Beat Columns (Live Music)

Paintings and sculptures occupy physical space. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa resides in the Louvre in perpetuity, guarded and revered, physical manifestations of “great art” in a hallowed space, ready for us to come and venerate.

Music, by contrast, is a manipulation of sound and time and lives in our minds and ears. Music is a physical experience not a physical object. Without our minds and ears to translate, it cannot exist.

Music needs to be iterated and reiterated to continue to live. The giants of the musical canon seem inviolate and firmly rooted, but even established musical giants have been as subject to trend and fashion as any other musician. Bach needed Mendelssohn to reintroduce his work to the world. Mahler’s work was headed for obscurity when it was championed by musical lion Leonard Bernstein. Vivaldi’s inescapable Four Seasons was actually a forgotten work at the beginning of the 20th century. Its rise in popularity corresponded with the rise of recording technology and turned a relatively obscure composer into a household name.

Because of its need to be constantly renewed, music is subject to the world’s often wayward and chaotic currents of artistic fashion (as is literature, theatre and architecture). Economics, technology, trend and fashion play a greater role in shaping our tastes than we understand or will admit to.

In Canada, a young nation swamped by European and American cultural and economic influence, we are continually reminding ourselves and each other that what we create here is worthy of advocacy. Canadian musicians whose careers may not have extended past national or even regional borders need and deserve our continued interest and awareness, especially after they are no longer in a position to promote themselves.

Barnes: One such composer is Milton Barnes who had a rich and varied career centred in Southern Ontario but ranging over North America. He had fruitful associations with many musicians, ensembles and dance companies. Trained in modernist compositional techniques, he ultimately moved to a more accessible style that factored in his background as a jazz drummer, his ease with popular music and his knowledge of traditional Jewish music.

Eleven years after his death, it would be easy for Barnes’ work to pass into disuse — new composers are fighting for space in a crowded local and global market and Canadian artistic history is so young it is hard to conceive of it as a tradition to be fostered, celebrated and renewed.

So it is good to see two Toronto choirs collaborating in a concert in part devoted to Barnes’ music. The Jubilate Singers have consistently created unusual and inventive programs. The Jewish Folk Choir is one of Toronto’s most long-running groups and has a long, varied and fascinating history of social and political engagement. It has been a staunch advocate for Jewish-Canadian music.

The two groups’ collaboration is named “L’khayim: A Celebration of Jewish Music,” and takes place on November 25. The concert showcases works in Yiddish, Ladino (a linguistic amalgam of Hebrew, Spanish and Aramaic influences) and Hebrew. Klezmer ensemble Shtetl Shpil are the guest instrumentalists. It will feature Barnes’ lively Sefarad, a tuneful suite that he wrote in 1996 to celebrate the 3,000th anniversary of the City of Jerusalem.

Soundstreams: Contemporary composition has also needed fierce advocacy, in part because of the fierceness with which audiences have resisted it. Over the course of the 20th century, the idea of the inherent superiority of European-derived composition has broken down completely and those who desire an intellectual component to music have been able to find it in various types of world music, jazz and other areas of popular music.

To remain relevant, contemporary music groups have had to bridge gaps between the European tradition and other stylistic areas. Toronto’s Soundstreams, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, has never wavered from its contemporary music mandate. But it has certainly expanded both its own and its audience’s understanding of what contemporary music entails. Their programs are notably free of pretension and over-seriousness; their mandate to involve and inspire young musicians gives their season a sense of liveliness and fun.

As part of its anniversary celebrations, Soundstreams is hosting a concert with the Latvian Radio Choir, considered to be one of the world’s top choral ensembles. A truly professional outfit, they give over 60 concerts a year. Choral aficionados definitely don’t want to miss this one.

The icing on the cake: as part of its commitment to outreach and education, Soundstreams will host four choirs from Canadian universities for this concert which will allow young musicians the experience of working with the Latvian Radio Choir in a mentorship capacity. The concert includes a number of Russian and Latvian works, a piece by John Cage and music by a nice range of contemporary Canadian composers.

Other concerts of note

On November 3 the Hamilton Children’s Choir gives a fundraising concert in support of the choir’s performance at the Xinghai International Choir Championships. Please come out and support this endeavour.

