Beat Columns (Live Music)

Last month, you may recall, the Canadian Band Association, Ontario had just held its first "Community Brass Band" weekend, which got me going in this space, on the subject of the characteristics of the brass band, the British Brass Band Style, Company Bands and Brass Band Contests.

There’s a whole other story to tell about how brass bands in the British tradition, sometimes sponsored by employers, began to be established on this side of the Atlantic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But first let’s look at an upcoming event which encapsulates not only what the brass band community is all about but also how far the brass band genre has come.

Hannaford Street Silver Band’s Festival of Brass: Just as there are few, if any, professional concert bands in Canada there are few professional brass bands. The notable exception is the Hannaford Street Silver Band, established some 30 years ago by a group of Toronto professional musicians who wanted to give the full virtuosic range of brass band idiom a voice and showcase in Toronto. Their concerts have consequently explored a much wider range of music than would usually have been considered part of the brass band repertoire. A recent example: with guest artist Fergus McWilliam, they presented the Strauss Horn Concerto No.1 this past February 21. Here was a top musician from the Berlin Philharmonic performing with a brass band on the only major brass instrument that is not part of the usual brass band instrumentation. Also note, the HSSB commitment to broadening the repertoire has gone beyond  rearranging standard repertoire into a vigorous commitment to commissioning new Canadian works.

Another important outgrowth of the HSSB’s activities has been their youth program. In 1999 they launched the Hannaford Street Youth Band under the direction of Anita McAlister. In 2005, another youth band was created for beginning brass players known as the Hannaford Junior Band. Soon a third, intermediate, band known as the Hannaford Community Youth Band was also formed. All three bands, under the same director, provide musical growth opportunities for young musicians ranging in age from 11 to the early 20s.

So, for devotees of the Hannafords and brass band fans in general, the HSSB’s annual Festival of Brass (this year on the weekend of April 15 to 17) is a must. This festival will be packed with almost every form of brass music. Friday evening will feature “Rising Stars” where the finalists of the Hannaford Youth Solo Competition will be judged on their performances by Alain Trudel and Stéphane Beaulac. The winner will perform with the Hannaford Band in the Sunday afternoon concert. Saturday will be devoted to a master class in the morning followed by a series of performances by “Festival of Brass” participating bands. On Sunday there will be an open dress rehearsal in the morning and the “Entre Amis” concert in the afternoon. This year, Stéphane Beaulac, formerly principal trumpet with Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal, now with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will be the featured soloist. He will perform Canadian composer Johnny Cowell’s Concerto in E Minor with the band, under the direction of another Hannaford distinguished visitor, Alain Trudel.

Crossing the Atlantic: Now back to our previous topic. Certainly the geography of Canada, with large distances between communities, made some aspects of the British Brass Band tradition, such as regular contests, impractical. On the other hand, relative isolation and lack of other recreational opportunity may have assisted with other aspects, such as the company band. Certainly, into the 20th century there were still a few distinguished company bands around, including the Taylor Safe Works Band, the Heintzman Piano Company Band, where the famous Herbert L. Clarke was featured, and the Anglo-Canadian Leather Company Band in Huntsville, Ontario where Clarke was the conductor from 1918 to 1923. Originally trained on the viola, Clarke was smitten by the cornet and began practising on his brother’s instrument. He then joined the band of the Queen’s Own Rifles in 1882 at age 14, in order to obtain his own government-issue cornet on which to practise.

Few, if any, company bands are still operating in Canada. There are still a number of Salvation Army bands, but the total number of British-style brass bands probably does not exceed 30. Most of these are in Ontario, operate as recreational or “community” bands and have long histories going back over a century in some cases. The most well-known include the Oshawa Civic Band, the Whitby Brass Band, the Weston Silver Band and the Metropolitan Silver Band of Toronto. Professor Henry Meredith’s Plumbing Factory Brass Band in London is one which has risen in stature in recent years.

South of the border: About the same time brass bands were springing up in Canada similar bands were forming in the US, principally in the New England States. It wasn’t long, though, before brass bands caught the attention of one John Sullivan Dwight in Boston. Ordained as a minister in 1840, Dwight had abandoned the ministry and developed a deep interest in music, in particular that of Beethoven. By the 1850s music was becoming a big business in America and Dwight was soon to become the country’s first music critic, launching frequent tirades against the popular music of the day, particularly the brass band. In one memorable instance he wrote: “All at once the idea of a Brass Band shot forth: and from this prolific germ sprang up a multitude of its kind in every part of the land, like the crop of iron men from the infernal seed of the dragon’s teeth.”

NABBA: Dwight notwithstanding, by 1983 the desire for some form of umbrella organization to coordinate the activities of bands and to further the brass band movement had resulted in the establishment of the North American Brass Band Association (NABBA) with stated aims to “Foster, promote and otherwise encourage the establishment, growth and development of amateur and professional British-type brass bands throughout the United States and Canada.”

Cautionary note: if you decide to ask Mr. Google for information on this organization, type in the full name, not NABBA, or you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about the National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association. (Unless of course you are a tuba player and need some muscle toning.)

While some Canadian bands have participated in NABBA competitions over the years, the most recent highlight was in the summer of 2014 when the North American Brass Band Summer School (NABBSS) was first held in Halifax as an integral component of the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo. We were participants in that first school and in the tattoo. We would not have missed it for the world. The 2015 event was equally successful and enrollments are well on the way for this coming summer.

Other Brass Band news from the GTA: I was very surprised and pleased recently to receive a copy of a new history of the Metropolitan Silver Band. As the title says, it covers “80 Years of Music-Making at Metropolitan United Church.” This history was written by the band’s longest-serving member, Ken Allen, who has been in the band for 71 of those 80 years, 43 of them as its manager. He was fortunate in having access to meticulously maintained records over the years by a fellow band member.

Elsewhere I have mentioned, on various occasions, those revolutionary times when a female musician was “permitted” to join a band. For the MSB, this occurred in January 1981, when Bill Martyn, a member of the cornet section and a high school English teacher, invited one of his students to join the band. Now, 35 years later, Michele McCall is still in the band and has been the band’s manager since 2005, when she took over from Ken Allen. Another milestone was in 2002 when the band appointed its first woman conductor. Fran Harvey is still the conductor after 14 years at the helm. The history includes a good selection of pictures, all with dates and identification of all band members. As I scanned these pictures, lo and behold, there I was during those years when I was a band member in the 1970s and 1980s. Late last year the band released a new CD to celebrate its 80-year association with Metropolitan United Church. Titled Amazing Grace-A Gospel Celebration, it is a compilation of  traditional hymns including one selection, My Lord What a Morning, featuring a solo by none other than 71-year veteran Ken Allen.

Salvation Army bands have long been a mainstay of the brass band movement, so it was good to hear of an SA concert coming up later in the month. Featured will be the Ontario Central East Divisional Singing Company (Junior Choir) conducted by Elizabeth Colley, Divisional Young Peoples’ Band – Blood and Fire Brass under bandleader Bob Gray, and Divisional Reservists’ Band – Heritage Brass also led by bandmaster Gray. The concert will take place Saturday, April 23 at 7pm, in the Agincourt Community Church of The Salvation Army, 3080 Birchmount Rd, Toronto. A freewill offering will be received during the concert.

Startups are always a good sign of the resurgence of interest in  brass band music, and here’s another one. They are inviting other brass players to join them. They rehearse Wednesday evenings in Newmarket and would particularly welcome cornet and tuba players. If you play a brass instrument, and are interested in exploring that genre, contact Peter Hussey by email at pnhussey@rogers.com.

New Horizons: From time to time I have reported on the activities of the many New Horizons groups since their introduction into Canada about six years ago. The number of groups in Toronto alone has grown to the extent that the original conductor, Dan Kapp, has relinquished his duties at the Long & McQuade main store to channel all of his energies into the many New Horizons groups. With the title of creative director, Dan will oversee the operations of all Toronto bands, as well as conduct two or more. While on the subject of New Horizons, a few days ago I learned of a New Horizons group now thriving in Sudbury. Where will the next NH group spring up?

Obituary: Unfortunately I must report on the passing of Alex MacDonald a long-serving member of the Metropolitan Silver Band. I first met Alex when he and I were living in the same residence at university many years ago. We played together in the U of T Varsity band. On one occasion Alex startled us all. We were rehearsing Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, but we didn’t have anyone to play the piccolo part. Alex tucked his euphonium under his arm and pulled a slide whistle from his inner pocket. Suddenly we had a piccolo.

Jack MacQuarrie plays several brass instruments and has performed in many community ensembles. He can be contacted at bandstand@thewholenote.com.

Sheila Jordan. Is it April 1 or April 2 as you are reading this? If so, you should be calling Jazz Bistro to make reservations for tonight for Sheila Jordan’s first appearance in Toronto in, if I’m not missing anything, two years. Almost exactly, in fact: it was near the end of March 2014 when Jordan appeared for three consecutive nights at Chalkers Pub. For two nights she performed accompanied by Don Thompson on piano and Neil Swainson on bass, and on the third night she led a vocal workshop, accompanied by Thompson alone. I was in attendance at all three events, having volunteered, way ahead of time, for door duties.

Sheila Jordan comes across on and off stage as a warm and caring person. You can always tell whether someone has any genuine interest in what other people are saying, or whether they’re waiting for their own turn to talk. Sheila belongs to the former camp. She cares about people. She loves the world. She has a sense of humour and a sense of wonder, and all that is on display when she performs.

When she performs, she’s equal parts singer and storyteller – both during and in between songs. Her songs are both deliberate and spontaneous – rehearsed and subject to change. Each time you hear her sing, it is worth hearing. As the concerts grow chronologically further away, my memories of them become fuzzier. But almost a year ago, I wrote that “In addition to being a genuine and adventurous performer, [Sheila is] one of the sweetest, most infectiously charming people I’ve ever spoken with.” I stand by that.

I bought two CDs while I was there – one of Jordan’s, Yesterdays, which is a duo album with bassist Harvie Swartz, and the Thompson/Swainson duo album, Tranquility, both of which I will recommend wholeheartedly, and the latter of which was reviewed for The WholeNote by the late Jim Galloway earlier that year.

These concerts will take place at Jazz Bistro on April 1 and 2; the cover charge is $20 and dinner reservations are, as I write this, still available.

Nathan Hiltz: The following day, April 3, at the same venue, you can check out Nathan Hiltz’s trio, with Pat Collins on bass and Morgan Childs on drums, playing tunes by one of my favourite jazz composers, and by very far my favourite jazz lyricist, Cole Porter. On some tunes, those lyrics will be delivered by Ori Dagan, in whose mouth those lyrics can be said to be in good hands. Or, around good teeth – whatever you like.

