and Revisions: The Balancing Act

TaPIR director Aiyun Huang. Photo by Bo Huang.Weaving disparate threads together to create something new is a fundamental approach for any creative artist, and in the world of contemporary music, the spectrum of elements interwoven into new works continues to progressively expand. Numerous concerts scheduled for October and November exemplify this trend, with some of these concerts drawing inspiration from the past to achieve this evolution.

Read more: Musical Weavings

The GT23 evening showcase, Friday, September 22, at the TD Music Hall. Photo by Andrew Timar.It’s no secret: right now, among our various cultural sectors troubling signs can readily be found. Stresses, fissures and cracks, intergenerational change and systemic failures – some chronicled elsewhere in this issue – feel as though they are starting to be as common as the wildfires that scourged the globe this past summer.

Read more: Light Between the Cracks: Small World Music's GLOBAL TORONTO 2023

Mahani Teave, NPR Tiny Desk Concert, 2021.Here on the island, there’s artistic blood in everybody. I mean, everybody somehow sings and dances and carves and – or plays an instrument. And there’s nothing more natural and more true to the human being than art and music. – Mahani Teave

Mahani Teave [Tay-AH-vay] – who makes her Koerner Hall debut at 3pm on October 1 as part of her first North American tour – is the sole professional pianist on one of the most remote, inhabited islands on Earth, Rapa Nui (Easter Island). There she heads the island’s only music school. She’s living a remarkable story.

Read more: True To The Human Being

“Switchemups”, in Exit Points #36 (March 31, 2023) L-R: Adrian Russouw, Rudy Ray, Owen Kurtz, Nilan Perera, %%30%30, Xina Gilani, Victor O, Michael Palumbo. Photo by Own Kurrtz.It was participating in the Toronto Improvisor’s Orchestra that offered a lifeline for electroacoustic music improviser, teacher, researcher and producer Michael Palumbo. During 2019, Palumbo was experiencing multiple crises in his life which eventually led him into performing improvised music on his modular synthesizer. “It was a form of music making where empathy is very important,” he told me during our phone interview. “I could go and play my heart out. It saved my life that year.”

Read more: Michael Palumbo’s Exit Points Makes Its Mark

On the move from Dundas W. to east of the Don; Broadview Place, a heritage building, was designed by E.J. Lennox, the same Toronto architect who designed Old City Hall and Casa Loma. Photo by Hugh's Room.In March of 2020 – while COVID anxiety was swirling through Toronto, but just before lockdown protocols were announced and enacted – news broke that Hugh’s Room Live would be leaving their Dundas West location, having failed to come to terms with their landlord in lease negotiations. It was a major blow for the city’s club scene.

Read more: Hugh’s New Room

Carmen Braden. Photo courtesy of Carmen.Summer and Music Festivals make great partners. Now that concert life appears to be fully alive after the past few years of the enforced doldrums, the summer festivals are alive with several offerings of new music and Canadian compositions. I’ve picked out some of the upcoming highlights, both local and further afield.

Read more: A Summer Musical Mix

David Braid and Phil Nimmons in 2010. The “Champions’ Cabaret” at The Music Gallery celebrated the induction of Nimmons and several others as new Champions for Music Education, by the Coalition for Music Education.On June 3, 2023, the clarinetist, composer, bandleader and educator Phil Nimmons celebrated his 100th birthday. Born in 1923 in Kamloops, Nimmons has been a major force on the Canadian jazz scene since the 1950s, when – following his formal music education, at both Juilliard in New York and at Toronto’s own Royal Conservatory of Music – he formed his much-venerated Nimmons ’n’ Nine group, with which he would go on to record nine albums, embark on innumerable tours, and perform regularly on CBC broadcasts.

Read more: As The Music Heads Outdoors

Leslie Arden’s "The Lancashire Lass". Photo courtesy of Watershed Music Theatre.The beginning of the summer season is exploding with the openings of new musicals – shows previously delayed by COVID shut downs, new projects and classics revisited – with a little flood in late May, inconveniently early for our May 31 release, but worthy of mention nevertheless.

Read more: Some Enchanted Summer
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