On November 17 and 18 the Cantemus Singers perform an early music program that includes Charpentier’s In Nativitatem Domini.

The recent Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom (now available on DVD) brilliantly utilized the music of Benjamin Britten throughout, including Britten’s wonderful and popular children’s opera Noye’s Fludde. On November 23 there is an opportunity to hear this work live, as the VIVA! Youth Singers take part in a staged version.

In a similar vein, the Elora Festival Singers perform Menotti’s festive Amahl and the Night Visitors on November 25. This opera is a touching and humorous work and an excellent introduction to opera for children.

As we head into the Christmas season, many choirs gear up for seasonal concerts. Next month, there is an astonishing number of concerts taking place on December 1, too many to list effectively. Please have a look at the listings to see how many varied and interesting choices there are on that Saturday evening. 

Ben Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist.  He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com.  Visit his website at benjaminstein.ca.

November is a month when many concert series have their season openers — a good chance for me to talk about some of my favourite groups.

Definitely in this category is Toronto Masque Theatre (TMT). This company is touched by magic — the magic of the masque, both ancient and contemporary, which they present in myriad entertaining productions that fuse different aspects of the performing arts; since 2003 they’ve staged close to 25 critically acclaimed multimedia productions ranging in repertoire from the late Renaissance to the modern day.

Their upcoming show, “Fairest Isle,” showcases the wealth and breadth of Purcell’s genius with pieces drawn from his semi-operas: The Fairy-Queen, Dido and Aeneas, King Arthur and The Indian Queen, along with music he composed for the Church and Court. TMT’s press release promises that it will be “an exhilarating combination of dance, theatre, orchestral music and song: a chance for audiences to glimpse the baroque splendour of the work Purcell created for London’s theatre of the time.”

Henry Purcell is obviously dear to the heart of TMT. In an ambitious five-year program, they’ve produced all of Purcell’s major theatre works, culminating in performances of, and a symposium on, King Arthur in 2009 to mark the 350th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Artistic director Larry Beckwith comments enthusiastically: “Purcell’s music is full of genius, craft, warmth and humour. He was so adept at supporting the meaning of the great — and sometimes not so great! — texts he worked with. The tunes are memorable and moving, the instrumental writing is first-rate, and the overall thrust of his work is lively and full of humanity.”

There’s a real treat in store if you go to see them! Performances are on November 16 and 17 at the Al Green Theatre. Pre-show chats featuring Beckwith and special guests take place 45 minutes before each show.

A look at the package in which Scaramella’s 2012-2013 season is wrapped will give you an idea of the artistry, ingenuity and care poured into each of their concerts. Go to the opening page of the brochure or the website, and you’re spun inside on the fronds of an exquisite spiral — actually a photograph of a staircase inside the lighthouse in Eckmuhl, Brittany (reminiscent of the scroll of a musical instrument, muses artistic director Joëlle Morton). Once landed, you’ll find your eye alighting on a set of particularly attractive images, each of which points in some way to the overall theme of this season: innovation and technology — a theme that takes on a variety of guises.

A photo of Salvador Dali engaged in serious discussion with a rhino gives some idea of what’s in store for their first concert. It’s all about animals and the ways that have been found to depict their sounds on musical instruments. As Morton says, “Our multi-talented musicians will be called upon to conjure cows, horses, ducks, frogs, geese, pigs, chickens, dogs, doves, frogs, bees, sheep, a stag, a snake, cicadas and cats.” They’ll do this in a multitude of pieces, from composers such as Biber, Bach, Handel and Copland to Elton John, George Harrison, Loudon Wainwright and traditional tunes. And who are these multi-talented performers? They include Elyssa Lefurgey-Smith (baroque violin), Katherine Hill (soprano), Joëlle Morton (violas da gamba), Sara-Anne Churchill (harpsichord) and Kirk Elliott (aptly dubbed “one-man-band”). “Lions and Tigers and Bears, O My!” takes place at Victoria College Chapel on December 1.