I know I’ve taken up all this space talking about a couple of shows which, more likely than not, are in the past as you read this, so before signing off, I want to direct your attention to a weekly engagement which shows no signs of stopping. If you dig or dug Hiltz’s guitar playing in a trio setting, you may dig him in the organ jazz quartet Organic, which generally features Bernie Senensky on the organ, Hiltz on guitar, Childs on drums, and Ryan Oliver on sax. The band has been together since its genesis over a decade ago, Oliver’s brainchild, and their effortless chemistry makes that more than apparent. They play weekly on Sundays at Joe Mama’s. There is no cover or tip jar, so you can take the money you saved on that and buy more drinks at the bar than you normally would.

Musideum: You’ll notice, if you thumb through the listings this month, that Musideum is conspicuously absent. Early last month, Musideum owner and founder, Donald Quan, announced that the end of March would mark the end of Musideum as a venue for the foreseeable future. Quan is indefinitely – but not necessarily permanently – closing Musideum to focus on other understandably indispensable aspects of his life: his health, his family, his friends and his own musicianship.

Musideum was a remarkable venue, an intimate space in which to interact with other people: as a performer to an audience, as an audience to a performer, or artist to artist to artist. It will remain open as a store for the first few days of April, so I’d encourage anyone who still has the chance to, go now and check it out.

And I hope to see you all soon, in one club or another. Check the listings!

Bob Ben is The WholeNote’s jazz listings editor. He can be reached at jazz@thewholenote.com.

An unusual consensus is emerging in British media large and small, dailies and blogs, around the Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales co-produced opera The Devil Inside that premiered in January in Glasgow and that Tapestry Opera is bringing to Toronto this month thanks to the Scottish Government’s International Touring Fund. The Guardian and the Telegraph, The Scotsman and the Financial Times, Opera Britannia and the Boulezian Blog alike are heaping praise on the Stuart MacRae and Louise Welsh adaptation of a Faustian bargain story by R.L. Stevenson, The Bottle Imp, set in present day with a cast of four and a 14-member band. Said bottle central to the plot will grant any wish to its owner, but if it remains in his possession at the time of death, his soul will spend eternity in hell. The bottle changes hands and makes many a wish true, but the fever of greed grows and, with it, complications.

Michael Mori, artistic director of Tapestry Opera, has no doubt the work will resonate equally well with Toronto audiences. “The offer of making it rich, retiring at 30, living the high life without earning a cent–basically the temptations of the pseudo-American dream–are at the heart of this story, and a compelling examination of the fantasies we still hold dear today,” he explains. The adaptation is both loose and very faithful: the librettist Louise Welsh, one of Scotland’s greatest crime novelists, “has a great hand for animating characters that are both classic and clearly defined in the present,” he says.

Mori, a self-avowed fan of short stories with a touch of the supernatural by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and R.L. Stevenson himself, first heard of The Bottle Imp while collaborating on an Edinburgh Fringe Festival pitch with Scottish Opera. “We were working with Scottish Opera to pitch what was to become The Devil Inside, along with our own M’dea Undone, as a double bill for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The arrangement fell through, but the Scottish Opera team of MacRae/Welsh continued working on it independently. In the meantime I read up on the story and really fell in love with its dark magic…a little bit of Faust, and a little bit of Poe. The plot is intensely driven by human dynamics, not only of love but also of the struggle against greed and temptation.”

By all accounts, the director Matthew Richardson managed to create a visually rich production with fairly pared-down means. Michael Rafferty will conduct the 14 instrumentalists of the Scottish Opera Orchestra in the score by a composer Torontonians haven’t had a chance to hear before. Stuart MacRae works in the tradition of European modernism, so don’t expect the familiar, the well-travelled, the tonal or the melodic, but his music blends in with the drama and is genuinely operatic. Mori describes it as “energized and driven, managing to hold a shimmering tension while capturing vocal lyricism in each of his characters.” Nothing will stand out or distract: “During the show, you may not even think about the music. MacRae allows the listener to be completely lost in the story.”

The Devil Inside will be Tapestry Opera’s first time presenting an international company. “I hope to do more of this at Tapestry, and also look forward to bringing our great Canadian artists to Scotland and the world. The boldness and the immediacy of chamber opera provide a powerful incentive to find and create more works of this size.”

The Devil Inside plays at Harbourfront Centre Theatre March 10 and 13.

Opera Atelier is bringing Mozart’s early work Lucio Silla home to Toronto (April 7 to 16, Elgin Theatre), after notable Salzburg and La Scala runs with one of the best- known period orchestras in the world, Les Musiciens du Louvre, under one of today’s best-known practitioners of HIP (historically informed performance), conductor Marc Minkowski. And with this, some good news: the company has secured a recurring engagement with the Royal Opera of Versailles, which will host an Opera Atelier production every second year. Marshall Pynkoski directs and Jeanette Lajeunesse-Zingg is in charge of choreography, with a new set and costumes by resident OA designer, Gerard Gauci. (The production seen in Salzburg and La Scala was designed by Antoine Fontaine, French designer of baroque opera with a series of notable credits like Ivan Alexandre’s recent Hyppolite et Aricie at the Paris Opera and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette among many other films.)

International collaborations of this kind can only be good for a company which is rather conservative in its instincts–faithful to its dance-focused “baroque gesture” aesthetics for 30 years now, whether it’s staging Lully or von Weber or anything in between, and faithful to a core group of returning artists (in Toronto, for example, the company’s performances with Tafelmusik are only ever conducted by David Fallis). Baroque operas are being staged around the world in all kinds of ways today, from those in modern clothes (Wieler’s and Morabito’s Alcina, for example) to spare and abstract (Pierre Audi’s Castor et Pollux, Robert Carsen’s Les Boréades) to fantastic reinvention (Laurent Pelly’s Platée, Jonathan Kent’s Hippolyte et Aricie) to, more rarely, those indeed in Antoine Fontaine-like stylized reconstruction aesthetics (Michel Fau, Ivan Alexandre). But Opera Atelier remains true to its 30-year-old blueprint.

And continues to divide baroque lovers in Toronto: there are its core fans and donors who like what it does and come back for exactly the familiar, and then there are those who, like myself, are wishing it would be bolder and stray from where it’s most comfortable – beautiful costumes, muscular dancers, stock gestures. One of the most memorable operas I’ve seen was a Charpentier’s Médée at the Frankfurt Opera set in present day, in a wealthy businessman’s penthouse that hosts Medea’s refugee family. Charpentier and the period band under Andrea Marcon went along just fine with a very modern interpretation by the director David Hermann. Why can’t I see productions like this at home, I wondered then. And I still do.

How much of the OA rulebook will be honoured in Lucio Silla, and whether the production will surprise us, remains to be seen in – there are a few clips from the La Scala performance on YouTube to whet the appetite. Krešimir Spicer (Lucio) and Inga Kalna (Cinna) of the original cast join Mireille Asselin (Celia), Peggy Kriha Dye (Cecillio) and Meghan Lindsay (Giunia). Trouser role lovers, rejoice: there are two in this production, Cecilio and Lucio Cinna. Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra under David Fallis will be in the pit.

Trouser roles: Speaking of gender-bending trouser roles, there will be two more on offer in Handel’s Alcina, the Glenn Gould School Opera’s spring performance at Koerner Hall, March 16 and 18. The romantic lead Ruggiero is a trouser role usually sung by a mezzo, and the small role of the boy Oberto often goes to a young light soprano. The opera also has one en travesti role in Bradamante, who is disguised as a man for most of the proceedings. Although arguably Handel’s best and most popular opera–okay, together with Giulio Cesare and a couple others–Alcina is all too rarely performed in Toronto. The long-time chorus master of Tafelmusik Choir, Ivars Taurins, will conduct the Royal Conservatory Orchestra on modern instruments, while as usual a selection of GGS students is cast in lead roles. Soprano Meghan Jamieson will be Alcina, while coloratura soprano Irina Medvedeva as her sister Morgana gets to sing what is probably the best known aria of the opera, Tornami a vagheggiar. Bradamante and Ruggiero will be interpreted by the mezzos Lillian Brooks and Christina Campsall respectively. The semi-staged Alcina will be directed by Leon Major, the artistic director of The Maryland Opera Studio for the University of Maryland, College Park.

Bunyan: Over at the Toronto’s other opera school, Sandra Horst will conduct the Britten-Auden operetta Paul Bunyan as part of the University of Toronto Faculty of Music Opera Series, March 10 to 13 in the MacMillan Theatre. The cast is large and varies between performances, but some names will already be known to opera-going Torontonians: mezzos Megan Quick and Emily D’Angelo and soprano Danika Lorèn, for example, who have joined the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio this year. The greater pleasure of attending student performances is of course discovering unknown talent, and the complete cast list can be found on the U of T Opera’s Paul Bunyan web page (uoftopera.ca/paul-bunyan). This fully staged production will be directed by Michael Patrick Albano and designed by Lisa Magill and Fred Perruzza.

Quick Picks

Megan Quick can also be heard in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the Schoenberg-Riehn arrangement for chamber orchestra on Mar 21 in Walter Hall, with the University of Toronto Faculty of Music Artist Ensemble, and Andrew Haji singing the tenor part. The mezzo will also sing Die Waldtaube from Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, another piece rarely performed in Toronto.

Collectif Toronto is a new addition to the alternative operatic scene in the city, an ensemble formed by the singers Danika Lorèn, Whitney O’Hearn and Jennifer Krabbe. On Mar 20 at 7:30pm in Haliconian Hall, the three singers and Tom King on piano will perform As a Stranger, a dramatized and adapted but complete Winterreise, Schubert’s sombre song cycle. Concept by Whitney O’Hearn, direction and videography by Danika Lorèn.

Canadian Opera Company’s midday Vocal Series is getting interactive on Mar 15, in a concert of operatic arias and sing-along choruses featuring young artists of the COC Ensemble Studio and Kyra Millan, soprano and opera educator. Love the tenor voice? There’s a COC Vocal Series performance for that. In the “Four Tenors” concert on Mar 29 Jean-Philippe Fortier-Lazure, Aaron Sheppard, Andrew Haji and Charles Sy join forces in a program of tenor arias and ensembles.