Two violinists in Toronto on the same weekend approach the performance of early music from different perspectives. November 7 to 11, one of the foremost international baroque violinists appears with Tafelmusik: Gottfried von der Goltz began his career as a “modern” player but decided to switch to the baroque style; in so doing, he found everything he needed to build an international career. Now violinist and director of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, he is Tafelmusik’s guest in “Mozart’s World,” as soloist in the Mozart Violin Concerto in A and as director in works by Haydn, Franz Beck and Josef Kraus.

Also on November 11, a violinist you may have heard last June in Toronto’s Luminato Festival performing the solo violin role of Einstein in Philip Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach, appears in recital at RCM’s Mazzoleni Hall. Jennifer Koh is a consummate and very thoughtful artist who believes strongly that connections exist in all music from early to modern, since music reflects humanity’s common experiences in every society and every age. This conviction has led to the evolution of her project “Bach and Beyond” — a set of three recitals that seeks to reveal the connections in solo violin repertoire, from Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas through to newly commissioned works. Her recital in Toronto is the second of these. She’ll perform two solo works by Bach, plus the Bartók Solo Sonata and a world premiere: Kline’s Partita for Solo Violin, written for her.

Others

November 17 at the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society: Canadian pianist Shoshana Telner has enjoyed a flourishing career as soloist, chamber musician and teacher and currently teaches in the music faculty of McMaster University. In this concert she performs Bach’s Six Keyboard Partitas — music (described by one listener) that puts you “within that holy moment.”

November 17 and 18 (Toronto), November 24 (Hamilton): Capella Intima was founded in 2008 by the talented tenor and baroque guitarist, Bud Roach, expressly to present vocal chamber music of the 17th century. Roach has recently been immersed in research into the lost art of the self-accompanied singer, work that’s resulted in a beautiful recording of secular arias by Grandi. (Go to Capella Intima’s website to hear excerpts and find out more about the project.) Some of this music will be presented in the three upcoming performances: intimate arias by Grandi, Sances and Strossi, featuring soprano Emily Klassen and tenor Bud Roach, who also accompanies the songs on baroque guitar.

November 18: Organist Philip Fournier came to Toronto from the USA in 2007, bringing with him an impressive history of scholarship and experience in the fields of organ performance and choral directorship. He gives a recital, “Organ Music of the 17th Century,” on the magnificent three-manual mechanical action organ at The Oratory, Holy Family Church — music by Praetorius, Sweelinck, Scheidt, Frescobaldi, Byrd and Bach.

November 18: The Windermere String Quartet on period instruments continue their journey through the “Golden Age” of string quartets with a performance dedicated to youthful works. In “Young Blood” they play works by Mozart, Schubert and Arriaga — musical geniuses who, by the age of 19, had already displayed their mastery of the form. Lucky for us that they were so precocious because they had not much time to develop: they all died tragically young.

November 27 also at the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society: Lovers of the viol should flock to this concert given by the internationally renowned bass viol duo Les Voix Humaines. Their concert titled “The Sun Queen” refers to King Louis XIV’s favourite instrument, the viola da gamba, and includes original compositions and arrangements of French chamber music of the 17th century. This is music which (in their words) “reflects the growing taste for private pleasures, making use of a language which is at once moving and discreet, evoking a world where freedom and intimacy go hand in hand.”

Choral concerts involving early music are well represented; here are a few of them: Cantemus Singers: “Make We Merry!” (November 17 and 18); Georgetown Bach Chorale: Handel’s Messiah (November 17 in Goderich, November 18 in Brampton, November 23 and 25 in Georgetown); Melos Choir and Chamber Orchestra: “Celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II” with Handel’s Coronation Anthems (November 18 in Kingston); Larkin Singers: “Bach Motets” (November 24); Elmer Iseler Singers: Handel’s Messiah (November 30); Tafelmusik: “French Baroque Christmas” (December 5, 6, 7, 8, 9); U of T Schola Cantorum: Handel’s Coronation Anthems (December 7).

For details of all these and more, please see The WholeNote’s daily listings. 

Simone Desilets is a long-time contributor to The WholeNote in several capacities who plays the viola da gamba. She can be contacted at earlymusic@thewholenote.com.

Of all the concerts I didn’t get out to last month the one I regret most missing was Continuum Contemporary Music’s October 22 program at the Music Gallery titled “Finding Voice.”