Soprano Teiya Kasahara will collaborate with the drumming ensemble Raging Asian Women Taiko Drummers and percussionist/flutist Heidi Chan on a program titled “Crooked Lines: Stories in Between,” Mar 11 to 13. Kasahara is a 2010 COC Ensemble Studio graduate whose career is expanding to Germany: in May of this year, she returns to Aalto-Musiktheater Essen to resume the role of Fata Morgana in Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges.

And a new Canadian work to conclude with: Isis and Osiris: Gods of Egypt (music by Peter Anthony Togni, libretto by Sharon Singer) will premiere in concert at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. Soprano Lucia Cesaroni and tenor Ernesto Ramirez sing the title roles, with mezzo Julie Nesrallah as Nephtis and baritone Michael Nyby as Seth, Stuart Graham as The Grand Vizier, Christopher Wattam as Imhotep and Leigh-Ann Allen as Sennefer. The soloists, the chorus and the 11-piece orchestra will be conducted by Robert Cooper on Apr 1 and 3. 

Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto. Her new book of fiction–a novella All That Sang–is coming out in April with Véhicule Press.

The youthful and adventurous Danish Ensemble Midtvest (EMV) makes its Canadian debut, March 13, as part of Mooredale Concerts’ current season. Mooredale’s artistic director, cellist Adrian Fung told me via email how he first met the group: “My Afiara Quartet tours Denmark every two years, each time playing over 20 cities. It was on one of these trips that I met the EMV, which is managed by the same energetic gentleman (Oliver Quast) who builds our successful Danish tours.”

Based in Herning, which is in the centre of west Jutland (hence the “midwest” reference), in the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (HEART), EMV consists of five string players, a pianist and a wind quintet. As Fung pointed out, “They bring an incredible flexibility to their playing, as the size of their ensemble shrinks and expands to the benefit of the repertoire and their programming. Think of a team of chefs that each have their specialty, but only called to the fore when the menu calls for it.”

Their Walter Hall concert will see six members of EMV joined by American clarinet virtuoso, Charles Neidich, “a celebrated luminary of the clarinet” as Fung dubbed him, in a program that focuses on the ensemble’s piano-wind nexus. Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s  Fantasy: Pieces for Oboe and Piano Op.2 opens the recital and I was able to get a sense of it by sampling EMV’s cpo CD, Neilsen: Complete Chamber Works for Winds. I was struck by the richness of Peter Kristein’s singing tone on the oboe in the Romance and look forward to hearing him and pianist Martin Qvist Hansen live. Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-Flat Major K452 stands at the pinnacle of writing for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. I have been in love with it since childhood when my father introduced me to the Angel LP with pianist Walter Gieseking and the Philharmonia Wind Quartet that included the legendary hornist Dennis Brain.

Two months after Schubert finished writing Die schöne Müllerin, he took the 18th song in the cycle (Faded Flowers) and used it as the basis of a set of variations, Introduction and Variations on “Trockne Blumen” for Flute and Piano D802 Op posth.160. A solemn introduction leads into the gentle bucolic theme and as the variations progress the flutist is called on to convey beauty, tempestuousness, vulnerability and propriety. Flutist Charlotte Norholt, who will perform the work here in March, said before EMV’s first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2012 (in a Danish video available on YouTube) that “the quest for musical excellence is the driving force of this ensemble.”

For Brahms’ Clarinet Trio in A Minor Op.114, cellist Jonathan Slaatto joins pianist Hansen to welcome back special guest Neidich for this enduring late-in-life masterpiece that was inspired by the same clarinetist (Richard Mühlfeld) who led Brahms to write his equally memorable clarinet quintet and sonatas. Slaatto, in that same YouTube video from 2012, expressed part of what makes EMV (and any good ensemble) tick when he said, referring to finding a suitable tempo, that your own view of any piece is subordinate to the view of the group as a whole.

Fung told me that he “was lucky to nab EMV on the same trip they are playing New York’s Carnegie Hall (their third appearance with them).” I suspect the Mooredale audience will agree after hearing their March 13 concert.

Maxim Vengerov. On March 11, the universally acclaimed violinist, the extraordinary Maxim Vengerov, makes his first recital appearance in Toronto since a right shoulder injury and recovery from surgery forced him to suspend playing for four years in 2007. His Roy Thomson Hall concert with pianist Patrice Laré, presented by the Montreal Chamber Music Society, will include Franck’s emotionally rich classic, Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, Ysaÿe’s devilishly difficult, unaccompanied Sonata for Violin No.6 as well as music by Brahms and Paganini.

I got a sense of Vengerov’s journey back, which involved an assiduous rehab and reinvention of his violin technique from much reportage on the Internet, particularly Laurie Niles’ revelatory violinist.com interview published on January 9, 2013. In that interview, Vengerov also spoke of his close relationship to cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, both of whom he got to know as a teenager.

Of Rostropovich, Vengerov says he was “like a musical father, he was so close to my heart; I think it was his great musicianship and also understanding of the violin repertoire, of the stringed instruments, that helped us to build an incredible chemistry that I had with no one else.”

Barenboim, Vengerov says, would “view a piece of music as an instrumentalist, as a pianist, from the harmonic point of view, from the orchestration, colouring,” whereas Rostropovich had an “instant connection with the composer, with the soul of the composer,” imagining he was the composer himself performing the music.

Of course Vengerov himself has conducted successfully (as anyone in the audience in October of 2012 at Roy Thomson Hall was only too aware, for his historic double role as soloist/conductor with the TSO in an exceptional performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade), but the violin remains his “first source of communication with the audience – no doubt my first love.”

Vengerov looked at the time when he couldn’t play as beneficial to deepening his musical knowledge. “I think I have more colours to my violin playing than before, for the fact that I hear it somehow differently.” He also discovered, after surgery, that he had to change his technique so that he moves much less; he had been putting too much physical effort into his playing. Working with quite a lot of pain forced him to relax his playing. “If I had pain, that meant I was doing something wrong,” he said.

All in the service of the music, of “the great heritage Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky left for us. We have to deliver these great works in the best possible way that we can. We have to find a very personal approach to them. Every soloist nowadays has to try to say something unique, something personal. Otherwise, if you’re playing just another performance of Brahms’ concerto, why do we need to hear that? That is the great lesson that Barenboim taught me…Just study the score…I want to really hear your Sibelius, your discovery, based on your new, detailed knowledge of the musical score.”

Takemitsu in Kyoto. An unexpected delivery of a DVD recently rekindled memories of Toru Takemitsu, who won the Glenn Gould Prize six years before Pierre Boulez. The DVD, Kyoto, is a quasi-documentary, part travelogue, atmospheric portrait of a place and a lifestyle, made in 1968 by the Japanese master filmmaker Kon Ichikawa (The Makioka Sisters) with a soundtrack by Takemitsu, then in his late 30s. Its 37 minutes are densely packed with artfully composed images that treat a rock garden, a Buddhist temple and a royal villa with the same aesthetic respect as that given to the people who walk the city’s streets. Takemitsu’s music, mysterious and quietly surprising but always filled with a deep humanity, acts as the foundation that illuminates these images. With a modernist sensibility always conscious of a cultural past, his score is an essential component of this fascinating piece of cinematic art. The handsomely packaged DVD is available from martygrossfilms.com. Many years ago, I was fortunate to be invited to watch Takemitsu at work one afternoon supervising the marriage of music, sound design and image in Marty Gross’ exquisite Bunraku film, The Lovers’ Exile. Takemitsu’s attention to detail, personal warmth and humility made a lasting impression.

QUICK PICKS

Music Toronto: If you’re quick off the mark you may be fortunate enough to hear the eminent British pianist Steven Osborne Mar 1. On Mar 10 the exuberant Montreal string ensemble, collectif9, performs a diverse program including Geof Holbrook’s Volksmobiles, from collectif9’s CD of the same name which Strings Attached DISCoveries’ columnist Terry Robbins praises elsewhere in these pages. Mar 17 the ebullient Quatuor Ébène’s strong program begins with Mozart’s delightful Divertimento K136, moves to Debussy’s Quartet in G Minor (a piece they own) before concluding with Beethoven’s immortal String Quartet No.14 Op.131. Apr 5 Duo Turgeon, husband-and-wife duo pianists, perform a heavyweight program that includes a new arrangement of Ravel’s Second Suite from Daphnis and Chloe by Vyacheslav Gryaznov, Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini and Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn as well as pieces by the Russian Valery Gavrilin and the Canadian Derek Charke.

Royal Conservatory: I wrote in my last column about the talented young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang and her Koerner Hall debut Mar 2. She’s followed Mar 4 by Canadian violinist Karen Gomyo, Swiss cellist Christian Poltéra and Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen in an appealing program of Mittel-European fare. On Mar 20 Paul Lewis performs his first solo recital in this city since his remarkable Toronto debut with the Women’s Musical Club in the fall of 2013. In this upcoming Koerner Hall concert, he focuses on Brahms (Four Ballades Op.10; Three Intermezzi Op.117), Liszt (the transformative Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi una sonata, “‘Dante Sonata” from Années de pèlerinage, Italie) and Schubert (the enchanting Sonata D575). On  Mar 29 the current crop of Rebanks fellows are on display in a recital in Mazzoleni Hall, which is also the venue Apr 7  for chamber music by Haydn, Berg (the uber-Romantic Lyric Suite) and Dvořák (the charming Piano Quintet No.2 Op.81) performed by the Musicians from Marlboro. In Koerner Hall on Mar 30 violinist Augustin Dumay and pianist Louis Lortie bring their powerful musical gifts to sonatas by Beethoven (“Spring”), Franck and Richard Strauss.

Perimeter: Best known as artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, husband-and-wife cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han bring their considerable performing talents to the Perimeter Institute Mar 10, in a program of music by Richard Strauss, Chopin, Messiaen, Glazunov and Albéniz.

Nocturnes in the City: Pianist Adam Zukiewicz plays Beethoven and Liszt Mar 13. (One evening earlier, Mar 12, Zukiewicz plays a similar program at St. Basil’s Church.) The Czech-based Epoque Quartet plays Vivaldi, Jezek and others at the Praha restaurant Mar 27. Notable Czech pianist and Smetana specialist, Jan Novotný, makes a welcome visit to Toronto for a recital that includes music by Smetana, Schubert and Mozart.

Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society: The final weekend of the Attacca Quartet’s Haydn 68 series takes place Mar 18, 19 and 20; since their last appearance in the KWCMS Music Room, the quartet has a new violist, Nathan Schram. (My Q & A with the KWCMS’ Jean and Jan Narveson and interview with former Attaca violist Andrew Fleming appeared in The WholeNote’s November 2013 issue as the complete Haydn string quartet cycle began.) Mar 24 cellist Rachel Mercer and pianist Angela Park perform the complete Mendelssohn works for cello; on Apr 3 they join violinist Elissa Lee and violist Sharon Wei, their partners in Ensemble Made in Canada, for a Syrinx concert of music by Beethoven, Schumann and Omar Daniel.

Academy Concert Series presents Mozart’s masterful Sinfonia Concertante K364 for violin, viola and orchestra, and Beethoven’s first sonata for cello and piano, Op.5 No.1, transcribed by nineteenth-century arrangers for string sextet and cello quintet, respectively, Mar 19. Also Mar 19, Jeffery Concerts presents the TSO Chamber Soloists – Nora Shulman, flute, Teng Li, viola, Jonathan Crow, violin, Heidi Van Hoesen Gorton, harp, and Joseph Johson, cello, in a program of music by Françaix, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel and Jongen.

The TSO: Stéphane Denève, principal conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, leads the TSO in a crowd-pleasing program Mar 23 and 24 that features the charismatic Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist in Saint-Saëns’ exotic Piano Concerto No.5 “Egyptian.” On Mar 31 the TSO presents the Victoria Symphony conducted by Tania Miller with Stewart Goodyear as soloist in Grieg’s lyrical Piano Concerto. Soprano Carla Huhtanen, poet Dennis Lee and narrator Kevin Frank join conductor Earl Lee in two afternoon Young People’s Concert performances Apr 2 of Abigail Richardson-Schulte’s musical treatment of Lee’s iconic children’s classic, Alligator Pie. It would be a surprise if Gabriela Montero didn’t improvise her own cadenza in Mozart’s sublime Piano Concerto No.20 K466 when she appears as soloist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra under its new conductor Alexander Shelley Apr 2; two of Richard Strauss’ most exciting tone poems, Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration open and close the concert.

Massey Hall/Roy Thomson Hall presents Chopin champion Yundi in his first Toronto recital in a decade Mar 19; the famously conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra features Pinchas Zukerman as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.3 K216, a masterpiece of gallantry and lightness, and in Beethoven’s tender First Romance, Mar 20.

Canzona presents the XIA Quartet – Edmonton Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Robert Uchida and Toronto Symphony Orchestra members, violinist Shane Kim, assistant principal violist, Theresa Rudolph, and principal cellist, Joseph Johnson, playing music by Bartók, Debussy and Schubert, Mar 20 at St. Andrew by-the-Lake, on Toronto Island, repeated Mar 21 on the mainland.

Three years ago, Rashaan Allwood was the very rare recipient of a perfect 100 in his ARCT Royal Conservatory exam. Now he’s a U of T student with an upcoming free recital Mar 26 at Walter Hall of piano music inspired by birdsong and nature – Messiaen, Ravel, Liszt, Granados and others.

Last month I wrote about Andrew Burashko, Art of Time Ensemble’s founder and artistic director; the group’s unmissable next concert, “Erwin Schulhoff: Dada, Jazz and the String Sextet: Portrait of a Forgotten Master,” takes place Apr 1 and 2 at Harbourfront Centre Theatre.

Following their playing of Mendelssohn’s engaging String Quartet No.2, U of T Faculty of Music ensemble-in-residence, the Cecilia String Quartet is joined by James Campbell for a performance of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet, a cornerstone of the clarinet repertoire, Apr 4.

The COC orchestra’s top two violinists, Marie Bérard and Aaron Schwebel, give a free noontime concert featuring music by Ysaÿe and Leclair, in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, Apr 5. 

Paul Ennis the managing editor of The WholeNote.

The month of March begins in a big way this year with the annual New Creations Festival presented by the Toronto Symphony. In last month’s issue I introduced the main features of what is being planned for the three concerts happening on March 5, 9 and 12, including the presence of guest composer, conductor, violist and co-curator Brett Dean from Australia. One of the three commissioned works for this year’s festival is a unique collaboration between composer Paul Frehner and filmmaker Peter Mettler. I had an opportunity to speak with both of these creators to find out how their piece for orchestra and film came into being and what we can expect to experience on March 9, the night of the performance.

I began by asking Frehner how the commission came to be and wondered if the two artists had worked together before. As it turned out, the project began when Frehner was approached by Gary Kulesha on behalf of the TSO with a request to be involved in the writing of a work for orchestra and film. According to Frehner, Mettler was then approached on a recommendation from film director Atom Egoyan. The two artists had never met before, so right from the beginning, they started with a dialogue that involved examples of each other’s work being sent back and forth, and engaging in conversations exploring various ideas that each were drawn to.

Writing music for film often takes a predictable path, where the composer writes to a set sequence of images. Not so with the way Mettler works. He has spent the last 12 years developing software that functions as an instrument for editing and mixing both image and sound to create a film “on the spot.” He can use this instrument to both improvise and create, providing a personal challenge that is “far more exciting than just pushing play.” In the early stages of their collaboration, Mettler sent Frehner up to 90 minutes of raw footage, some of which were extended sequences. Frehner latched onto a few of these and wrote music inspired by those scenes. Using music software to create an orchestral rendering of the music, Frehner sent his sketches back to Mettler, who then began to improvise using his bank of 2000 or more images, finding visual complements to what the music was doing. Gradually a shape began to emerge as the dynamic exchange continued and in the end, many of the image sequences that Mettler chose were not related to those that Frehner was originally inspired to write music for.

In their initial dialogues, they discovered that they shared a mutual interest in science and physics. Beginning with conversations on particle physics, they eventually decided to focus the piece on ideas of cyclical rotation – orbits, tidal rhythms, and natural cycles, ending up with the title From the Vortex Perspective. Structurally, the music has both cyclical elements and abrupt changes. Several ideas return, each time with variations in orchestration.

Frehner’s compositional style can be described as eclectic, integrating such influences as Brit and American rock, jazz pianists Oscar Peterson and Keith Jarrett, early music, as well as the music of a range of composers including Grisey, Vivier and Nancarrow. In this project with Mettler, Frehner chose to feature the brass instruments prominently in various places, incorporating unison writing and the low register instruments. In other places, the string section has the main idea, whereas at other times, strings provide a textural background. Visually, the film begins with images of an abstracted forest environment, moving into reflections on water. At one point when the music becomes heavily punctuated, the viewer is taken through a sequence of different grasses and reeds with the sunlight bursting through to create complementary accents. Some of the slowly evolving scenes created opportunities for Frehner to linger longer with some of his musical ideas, taking his time to explore them rather than looking for other directions.

For the performance, the images will be projected onto three screens – two smaller monitors surrounded by a larger screen, with the spatial aspect of the three image sources becoming an aspect of the overall composition. And just as the conductor and musicians interpret the musical score, Mettler has created his own guiding score as an aid for his real-time performance during which he will respond to the subtleties of the music to create a live version of the film. Thus this work is a true performance in both mediums of image and sound.

As mentioned above, Brett Dean is this year’s guest of the New Creations Festival. As it turns out, Frehner and Dean crossed paths over ten years ago on two different occasions – in 2002 at the Winnipeg New Music Festival where Dean was the featured composer and Frehner had a composition; and a few years later at the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra’s International Composers Competition where Dean was the judge and Frehner was one of the composers present. Dean’s role as curator for the New Creations Festival includes the programming of three of his own works, each substantial pieces for orchestra, as well as works by fellow Australians Anthony Pateras and James Ledger.

New Music for Orchestra: The New Creations Festival is not the only chance to hear new orchestral work this next month. The Toronto Symphony will perform works by three Canadian composers: “Home” from New World by Michael Oesterle on March 31, Alligator Pie by Abigail Richardson-Schulte on April 2 in matinee performances, and Ringelspiel by Ana Sokolović, performed by the evening’s guest performers – the National Arts Centre Orchestra – on April 2. On March 31, Esprit Orchestra teams up with the Elmer Iseler Singers for their last concert of the season to perform two newly commissioned works with mythic themes: Soul and Psyche for choir and orchestra, composed by Esprit’s founder and conductor Alex Pauk, and Sirens by Canadian Douglas Schmidt. The program also includes Hussein Janmohamed’s choral work Nur: Reflections on Light, which weaves together Ismaili Muslim melodies, Quranic recitation and Indian ragas, and the classic orchestral dance score La création du monde by Darius Milhaud, infamous for its combination of jazz and classical rhythms from the early 1920s.

Soundstreams: Soundstreams is cooking this month with several events. Starting off in early March, they will present three concerts of the music of Scottish composer James MacMillan in three cites: Kingston (March 4), Kitchener (March 6) and Toronto (March 8). The program will highlight MacMillan’s masterpiece, Seven Last Words from the Cross, as well as selections from Schafer’s The Fall into Light. The Toronto concert will include additional works by MacMillan (The Gallant Weaver) and Schafer (In Memoriam Alberto Guerrero), along with a performance of James Rolfe’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, a Soundstreams commission from 2006 based on Walt Whitmans’s elegy written after the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

Then in mid-month, Soundstreams will kick off a series of events being planned to celebrate the 80th birthday of minimalist pioneer Steve Reich culminating in a gala concert on April 14. Getting the ball rolling will be their second Ear Candy event on March 19 featuring Reich’s first major work It’s Gonna Rain, created from a surprise discovery made while fiddling about with out-of-sync tape loops. The phasing technique he developed from these experiments paved the way for the birth of his minimalist aesthetic. It’s also an opportunity to hear his Electric Counterpoint which has been recorded by such artists as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, whose Water will have its Canadian premiere in the New Creations Festival on March 12. The Ear Candy evening also features a diverse array of local artists, each of whom has been influenced by the minimalist aesthetic. Four of these performers, including DJ SlowPitchSound and Brandon Valdivia, will also be performing the previous evening on March 18 at the Soundstreams’ Salon 21, which offers a historical look at the development of minimalism.

Music Gallery: The performance of Reich’s music continues over at the Music Gallery in a concert on March 17 featuring composer and performer Michael Century. In his earlier days, Century founded The Banff Centre for the Arts Media Arts program in 1988, a program that helped initiate new media practice in Canada. In this concert, Century will perform Reich’s Piano Counterpoint, an arrangement for solo piano and tape of Reich’s classic Six Pianos, as well as premieres of his own works for piano, accordion and live electronics. These works use open software and an eight-channel immersive speaker array. Additional pieces by American composers Julia Wolfe, John Cage and Morton Feldman will be heard in the second half of the evening.