“Communication, as well as the historical lens, is at the core of a concert that presents two linked theatrical works by Dutch composer Martijn Voorvelt” read the always entertaining Continuum blurb. “[It is] based on the tangled up story of Sir Morell MacKenzie, inventor of the tracheotomy, and his treatment of the mute and dying German Emperor Friedrich III.”

Because Voorvelt is a self-taught composer, drawing at will on literature and theatre, I was looking forward to an evening of music that dipsy-doodles across the line between genres, using sound in ways that are more instinctual than intellectual. It was a quality that smacked me right between the eyes last year during Vingko Globokar’s visit last season, and I was looking forward to exploring it further: the connections between the innate musicality of voice and the inherent storytelling capacity of music.

Training the ear to listen to new music by invoking the nuances of spoken work — cadence, intonation, pitch, pace — seemed like a fine topic for a rainy day, and may well still be. But I will have to proceed without my prime example, and I’m sorry for it.

That being said, there’s no shortage of material this month for an exploration of the topic. For one thing, I could revisit our cover story’s Maniac Star/Royal Conservatory November 25 co-production of Brian Current’s Airline Icarus. (Current’s final comment on the challenge of educating the new music audience’s ear is certainly a propos). But let’s look for some other examples.

Nine days earlier, on November 16 and 17, in the selfsame venue, for example, the Royal Conservatory Opera School presents a double bill of Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters andJoseph Vézina’s Le Lauréat. In Rorem’s work, in particular, drama and music seem always shyly (or should that be slyly?) fascinated bedfellows, without ever quite figuring out what the attraction is. Three Sisters takes for its libretto a Gertrude Stein play of the same nameand it makes for an interesting match. Bernard Holland, in The New York Times, Oct 1, 1994, writes about the Stein/Rorem work, and makes the following interesting observation: “Stein’s little game of mock murder makes sense of a sort, but making sense is not its business. It is the arrangement of her simple declarative sentences that pleases. Mr. Rorem’s terse music and its skillful, imitative ensembles ... successfully explain a literary art in which form is everything and matter matters little. Every musical gesture Ned Rorem has ever made has something of the human voice behind it.”

“Musical gesture with the human voice behind it” is a good description of the thing I am trying to describe, and it can be found across the musical spectrum. An example: a November 8 noonhour recital at University of Guelph College of Arts titled “Problems with Love.” It features a consummate musical raconteur, mezzo-soprano Patricia Green, wrapping her innate storytelling skills around “songs by Canadian composers, touching on poignant and funny sides of love.” And another example: a Sunday November 18 7:30pm presentation at the Arts and Letters Club by the Toronto Chapter of the American Harp Society titled“A Score to Settle,” written by K. Gonzalez-Risso, and billed as “a musical monologue for solo harp” featuring harpist and comic actress Rita Costanzi.

In entirely different ways, these performances, informed by principles as different as comedy and cabaret, offer opportunities for the willing listener to explore how an understanding of the rituals and cadences of storytelling can inform musical choice, no matter how abstract, by composer and listener alike.

Choral common ground: If music theatre is the most dramatic example of the interplay between different modes of listening, then choral music is the most pervasive. Indeed choirs, more than almost any other presenters, are at the forefront of commissioning new work, of mixing repertoire across generations in the same programs, and putting experiencing a work of music ahead of judging it as good or bad. With an estimated 20,000 individuals participating in choirs in The WholeNote catchment area, this is no small fact, especially given that choristers, more so than concert band members, for example, tend also to be avid concert-goers. Not a bad way of educating people to broaden their understanding of what makes music music!

Nowhere will you see this more clearly illustrated this month than in the November 11 Soundstreams Canada presentation of the Latvian Radio Choir at Koerner Hall, in a program ranging from Rachmaninoff to Cage, to young Canadian composer Nic Gotham and more.

Or take as another example the November 17 Grand Philharmonic Chamber Singers’ “Made in Canada” concert with music ranging from a new commission by Patrick Murray to works by Healey Willan and Harry Somers. And check out the November 10 Cantabile Chamber Singers concert titled “Lux” and described as an “a capella concert on the themes of light, love and night featuring works by L. Silberberg, C. Livingston and B. J. Kim.”