The Music Gallery continues to mark their 40-year history with an installation and listening salon opening on March 11 celebrating their partnership with Musicworks Magazine. The magazine has a long tradition of including recordings with their print issues, first released as cassettes and now as CDs. Past and present editors and contributors to the cassette legacy will be speaking of their memories and experiences at the opening event.

New Music Concerts: New Music Concerts is also busy with two upcoming concerts. On March 11 (in Kitchener) and March 13 (in Toronto) in a co-presentation with the Music Gallery, the Quasar Saxophone Quartet performs music by five Quebecois composers writing for saxophone quartet and electronics, including video in one of the works. The quartet is dedicated to the creation of contemporary works with their interests ranging from instrumental music to improvisation and electronics. On April 3, the electronic theme continues with their concert entitled Viva Electronica. It will be an evening of three world premieres, all of them NMC commissions from composers Anthony Tan, Keith Hamel and Paul Steenhuisen. Each of these artists has done significant research in the world of electronics, live electroacoustics and music software programming, as well as taught the ins and outs of working with music technology at various universities.

Additional New Music Events:

Mar 6: John Laing Singers perform works by Glen Buhr and Eric Whitacre.

Mar 6: Junction Trio hosts Schola Magdalena performing works by Stephanie Martin.

Mar 10: Canadian Music Centre; “Truth North Stories” with piano works by Anhalt and Morawetz.

Mar 18 Canadian Music Centre; “Canadian Art Song Showcase” with works by Alice Ho, John Beckwith, Sylvia Rickard and Hiroki Tsurumoto.

Apr 2: Nagata Shachu with TorQ, performing works for Japanese, Western and world percussion.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

“…It’s important that we also treat games as art, and when the opportunity comes along to engage with games as works of art that we take advantage of that opportunity” – Matt Sainsbury, Editor-in-Chief, Digitally Downloaded

Easter marks the second busiest time of the year for the choral community, second only to Christmas. But even though much of this month’s column will be devoted to these wonderful musical opportunities, I thought I’d start out by focusing on something not often written about in Toronto – video game music.

The Legend of Zelda Symphony of the Goddesses – Master Quest arrives for one night, March 19, 8pm at the Sony Centre on its international tour. This updated show returns with some of the most iconic video game music ever written, including music from the newest game, “Tri Force Heroes.” It is a massive entertainment event that always sells out, so it doesn’t need our help. But I am highlighting it here for a number of reasons: it is a chance to see a talented female conduct a major work in Toronto; there is a lot of choral music in it and not all of it is English; I have friends who have sung it and really enjoy the energy of the music; normally, travelling shows like this won’t even bother to hire a choir; they’ll just record sung chords to a synthesizer and use that; so this is a nice treat; oh, and it’s really, really fun.

Japan has long embraced both gaming and music, having done live performances of video game music as early as 1991. In 2005, the very first video game concert by the LA Philharmonic in the Hollywood Bowl saw 11,000 attendees. In 2011 and 2012, the London Philharmonic recorded The Greatest Video Game Music, volumes one and two. These were huge hits and topped classical charts. The widely popular German Symphonic Game Music Concerts take place annually in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall. This is a major art form and an incredible source of new performance opportunities for both choirs and orchestras.

In Zelda, composer Koji Kondo’s music has been arranged into a full four-movement symphony for choir and orchestra with a host of smaller pieces representing 18 games over 30 years. Conductor Amy Andersson touring along with executive producer Jason Michael Paul, leads the Tallis Choir and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra.

Andersson, a former conducting fellow at the Aspen Music School, led the previous Symphony of the Goddesses – Second Quest on its international tour. A conducting veteran of Colorado Light Opera and the National Theatre of Mannheim, Andersson was married to the late Yakov Kreizberg (formerly of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra) and is sister-in-law to Semyon Bychkov (BBC Symphony Orchestra). Andersson attended Mannes School of Music at the New School with both Bychkov and Kriezberg.

As I mentioned, this ever-popular event is sure to sell out. Fair warning, this isn’t your typical performance; hooting and hollering is expected. Part symphony, part celebration, it’s jovial, fun and full of amazing instrumental and choral music. And definitely dress up; green tunics and fairies will abound.

Easter

One of the highlights of every Good Friday in the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir season is the “Sacred Music for a Sacred Space” concert that takes place annually in St Paul’s Basilica. This year several pieces will be highlighted including Eric Whitacre’s stunning Her Sacred Spirit Soars, a tribute to Queen Elizabeth I; Patrick Hawe’s Quanta Qualia for alto saxophone and choir; and a new commission, Leonard Enns’ I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes for alto saxophone, soprano saxophone and choir. Topping the list is the 2013 TMC commission by Timothy Corlis, God So Loved the World. This work is a textured soundscape that is both passionate and stark. The words are simple but powerful; some of the most poignant from the entire Passion of the Christ. “Pater, dimitte illis, non enim sciunt quid faciunt”: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” opens the seven-movement piece. “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani”: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” – in Aramaic and set to a dissonant C-minor chord in the fourth movement of this piece – is particularly moving.

As I have mentioned before, I sing with the TMC, and while rehearsing this Corlis song I found myself musing about the place of religious music in the context of our secular world. Classical music is largely played outside of the context it was created for; masses, for example, form the bulk of grand symphonic choral work – but not everyone can be present at a Herbert Von Karajan-led Mozart Coronation Mass in St Peter’s Basilica (1985). Those familiar with the Roman Catholic Mass, or who went to Catholic school, are acquainted with the tradition and ritual of the mass, and how music often accompanies specific actions and rituals during the liturgy. Most people who attend classical music concerts, specifically, those of a requiem or a mass, are disconnected from the history and the context of these important works. I wonder when a full mass was last played with symphony and choral forces in Toronto.

This year the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir presents “Sacred Music for a Sacred Space” Wednesday, March 23, and Good Friday, March 25. Look for me in the tenor section.

TSO’s Mozart Requiem: I believe Joel Ivany, the Elmer Iseler Singers, the Amadeus Choir, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra were able to bridge some of the disconnect of hearing sacred music in secular settings with the recent remarkable reimagining of the Mozart Requiem in January during the Mozart @261 Festival. Spectacular music making occurred in those performances and the TSO’s efforts to reach out to a younger and more diverse audience were noticeable and very welcome in the filled Roy Thomson Hall. Ivany focused our eyes on the grief and feelings of loss that come with death. These are universal core values that are relatable to many people. What may often be forgotten when listening to requiem masses is that they were created to accompany actual passing, ending, finality – the ultimate Christian passage for the faithful.

Ivany’s staging reminded me that there does exist a place for a secular mass and ritual in our daily lives and that the same emotions that drive these ancient masses continues to provide important experience and context to us centuries after they were written.

If you wish to see a more conventional Mozart Requiem, your chance comes with the massed skills of the Guelph Symphony Orchestra and the University of Guelph Choirs on March 20 at the Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate, Guelph.

Soundstreams Canada features Scotland’s most celebrated composer, Sir James MacMillan, with “The Music of James MacMillan.” The Grand Philharmonic Chamber Choir, the University of Waterloo Chamber Choir, Choir 21 and the Virtuoso String Orchestra perform MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross and other works on March 6 at St Peter’s Lutheran Church, Kitchener. Soundstreams presents a similar program with Choir 21 and Virtuoso String Orchestra in Kingston, March 4, at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. And in Toronto on March 8, at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre. MacMillan conducts each performance.

Quick Picks

The York University Chamber Choir performs “Musick to Heare” in the Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Accolade East Building on Mar 9. Featuring music inspired by Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies and sonnets, Robert Cooper leads the choir in George Shearing’s jazzy Songs and Sonnets, Ralph Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music, and other inspired works by Canadian composers Allan Becan, Berthold Carriere and Michael Coghlan.

The Queen’s University Symphony and Choral Ensemble and the Perth Choir perform Schubert’s Mass in C D462 and other works on Mar 18 in Grant Hall, Queen’s University, Kingston, in celebration of Queen’s 175th anniversary and the Town of Perth’s 200th.

The Kingston Symphony performs Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 on Mar 19 and 20, at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Kingston. The first half of the concert will examine sections of the work, its poetic source and inspiration, the influence it has had and explore “Why is this symphony so good?” all hosted by KSA conductor Evan Mitchell.

Voices Chamber Choir presents “Light Eternal” including Duruflé’s Quatre motets sur des thèmes Grégoriens, Gounod’s Ave Maria, Saint-Saëns’ Quam dilecta, and Fauré’s Requiem and Cantique de Jean Racine on Mar 19, at the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. This is a lovely chance to catch a wonderful collection of French masterworks.

Last month I mentioned the multimedia presentation of the Bach Mass in B Minor concurrent to the Bastian Clevé film The Sound of Eternity by the Orpheus Choir and Chorus Niagara in St Catherines, Mar 5, or in Toronto Mar 6, at Metropolitan United Church. For a more conventional performance, the Grand Philharmonic Chamber Choir presents the Bach Mass in B Minor on Mar 25, at the Centre in the Square, Kitchener.

Metropolitan United Church has a lovely Mar 25 lineup titled “Requiem: In a Time of Sorrow.” Featuring Bach’s Cantata No.78, Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody and Requiem, with several soloists I enjoy, including Claudia Lemcke, Jordan Scholl and the clear, strong tenor of Charles Davidson. I’d be at this performance if I weren’t performing “Sacred Music for a Sacred Space” with the Mendelssohn Choir.

And finally, Mar 31 at Koerner Hall, the Elmer Iseler Singers and Esprit Orchestra present a concert titled “La création du monde,” after the instrumental work of the same name by Darius Milhaud which opens the program. Highlight of the evening is Soul and Psyche, a new creation for choir and orchestra by Esprit music director, Alex Pauk – a five-movement “contemporary mass” with influences from Inuit poetry, Balinese prayer, and more. This is also a rare chance to catch Hussein Janmohammed’s Nur: Reflections on Light, a collection of choral miniatures inspired by the Ayat an-Nur-Verse of Light from the Qu’ran. Janmohammed’s work was commissioned for the opening of the Aga Khan Museum and the Ismaili Centre and had its world premiere there in 2014, performed by the Elmer Iseler Singers, conducted by Lydia Adams.

Follow Brian on Twitter @bfchang Send info/media/tips to choralscene@thewholenote.com

So. Is there any point in reading Beowulf anymore? It has the distinct honour of being the first work of literature from a non-Greek or Latin source text, but while a quick glance at U of T’s course calendar would seem to indicate that the Viking Age epic will likely show up on an Old English literature course, you could very easily complete an entire English undergraduate degree without ever having to read it. In fact, reading it may well be entirely unnecessary. The poem has also undergone countless adaptations and updates to appeal to a modern audience, including Sci-Fi film versions, operas, comic books (there is a Beowulf: The Graphic Novel if you care to read it), novels (including the Michael Crichton bestseller Eaters of the Dead) and, currently, a made-for-TV mini-series created for British television and starring a cast of complete unknowns.

It’s also well worth asking if Beowulf, being over a thousand years old, still holds up as literature. For practical purposes, reading it in the original Old English is effectively impossible. And despite numerous translations into modern English spanning over two centuries (including a very fine, if overly creative, adaptation by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney), Beowulf is, as I mentioned, no longer required reading. As poetry – in the sense of an exploration of language and wordplay – it probably won’t impress a modern audience. If you’ve read it, you will probably recall that the poet’s technique of choice was alliteration not rhyme, and rhythm not metre – not particularly impressive in a digital age. Besides, the plot is next to non-existent and focuses on a series of fights between the titular hero and increasingly large and dangerous monsters. What’s up with that? as they say these days. I also doubt if too many potential readers are at all interested in the period in which Beowulf is set – that is, Northern Europe between the 8th and 11th centuries. I’m no historian, but I take historians’ word for it when they call the period the Dark Ages. (And we haven’t even touched on the issue of whether the Beowulf poet’s own audience would or could have even read the poem themselves.) What were literacy levels like in eighth-century Denmark? What was their book publishing industry like? I’m guessing not very robust. So does the literary canon still need Beowulf, or should it be stricken from the roster of classic literature?

To answer this question, one need look no further than the very interesting life of one Benjamin Bagby who has made a career as (to my knowledge) the world’s only bard, meaning he travels the world performing ancient epic poetry and accompanies himself on the Anglo-Saxon harp. Yes, this is literally his day job. Bagby claims he was captivated by the Beowulf saga from the day he read it at the age of 12, and I for one am prepared to completely believe him. Since he first read it, Bagby taught himself to perform the epic in the original Old English, and has since been touring Beowulf around the world as a solo performance for the last decade. If there is any justification for Beowulf’s place in the literary canon, Bagby’s performance is it, and this month, he’ll be performing the epic poem (with English surtitles) in Toronto at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, courtesy of Toronto Consort, on March 11 and 12. I can’t think of any better reason for historically inspired performance than to revive classic musical or literary works and present them to the public in a manner as close to the original as modern scholarship will let us get. We still have no idea who wrote Beowulf, but if he knew his poem was still being performed over a thousand years later to sold-out concert halls, he’d be gobsmacked.

Swan of Avon: Some literary classics are more accessible than others, some because they’re written in modern English, and some because, unlike Bagby’s Beowulf, tickets haven’t already almost sold out a month in advance. So, while you still can, avail yourself of tickets to the Musicians in Ordinary who are in the midst of a three-concert series devoted to Shakespeare, featuring ornate poetry and elaborate musical arrangements (albeit fewer monster fights than Bagby’s Beowulf). But, like Bagby, “Sweet Swan of Avon” attempts to take the audience into the language of Shakespeare’s time, rendering Shakespeare’s words more the way people would have said them at the time, rather than, as is more customary these days, like a modern dude who happens to have studied Shakespeare. March 19 at 8pm, in the intimate surrounds of the Heliconian Hall, the MiO present the second of this three-concert series, “Shakespeare’s Saints & Sinners,” featuring excerpts from Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet read by U of T prof David Klausner, along with lute songs by Dowland and Thomas Campion, and motets with strings composed by Orlando Gibbons. Violinist Chris Verrette leads a string band along with soprano Hallie Fishel and lutenist John Edwards for a concert that’s 100 percent Shakespearean. Check it out, as well as the third concert in the series, “Shakespeare’s Sorrows,” which takes place at the same venue on April 23, the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

Sweet Kisses: Shakespeare still too serious? If you’re looking to enjoy a concert that that’s passionate, emotional and exciting, but demands less gravitas than (say) Shakespeare or Old English epics, consider checking out a concert by the Cantemus Singers instead. “Sweet Kisses/Baci Soavi” is a concert of Italian madrigals on March 19 at one of the hidden gems of Toronto’s downtown core – the Church of the Holy Trinity. By the end of the Renaissance in Italy, poetry and music went from romantic and refined to a roller coaster of emotions. One really wonders how Italians of the 16th century were able to make it through the day without making themselves lovesick. Soprano Iris Krizmanic joins the Cantemus singers for a program of music by aristocrat, composer and murderer Carlo Gesualdo and the undisputed father of the musical Renaissance, Claudio Monteverdi, as well as by two lesser-knowns – Monteverdi’s contemporary Luca Marenzio, and the composer/nun Vittoria Aleotti (apparently a nun of the time could write sordid love songs and none of her colleagues seemed to mind). This sounds like a thoughtful, in-depth exploration of the Italian renaissance vocal repertoire by a group that has made madrigals their specialty. Be sure to check this concert out.

Polyphonic grand tour: For the more contemplative, the Oratory at Holy Family Church has a special concert for Lent that features sacred music from the Renaissance that transcends the everyday world of the secular. There, on March 16 at 8pm, you can hear a sung compline and a choral concert which includes choral pieces and arias by Bach, two settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Byrd and Tallis, and motets by Victoria and Cristóbal de Morales. It’s a grand tour of sacred polyphony by some of the greatest composers of the Renaissance performed by some exceptional singers.

Alard’s Goldberg: Finally, Tafelmusik is presenting a special concert of chamber music featuring the French harpsichordist Benjamin Alard that is sure to delight Bach aficionados. Alard is just 30 years old but is already working his way through the master’s repertoire for solo harpsichord. This month, Alard comes to Trinity-St. Paul’s, March 31 to April 3, to play the Goldberg Variations. He’ll be joined by Grégoire Jeay, Jeanne Lamon and Cristina Mahler to play the masterful trio sonata from The Musical Offering. Alard is a Bach specialist who already established that he has what it takes to make it as a soloist before his 30th birthday, so it will definitely be worth it to hear his take on Bach’s masterpiece. 

David Podgorski is a Toronto-based harpsichordist, music teacher and a founding member of Rezonance. He can be contacted at earlymusic@thewholenote.com.

Rachel Andrist and Monica Whicher jointly direct the Mazzoleni Songmasters Series which consists of three vocal concerts each season. Andrist is a member of the music staff at the Canadian Opera Company. Her first appointment as a vocal coach was at the La Monnaie in Brussels. Since then she has held similar positions with the Salzburg Festival, with Glyndebourne, with the English National Opera, with the Bavarian State Opera, with Netherlands Opera and with Scottish Opera. She is also a collaborative pianist and she finds both kinds of work support each other. As she points out, one meets a singer as a vocal coach and that opens up the possibility of a joint recital. Whicher is a soprano well known for her work in recitals (including a number of appearances with the Aldeburgh Connection) and her part in opera productions by the Canadian Opera Company and Opera Atelier. Both Andrist and Whicher also teach in the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory.

When Andrist and the pianist-composer John Greer began the Recitals at Rosedale series two seasons ago, the time seemed just right for such an undertaking. The Aldeburgh Connection had ceased to exist and a real vacuum developed. Yet the concerts were a mixed success. Although Rosedale Presbyterian is not all that difficult to get to, it would seem off the mental map of many, so that audiences were disappointing. Another problem was that the space at Rosedale was small and the acoustics very live. Not all singers were able to scale their voices down to an appropriate level. The move this season to Mazzoleni Hall at the Royal Conservatory seems a wise one. The hall is familiar, the acoustics are good and the series, now retitled Songmasters (with a punning reference to the already existing Mazzoleni Masters) now has the backing of the Conservatory with its good publicity.

Their next concert takes place March 6. The singers are the soprano, Mireille Asselin, and the baritone, Brett Polegato. The pianists are Andrist and Peter Tiefenbach. Andrist believes strongly that for a recital to make sense it must be structured round a central theme. The theme chosen for this concert is the way in which composers have been inspired by paintings. The major work in the program is Poulenc’s Le travail du peintre. These are settings of poems by Paul Éluard and evoke the work of seven contemporary painters: Picasso, Chagall, Braque, Gris, Klee, Miró and Villon. The program also includes Debussy’s Fêtes galantes. These are based on the Commedia dell’ arte but mediated by Watteau’s painting. Two Schumann songs from the collection Aus dem Liederbuch eines Malers follow. The next group contains settings of four poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence: two of them by British composers (Walton, Britten); and two by Walter MacNutt (1910-96), a composer now chiefly remembered as the music director at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church in Toronto.

Asselin was a student at the Glenn Gould School (where Monica Whicher was one of her teachers) and subsequently was a member of the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio. She has performed with the Metropolitan Opera, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and (many times) with Opera Atelier. Along with the tenor Lawrence Wiliford, she sings in Ash Roses, the CD of music by Derek Holman issued by the Canadian Art Song Project. You will also be able to hear her in Opera Atelier’s production of Mozart’s Lucio Silla, starting on April 7.

I first heard Polegato in the wonderful CD, To a Poet, settings by several composers of poems by Flecker, de la Mare, Housman and Hardy (CBC; not currently available). The first time I heard him live was in a Tafelmusik performance of Handel’s Messiah. I thought then that I had never heard the bass solos better sung and I have not changed my mind since. Polegato is now much in demand. One of the roles that he has made very much his own is that of Kurwenal in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. This spring he will again be singing it in Paris.

Bach and Brahms at Metropolitan United: In the Christian calendar Good Friday is the holiest day of the year. This year it falls on March 25. In the evening I intend to go to Metropolitan United Church for a performance of three works: the Brahms Requiem (with the soprano Gisele Kulak and the baritone Jordan Scholl as soloists), Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody (with Laura Pudwell, mezzo) and Bach’s Cantata No.78 (with soloists Alison Campbell, Claudia Lemcke, Charles Davidson and Jordan Scholl).

Lunchtime at the Richard Bradshaw Auditorium: The free lunchtime recitals at the Richard Bradshaw Auditorium in the Four Seasons Centre resume on Mar 15 when Kyra Millan, soprano and opera educator, presents a concert of arias and sing-along choruses, with artists from the COC Ensemble Studio. On Mar 17 Bob Anderson will conduct “Choral Journeys,” from the Renaissance to contemporary Canadian works, with Charles Sy, tenor. On Mar 29 you can hear four tenors: Jean-Philippe Fortier-Lazure, Aaron Sheppard, Andrew Haji, Charles Sy.