Or, finally, consider the November 3 University of Toronto Faculty of Music concert titled “Choirs in Concert: When Music Sounds: Celebrating the 80th birthday of Ruth Watson Henderson.”

Henderson, one of Canada’s pre-eminent choral composers, talks about the links between text and music in a recent interview (on the Choral Canada website), with Dean Jobin-Bevans, president of Choirs Ontario.

“It is all about taking a text that I find inspiring and thinking about how it can be presented in a way that can express some important feelings and ideas to a large number of listeners” she says. “The most important thing for me when I am writing is the text; if I get a good text, then all of my ideas come from the text. I am not very good at putting things into words, I am much better at hearing things musically, and so when I cannot express myself when speaking with words, I find that I can express myself much better through music; by putting ideas down on paper and writing choral works.”

Follow the Bob! Regular readers of this column will know that I often pick a particular venue and catalogue what’s happening there as a way of providing a cross-section of what is happpening. It’s sometimes equally instructive, though, to follow an individual musician through a month’s worth of perambulation from one venue to another.

Take New Music Concerts’ Robert Aitken for example. The evening of November 11 will find him at the Music Gallery, albeit in the capacity of genial host rather than performer, for a New Music Concerts presentation of Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, Véronique Lacroix, conductor, in a program titled GENERATION 2012: ECM+.

Four days earlier, he features as flutist, along with musical chameleon, accordionist Joseph Macerollo, in a Canadian Music Centre/New Music Concerts event titled “Secret of the Seven Stars.” It’s a CD launch, featuring works by Hope Lee and David Eagle, and providing an early opportunity to check out the new and improved Chalmers House performing space, one which one hopes will join the array of fine little performance venues for cutting edge music.

And, going from little to large, Sunday November 18 Aitken will appear as flutist in Esprit Orchestra’s second Koerner Hall Concert of the season, titled “Exquisite Vibrations,” in a work titled Concerto for Flute and Orchestra by French composer Marc-André Dalbavie.

The universities: mind you, you can’t go wrong by familiarizing yourself with the key venues for new music either. Starting with the universities, I count no fewer than ten concerts at the University of Toronto this month that could be of interest to new music followers, most of them at Walter Hall: November 4 there is a concert, “In Memory of Gustav,” dedicated to the works and legacy of Gustav Ciamaga, composer, educator and electronic music pioneer; composer/teacher Norbert Palej shows up as a composer on November 5 (in another concert featuring accordionist Macerollo), and then on November 21 as conductor of the U of T Faculty of Music’s gamUT Ensemble ... and the list goes on, for U of T as for its Philosopher’s Walk neighbour to the north, the Royal Conservatory. Same goes for York and others.

Small venues: as for the smaller venues, check out the Music Gallery (November 10, 15, 17; December 1 and 7); Gallery 345 (November 4, 8, 10, 16, 18, 22, 23 and 27); the Tranzac (November 7, 8 and 9) for the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival; and the Wychwood Barns (November 10, 24 and December 1) for New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA)’s 11th Annual SOUNDplay Series.

And make a special point of checking out the newest intimate space on the map, the Array Space at 155 Walnut St. On November 19 at 7pm, it’s a concert titled “Passport Duo,” featuring works by Hatzis, Wilson, Forsythe and O’Connor. And on November 26 it’s the 14th in a series of evenings of improvised music, with Array director Rick Sacks and a roster of always interesting guests.

Subversion: I started by talking about how spoken language potentially provides different, sometimes less daunting and even enriching access points to new music. It’s not the only tool in the shed, though. There’s also the thoroughly mixed program (such as that promised by Scaramella on December 1, in the Victoria College Chapel, which offers “animal-themed music, from baroque to the 21st century”). Or perhaps even more to the point, consider a November 9 offering from a collective, group of twenty-seven, called “The Subversion Project” which on this occasion, at Grace Church on-the-Hill, offers works by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Zorn and Buhr in a deliberate effort to enable listeners to hear the familiar anew, and to modulate the strange through the familiar.

Sounds like a fine idea, don’t you think? 

David Perlman has been writing this column for the past season (and a bit) and is willing to entertain the notion that it’s someone else’s turn. He can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

Last year, in October, flush with the excitement of the new season in full swing, I wrote about some recent artistic appointments, focussing particularly on conductor Uri Mayer’s new role as artistic director and principal conductor of the Toronto Philharmonia Orchestra. Mayer had exciting and ambitious plans for the ensemble. Fast forward to this past October and its future appears significantly different than the one Mayer had envisioned. Like so many arts organizations (both large and small) plagued with money worries in these economically difficult times, the Toronto Philharmonia’s very survival is now in jeopardy due, in great part, to its ongoing financial problems.

In an interview with John Terauds (see musicaltoronto.org) October 16, the TPO’s president, Milos Krajny, said: “We are not opening the season because we couldn’t raise enough money.” According to Terauds, Krajny sent out an urgent plea to the orchestra’s patrons and friends on September 10 but the appeal came up short of the $150,000 required to open the season.

There was Anton Kuerti, with his nimbus of unruly hair, in the auditorium of Walter Hall on a balmy Sunday afternoon looking for all the world like a latter-day Einstein. Except this was no theoretical physicist nor amateur musician but a man who has been called one of the truly great pianists of this century, a pianist who has been lionized in practically every one of the almost 40 countries he has played and whose name is very nearly synonymous with Beethoven’s great “Emperor” Concerto.

Surrounded by the principal players of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as they deftly performed excerpts from Schubert’s Octet and Spohr’s Nonet, he surveyed the forest of hands that shot up in answer to his gently probing questions and fielded a volley of eager responses from young children and their families. It was quite an introduction to the first concert in Mooredale Concerts’ Music & Truffles series, one specifically designed to acquaint first-timers with classical music.

It is easy to forget, in taking a measure of the man — when that man is Anton Kuerti — that he is not simply a concert pianist par excellence. Impresario, talent scout, chief copywriter, principal website and ticketing strategist, entrepreneur: these are just some of the hats he has added to his repertoire after assuming the mantle of artistic director of Mooredale Concerts five years ago following the death of his wife, the cellist Kristine Bogyo.

The genesis of these concerts began in 1986 when their son Julian was ten years old and Bogyo was looking for a youth orchestra where the young violinist could further hone his skills. Then, as now, notes Kuerti dryly, “it’s very important and worthwhile to have as part of music education (but) there’s a scarcity of chamber music opportunities for outstanding young artists.”

By the second year, the ten children Bogyo started with when she decided to grow her own youth orchestra in the family’s living room, had trebled, prompting a move to Mooredale House. “Kristine had the knack for making young people love music and understand it,” Kuerti says, citing the letters parents and the young musicians themselves continue to write, even after they go on to professional careers.

In the intervening years, the single orchestra has blossomed into three. Clare Carberry, a fellow cellist, joined Bogyo 21 years ago and now conducts the intermediate orchestra. Bill Rowson conducts both the junior and senior orchestras while Kuerti himself leads the senior orchestra’s summer concert. Mooredale Concerts continues to provide opportunities and bursaries for those who need them.

The youth orchestras have an enviable reputation not just among the music teachers who entrust their young charges but among the young musicians themselves who, says Carberry, “experience the joy of performing but also make friends as well.” Bogyo’s sister Esther, whose own children have been a part of the orchestras, agrees: “It lets the kids see each other as very cool and that it’s okay to love music.”

Bogyo realized, from the outset, that it was crucial to the growth and development of the fledgling musicians not just to play, but also to listen. “Take Beethoven’s Fifth,” says Kuerti, “To you and me, it’s perhaps too well known, but everybody hears it for the first time. And every music lover should have a chance to hear it live.”

Thus was born the Concert Series as an opportunity to showcase home-grown talent, providing a platform for collaboration with artists such as Isabel Bayrakdarian and Measha Brueggergosman long before they became well known. Kuerti continues this fine tradition by inviting the winners of the Young Canadian Musicians Award, on which jury he sits, to perform in concert.