University of Toronto (Walter Hall): Megan Quick, contralto, and Andrew Haji, tenor, will sing, on Mar 21, in Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Quick will also sing Die Waldtaube from Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. Mar 31 you can hear a free recital by the winners of the Jim and Charlotte Norcop Prize in Song and the Gwendolyn Williams Prize in Accompanying. “The Art of the Prima Donna” on Apr 1 is a staged and costumed program of romantic opera with works by Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and others. The recital by the Cecilia Quartet on Apr 4 includes a new work by the composer and soprano Kati Agócs.

Quick Picks: Ilana Zarankin, soprano, and Laura McAlpine, mezzo, are the soloists in the Talisker Players presentation of “Spirit Dreaming: Creation Myths from Around the World” at Trinity-St.Paul’s Centre, Mar 1 and 2. The program includes works by Somers, Kuyas, Beckwith, Tanu, Ravel, Villa-Lobos and Jaubert. Paula Arciniego, mezzo, will sing works by composers ranging from Grieg to Theodorakis in Heliconian Hall, Mar 4. Alliance Française de Toronto presents Guy Smagghe in a selection of songs from Félix Leclerc to Francis Cabrel, Mar 5. Evelina Soulis celebrates her 50th birthday with mezzos Maria Soulis and Katerina Utochkina in music by Monteverdi, de Falla and others in Heliconian Hall, Mar 13. Bruce Ubukata will give a vocal master class at York University’s Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Mar 15. Xin Wang, soprano, and Derek Kwan, tenor, will sing an all-Canadian program with songs by Ho, Beckwith, Rickard and Tsuromoto on Mar 18 at the Canadian Music Centre. On Apr 7 the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto presents a program by the violist Steven Dann and family, including  soprano Ilana Zarankin.

And beyond the GTA: Bach’s Mass in B Minor can be heard in the Centre in the Square in Kitchener on Mar 25. The soloists are Carla Huhtanen, soprano, Allyson McHardy, mezzo, Colin Ainsworth, tenor, and James Westman, baritone. Ainsworth will also give a free noon-hour recital at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo on Mar 23. 

Hans de Groot is a concertgoer and active listener who also sings and plays the recorder. He can be contacted at artofsong@thewholenote.com.

I’ve weighed in on numerous occasions, in this column and in my WholeNote album reviews and blogs, about the vast scope of world music as a topic: its misty origins; the limits and problems associated with continued use of what was originally an academic idea, and then became a marketing term. It’s a notion that’s so hard to pin down with any precision, that some would argue not to bother.

Undaunted, I’ve endeavoured to chart its multifaceted presence at key regional venues and among presenters such as the Music Gallery, Small World Music, Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall and at the Lula Music and Arts Centre, as performed by its practitioners, and enjoyed – some might use the word consumed – by its myriad audiences. On a couple of occasions I have highlighted stories about its educational role at our regional institutions of higher learning. For instance, my column in the April 2014 issue of The WholeNote featured the flourishing Balinese Gamelan ensemble course offered at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo.

For some mysterious reason, perhaps Freudian or Jungian, however, I have so far neglected to explore world music’s abiding 47-year presence at my alma mater, York University’s Music Department. Luckily this March arms me with several reasons to fill that lacuna: ten back-to-back upcoming concerts; two recent conversations; and the retirement of one of York’s key world music animators, Trichy Sankaran.

The first conversation: I turned first to world music's prime initiator at York, the man with the plan, York U. professor emeritus R. Sterling Beckwith. He’s the person I credit with introducing world music ensembles in Canadian universities as continuing credit courses. As York U. Music Department’s founding chair surely he could shed light on its fundamentals. He didn’t disappoint; his trenchant views and passion on the topic were as keen as ever.

“World music along with jazz has now been taken up by many American and Canadian universities; they have become fixtures there,” he began. “Long gone are the days when they considered it beneath their interest,” he added.

“Well before I arrived at York, I took [pioneering] ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood’s Javanese gamelan class at Harvard. I also spent time with the retired senior musicologist Charles Seeger. Among other things, he praised the American Carnatic singer and ethnomusicologist Jon Higgins whose bi-musical [a term coined by ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood] reputation preceded him.” Even though Higgins was still at the very start of a remarkable career, he had already concertized, broadcast and recorded a Carnatic music LP with renowned musicians in India. (Spoiler alert: Higgins became a teacher and a mentor of mine at York.)

There is a back story here which Beckwith helpfully sketched for me. Mantle Hood’s groundbreaking ethnomusicology program at UCLA, established in 1960, came complete with performing ensembles, and produced Robert Brown the person who in turn kick-started the World Music program at Wesleyan University. Through Brown, we can trace the teacher-student lineage to Higgins. Brown served as Higgins’ PhD thesis advisor at Wesleyan. “I consider other American university ethnomusicology programs such as those at Washington University also direct descendants of Hood’s groundbreaking efforts at UCLA,” Beckwith added.

“Yet another defining pre-York U. experience was the discussion I had with the late Ravi Shankar about introducing applied Indian music studies at York. He was intrigued and recommended his sitar disciple Shambhu Das, who as it turned out, was already living in Toronto. All of that was in my head when I arrived here in 1969.”

Beckwith continued, “I was determined to implement the paradigm-altering gamelan experiences I had with Hood and the inspiring conversations I had with Seeger, as well as doing what I could to bring Higgins to York. As events would have it, my last official act as Music Department chair was to be able to hire Jon Higgins, which made it possible in turn to hire the gifted percussionist Trichy Sankaran a little later.”

Trichy Sankaran: One of Beckwith’s first world music hires, in 1971 – and significantly also one of the longest serving – was a mridangam and kanjira player with an international career, Trichy Sankaran. Sankaran passed a significant milestone last fall, retiring from York in September 2015 after an illustrious career spanning 44 years as a professor of music, researcher and textbook author. As well as serving as a co-founding director of its Indian music studies, one of Canada’s first university-based world music performance programs, he also developed hybrid Carnatic and Western pedagogical practices. Certainly one of Sankaran’s most significant contributions at York was his marked influence on a couple of generations of students, many of whom have gone on to become established musicians, composers and educators. His outstanding achievements as an educator were recognized with the OCUFA Award, given by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations for teaching excellence.

Along with Beckwith, I and many other Sankaran friends, colleagues and students were present at York’s Tribute Communities Recital Hall last September. Few there doubted that the event marked the closing of a long and important first chapter in the music department’s grand – and continuing – adventure in world music education.

The occasion was celebrated in style with a formal concert in which Sankaran was joined on stage by his vocalist daughter Suba Sankaran, leader of the JUNO-nominated Indo-jazz-funk fusion ensemble Autorickshaw, and her bandmates, bass guitarist and singer Dylan Bell, and tabla player Ed Hanley. The musicians gave authoritative performances of solo and ensemble works, the repertoire including original compositions by the senior Sankaran. As well as signalling the passing on of an intergenerational musical torch, it additionally asserted (at least my awareness of) the emergence of a specific family-centered kind of Indo-Canadian hybrid music-making, echoing the venerable Indian tradition of guru-shishya parampara. As for the continuity of Carnatic music education at York pioneered by Sankaran, that subject appears to be moot.

The second conversation: Throughout its first three decades, York’s world music ensemble courses remained relatively constant and few. It was only around the very early 2000s that I became aware of a dramatic increase in the number of world music ensembles. The trend only crossed my personal radar after, in 1999, I was hired, by Michael Coughlan, the incoming Music Department chair, as the founding course director of the Javanese Gamelan (ensemble) course. During the years I taught the course, the number and range of music ensembles seemed to grow almost exponentially, and the students attracted to them likewise swelled.

What’s the current state of the university’s world music ensemble program? I spoke to the ethnomusicologist, singer and instrumentalist Irene Markoff, whose research and performing activities centre on the musical traditions of Bulgaria, Turkey and the Balkans. “I began to teach there in 2001,” she told me. “At one point I taught global musicianship to music majors. Placed in the context of performance rather than listening to recorded musical examples, my approach was well received by the students.” Her ensemble courses however also include non-music major students. Markoff gave an example, “I currently have a number of students of Chinese heritage in my ensemble who can sing complex metrical parts, despite being non-music majors. They sometimes outstrip music majors in mastering some of these [perceived difficult] performing skills.”

While generally bullish on York’s music course offerings, she did express a wish: “That our music students would be required to take a world music ensemble.” Why? “For the simple reason that we live in a multicultural society and I believe such study will broaden students’ musical horizons. Also with musical hybridities [being a regular fact of musicians’ lives today], it’s important for learners to be exposed to the broad spectrum of metres, multi-part singing styles and tonal modes,” all benefits afforded by learning music outside of the Western mainstream.

I asked Markoff about the future of the world music ensembles. “I have proposed the production of ensemble music videos hosted on the department’s website as a means of attracting future students. As for their relevance, I believe these ensemble courses will continue to well serve music students, exposing them to ‘other’ musical practices and to increase their appreciation and understanding of peoples.”

In a nutshell, Markoff believes such educational ensembles, which allow students to experience the musical diversity of cultures, tend to “build bridges rather than erecting walls between cultures.”

York University’s World Music Festival runs March 17, 18 and 21 at various venues, all in the Accolade East Building.

Mar 17 the World Music Festival kicks off with the Cuban Ensemble conducted by Rick Lazar and Anthony Michell, followed by West African Drumming, Ghana, led by Kwasi Dunyo. That afternoon Lazar’s Escola de Samba rules the Sterling Beckwith Studio, followed by West African Mande, Anna Melnikoff, conductor.

Mar 18 Irene Markoff conducts the Balkan Music Ensemble at 7:30pm at the Tribute Communities Recital Hall. Earlier that day performances by the Celtic Ensemble conducted by Sherry Johnson, Chinese Classical Orchestra directed by Kim Chow-Morris, Caribbean Ensemble conducted by Lindy Burgess and Charles Hong’s Korean Drum Ensemble will echo in various Accolade East Building halls.

It’s a World Music Festival wrap Mar 21 with the World Music Chorus conducted by Judith Cohen, a course I greatly enjoyed a few years ago when I returned (yet again!) to my music studies at York. Please consult The WholeNote listings for times and venue details.