Whereas Bogyo concentrated on home turf with special attention to the Canadian landscape, Kuerti works from a broader palette, deepening the variety and range of works presented. When he invited nine of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s first chair players to open the current season in what would turn out to be a sold-out concert, they already had their work cut out for them. It was Kuerti who suggested that they play Schubert and Spohr.

“He’s a music scholar many times over,” says Christina Cavanagh, Mooredale Concerts’ managing director. Kuerti views his task as not merely one of programming an audience favourite such as Schubert, but giving an overlooked master like Spohr his due. “He was an incredible violinist himself and there is a lot of virtuoso writing in the Nonet,” Kuerti points out.

Only two words guide Kuerti’s programming: “Great music.” As an artistic director he is intent on “presenting something people will buy and love: some Canadian, so far as it’s really good, but also 20th and 21st century music.” And as with any impresario worth his salt, he also keeps a canny eye on breaking new ground.

A case in point: booking the Dali String Quartet for a concert next February. This young group, schooled in Venezuela’s El Sistema, focuses on Latin American music, in particular the work of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, but plays the traditional string quartet repertoire as well. Kuerti is just as enthusiastic about Pierrot Moonstruck, where poetry and mime will, for the first time, be married to piano music and the soprano voice in a program that evokes turn of the century Paris using music by Chopin, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel.

On December 4 Mooredale Concerts subscribers will be ushered into Koerner Hall to hear Kuerti play yet another concerto, Brahms’ Second, as part of an a program that also includes the composer’s Symphony No.4,when he reunites with Marco Parisotto and the Ontario Philharmonic. It will be another tribute to his stewardship of what began a quarter of a century ago as a mother’s quest and one woman’s act of creative imagination: the opening salvo in a continuing celebration of great music. 

Rebecca Chua is a Toronto-based journalist who writes on culture and the arts.

When the students of the Regent Park School of Music took to the stage with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters at Toronto’s Rogers Centre this past June, they were performing for an audience of 40,000 — no mean feat for 15 students from a little community music school. Not that these particular students are strangers to large crowds. After all, they’ve performed at Blue Jays openers before. But this time around, their rousing rendition of Another Brick in the Wall was, in fact, a reprise of several sold out concerts two years ago.

That first time, when Waters contacted the school in 2010, they were given such short notice that, armed only with a copy of the lyrics and a YouTube video, the students virtually practised in the bus on the way to the concert at the Air Canada Centre. Still, that was a demonstration of the kind of sterling professionalism (and gusto!) worthy of any serious musician — and the kind of challenges that these students have surmounted before.

For the children of Regent Park, the challenges have never been simply, or even predominantly, financial. When the music school first began almost on a hope and a prayer in 1999, the neighbourhood’s name was widely used as a synonym for “gangs and drugs.” As a scenario it was not so very different from the slums of Caracas in Venezuela in 1975, where one of the giants of music education in our time, Jose Antonio Abreu, hit on the plan of luring children of poverty away from crime by providing free musical training.

El Sistema, the voluntary music education program Abreu founded, and for which he was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2009, began dismally, with just 11 students. Today, it has close to 370,000 students and boasts 125 youth orchestras, 31 symphony orchestras and the celebrity of alumni like conductor Gustavo Dudamel. What’s more, it’s an enduring testimony to the transformative power of music.

Now that september’s TIFF-induced somnolence has receded from the new music scene, October starts to take on more of the shape one might hope for, with the emergence of new ensembles, an entirely new series of instruments, a major John Cage conference, almost back-to-back Koerner concerts by two heavyweight ensembles, both celebrating their 30th anniversaries and a plethora of inventive smaller presenters taking advantage of an ever-increasing range of intimate venues far and near.

It’s a particularly nice coincidence for me to have this column kicking off the Beat by Beat section of the magazine in the very month that Richard Marsella’s Regent Park School of Music moves into its new digs in the spectacular new Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre (this month’s cover story). It was Marsella, you see, who gave the column the name “In With The New” when he served, energetically and all too briefly, as The WholeNote’s new music columnist. I wish him, and the school, momentum and luck.

Newest of the new:It is always interesting at the start of a new season to look at ensembles at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of longevity — at the ones celebrating significant anniversaries and at those just embarking. In the latter category, a group called the Thin Edge Music Collective probably takes the prize as the newest of the new. This time last year the collective was nothing more than a good idea in the minds of pianist Cheryl Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk.