University of Toronto Faculty of Music: York University is certainly not the only world music game in town. Apr 7 the U of T Faculty of Music presents its World Music Ensembles in concert at Walter Hall. Featured are the African Drumming and Dancing Ensemble, Latin-American Percussion Ensemble and Steel Pan Ensemble. I’ve been attending these concerts since their inception and have never failed to be inspired by the enthusiasm and musical skill demonstrated.

Quick Picks

Mar 2 the COC’s noon-hour World Music Series presents Avataar. Directed by saxophonist and composer Sundar Viswanathan the all-star Toronto group often includes Michael Occhipinti (guitar), Justin Gray (bass), Felicity Williams (voice), Ravi Naimpally (tabla) and Giampaolo Scatozza (drum set). They’ll be playing selections from their recently released album Petal. Arrive early.

BRASH: It is just the sort of weather, however unseasonable, for “BRASH! A Badass Brass Festival,” presented by Lemon Bucket Orkestra (LBO) and Small World Music, on Mar 11 and 12 at the Opera House on Queen St. E. LBO with its high hipster street cred needs no further introduction in these pages. Ratcheting up the badass quotient a notch will be Toronto’s Rambunctious and Montreal’s Gypsy Kumbia Brass Band.

Mar 11, 12 and 13 at the Betty Oliphant Theatre the Raging Asian Women (RAW) Taiko Drummers perform an evening of stories from the drummers’ lives, in collaboration with Asian Canadian performers Teiya Kasahara (voice) and Heidi Chan (percussion and flute). "Crooked Lines: Stories in Between" involves video vignettes along with the taiko drummers' trademark ferocity and spirit.

Mar 26 the Small World Music Centre presents a smaller, more intimate and reflective musical experience, though in no way any less passionate: the Dilan Ensemble directed by Shahriyar Jamshidi, a kamancheh (bowed lute) player, composer and vocalist, now settled in Canada. "In the Shadow of the Fatherland" is a cross section of the repertoire the Iranian Kurdistan native has devoted his career to preserving and transmitting. Jamshidi is joined by local cellist Raphael Weinroth-Brown.

Apr 2 and 3 The Aga Khan Museum continues its impressively inclusive concert programming, partnering with the venerable presenter Raag-Mala Music Society of Toronto in two concerts titled Raags of the Gharana Tradition. Apr 2, Maihar gharana (musical school, lineage) sitarist Anupama Bhagwat and Agra gharana singer Waseem Ahmed Khan render a selected few of the vast set of Hindustani evening raags. Apr 3 at 3pm it’s time for a much rarer section of afternoon raags; many “classical” ragas/raags are associated with four three-hour timeframes and for maximum effect are performed at those prescribed times. Sarangi player Ramesh Mishra, a disciple of Ravi Shankar (of the Maihar gharana), shares the concert with the vocalist Devaki Pandit who has studied with gurus of both Jaipur and Agra gharanas.

Also on Apr 2 Nagata Shachu, with Kiyoshi Nagata as its music director, joins one of the city’s leading percussion ensembles TorQ in concert at the Brigantine Room, Harbourfront Centre. Expect an engaging, polished Japanese, Western and world percussion music mix. 

Andrew Timar is a Toronto musician and music writer. He can be contacted at worldmusic@thewholenote.com.

Dollars to doughnuts Amanda Tosoff will win jazz piano fans in a flash with her stupendously swingin’ version of Rodgers and Hart’s There’s a Small Hotel from 2013’s Live at the Cellar with Jodi Proznick on bass and Jesse Cahill on drums. But aside from the odd standard or bandmate’s original tune, most of Tosoff’s recordings to date have focused on her own original compositions, including 2008’s Wait and See which was followed by the prestigious General Motors Grand Jazz Award at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal.

Designed to showcase some of Toronto’s finest local jazz talent, the TD Discovery Series is a year-long initiative of music and educational performances created by Toronto Downtown Jazz, producers of the Toronto Jazz Festival, and supported by TD Bank Group. This year, Amanda Tosoff’s Words Project is the first of four TD Discovery Series Special Projects. It finds the pianist, composer and arranger echoing a welcome tradition in Canadian jazz and creative music: setting poetry to music with stunning results. As great as the sum of its parts, the project features the following artists: Felicity Williams, voice; Amanda Tosoff, piano; Alex Goodman, guitar; Jon Maharaj, bass; Morgan Childs, drums; Rebekah Wolkstein, violin; Amy Laing, cello. As is always the case, this will be an evening not to be missed, and advance tickets are highly recommended.

Amanda Tosoff is a daring improviser and gifted composer. Words, her fifth release, is a bold move, as evidenced by words taken directly from her website. “The desire to challenge oneself (and the audience) is a key component of the DNA of a true artist.” The concept of setting music to poetry was not planned; it was itself an improvised result of a composition exercise:

“One day I just decided to find a poem and write a melody to it – the song on the record called Owl Pellet by Tim Bowling. I had such a great time doing this that I decided to continue on with this idea, eventually choosing a bunch of poems that resonated with me. I have to admit that I hadn’t really checked out much poetry since high school, but this project has definitely made me more interested in poetry, and how poems can provide a great starting point for composition. They give you moods, images, emotions and phrasing to start with. I definitely feel that this has expanded my composition skill and also my approach to style. I really look forward to exploring this more.”

May the fans of William Wordsworth worldwide check out the opening track Daffodils – it is available for listening on Tosoff’s YouTube channel. Other sources of text include Canadian poets Carole Glasser Langille and Laura Lush and song lyrics from talented songsmiths (and members of Tosoff’s family), Melissa Mansfield and Lloyd and Ted Tosoff.

At first listen, and very much at the forefront of this project’s success, is vocalist Felicity Williams, a musician who shines consistently. Much admired within the communities of creative music, jazz, pop and beyond for her pure, unaffected sound, intense vocal range and endlessly inventive improvisational ability, the York University Music alumna has worked with a wide range of projects, from Bahamas to Hobson’s Choice.

“Felicity is amazing,” says Tosoff. “She’s such a great musician and was perfect for this project. As soon as I wrote the first piece I heard her singing it. I think it is her beautiful pure tone, but also, perhaps, her range too. I have to admit that when I was writing these pieces I was singing a lot to figure out how I wanted my melodies and phrasing to go. I think that her voice was most similar to mine in range and the way I wanted the melodies sung – so I guess I wrote these pieces for myself, but needed a fantastic singer to bring the songs to life!

Says Felicity Williams:

“Amanda found a way to make the music spring up through the words, as though both music and words were flowing from the same point of origin. I think that’s what you have to do when you take someone else’s poems and set them to music. If you make yourself receptive to the rhythm and the phrasing of the words themselves, you can get on their wavelength. And then you extend the creative process, by making something new.”

Amanda Tosoff’s Words CD release concert takes place at the Music Gallery on March 10 at 8pm, $20 or $18 in advance; and March 11 at 8:30pm at The Jazz Room in Waterloo.

Readers who find the setting of poetry to jazz interesting will want to check out a previous TD Discovery, the Sarah Yeats Project, a contemporary chamber jazz group that features the poetry of William Butler Yeats. With original music and arrangements by Sarah Jerrom, the featured poems are arranged for nine-piece instrumentation comprised of strings, woodwinds, brass and a traditional jazz rhythm section. This is a highly ambitious project and Jerrom invites you to join her crowd funding campaign to complete the recording of The Yeats Project through her Kapipal page: visit sarahjerrom.com.

Plugged-In Weston: Meanwhile, at galenweston.org you can find Plugged In, the latest recording from innovative fusion jazz guitarist Galen Weston (“Not that Galen Weston,” jokes his publicist, citing no relation to the current executive chairman and president of Loblaw Companies Limited). This Galen Weston, owner of a beautiful new recording studio called the Rose Room (roseroom.ca) has an extensive business background, although the music came first:

“I graduated from Humber College in 1997; they were nice enough to introduce me to jazz and ruin my life,” he jokes. “Prior to that I was rocking it out, two-hand tapping. I loved instrumental rock – Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, I was a huge guitar fan - then I got there and I had to learn all this vocabulary, speak this new language – but I fell in love with it.

I never achieved what I wanted to achieve in college – I wasn’t getting out there and getting to tour with Gary Burton – or anyone, for that matter. So I wasn’t sure what I would do because I had this desire to play jazz and fusion and that’s what I wanted to do, but my ability wasn’t in line with my desire at the point of doing it professionally. My reading was strong, so I would have been good enough to lose my mind in a pit band or something, but I was broke, too. Student loan debts meant that a good paying job for me at that time was eight dollars an hour at a gas station. And I wanted to stay in Toronto so I needed a job to make money.”

As a determined self-taught, self-made entrepreneur, Weston went from making 350 phone calls a day selling penny stocks to becoming RBC’s most successful rookie.

“The whole company came in and they made me talk about how I got so successful, and then the next day I quit, it just wasn’t me. I had enough money to pay off my student debt, but I needed another plan. I liked Lead Generation and working with the internet, and I really worked hard…seven years later, while the US market tanked, everyone wanted safe money so they bought annuities, and I had my entire engine set up for Lead Generation.”

Weston is considered a financial Internet marketing pioneer. His company AdvisorWorld.com has helped tens of thousands to obtain successful professional relationships with trusted advisors.

Success has allowed Weston to recently come back to music full circle, spending his time practising, writing and recording at the Rose Room Studio. The Galen Weston Band is comprised of David Woodhead on bass, Al Cross on drums, Matt Horner on keyboards, Richard Underhill on alto sax and appearances by Rick Lazar on percussion. The band’s beautifully produced Plugged In album has been slowly picking up steam online; Song For Daphne has been played over 136,000 times on SoundCloud as of this writing. As for gaining exposure in the Toronto music scene, unsurprisingly, Weston has a plan.

“I’ve always been thinking it’s hard to get Torontonians to music in general, it’s almost like you have to drag them out by the earlobe. So I thought, how do I get them there? I had to do something that opens me up to a theatre audience. I needed to make my show more theatrical – I don’t like speaking and I’m not very good at it – so this was kind of inspired by U2 and Pink Floyd – adding a visual element that people aren’t used to.”

On March 26 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, the Galen Weston Band will be appearing live – and animated! In collaboration with his uncle, award-winning animator Stephen Weston, the concert experience will take audience members to a world where “Fantasia meets Guitar Hero” and where the animations tell the story of the guitarist’s own journey, or as he puts it: “a tongue-in-cheek meditation on the struggle for identity in a genre-obsessed world.”

Kudos to the artists who take risks and the audiences who honour them with ears and cheers. 

Ori Dagan is a Toronto-based jazz musician, writer and educator who can be reached at oridagan.com.