“TEMC believes that contemporary music is a powerful medium which has the ability to comment and reflect on modern society in a unique and poignant way,” their manifesto reads. “We recognize that the broad range of musical idioms which new music encompasses functions as an important touchstone for contemporary life and as such are passionately dedicated to supporting our peers through commissions and performance. Ultimately we aspire to bring innovative and challenging 20th and 21st century music to audiences both existing and as yet untapped.”

By spring of 2012, following a Banff Centre residency with Toronto composer Tova Kardonne, they had mounted an inaugural concert, aptly titled “Premieres,” featuring five newly composed works by emerging Canadian composers: Margaret Ashburner, Aura Giles, August Murphy-King, Nick Storring and Kardonne.

Composer/cellist Storring joins them again October 6 for a concert titled “Unusual Spectrum” featuring works by Sokolovic, Bolton, Nobles, J. TV and Storring himself. And the works are not the only thing “unusual” about the event. The venue (The Placebo Space, Apt. A at 1409 Bloor St.W.) is as unfamiliar to us as Gallery 345 was a handful of years ago. For the other three programs in their 2012/13 season, they will take their act to a range of intimate venues across our catchment area: to Gallery 345 and Hamilton’s Artword Artbar November 22 and 25 respectively; back to Gallery 345 in February; and across town to the Tapestry/Nightwood New Work Studio in the Distillery District in June. As Amici did, a quarter of a century ago, TEMC seems to have cottoned on to the fact that commissioning works for larger combinations of instruments, along with themselves, can be the path to building relationships and bridges as they go. Percussion and cello, accordion and flute already feature in this year’s series plans.

Bohlen-Pierce: Speaking of the newest of the new, it’s not often that entirely new instruments come along and even less common when the instruments in question have the potential to reshape entirely the way composers write and audiences listen. So circle Tuesday October 9, 8pm, (at Gallery 345) for a lecture/recital by Nora-Louise Muller on the Bohlen-Pierce Clarinet which, according to its its Toronto maker, master clarinet builder Stephen Fox, is designed to produce “an exotic sequence of tones providing numerous consonant intervals and hence the promise of extensive musical possibilities to those willing to explore non-traditional sounds.” There’s nothing random about it, though. The Bohlen-Pierce Scale, according to Fox “uses an alternative musical system which divides the perfect twelfth into 13 steps.”

This Bohlen-Pierce clarinet project began in 2003, with the goal of designing and building clarinet-type instruments — soprano, tenor and contra — for the purpose of exploring and demonstrating the musical potential of the concept. The premiere concert involving Bohlen-Pierce clarinets took place at the University of Guelph on March 20, 2008, presenting newly composed works by Owen Bloomfield and Todd Harrop, and “future plans involve holding an international composition competition for Bohlen-Pierce instruments.”

New ensemble: Saturday October 27 at Heliconian Hall, the Toy Piano Composers collective unveils something new too, namely its own ensemble. Hence the concert’s title: “We Started a Band.” Featuring works by TPC members Brophy, Floisand, Guechtal, Pearce, Ryan and Thornborrow, the concert also will also unveil the TPC Ensemble: Katherine Watson, flute; Anthony Thompson, clarinet; Sharon Lee, violin;Adam Scime, double bass; Daniel Morphy, percussion; and Wesley Shen on piano and toy piano. Watch for the five-year-old collective to flourish as familiarity with a versatile group of core players breeds content.

Soundstreams and Esprit: It’s hard not to draw parallels between two of Toronto’s most venerable presenters this month. Both are 30 years old this season. Both have been led by one individual since their inception (Lawrence Cherney at Soundstreams, Alex Pauk at Esprit). Both opted early on to take the gamble of upsizing their previous venues and moving their main series to Koerner Hall. Soundtreams launches its Koerner season October 11. Esprit follows October 14. Both will feature new commissions by Murray Schafer, himself striding towards an important anniversary in the spring. But the superficial similarities obscure the fact that the two events promise to be as different as one might imagine, reflecting two very different, if equally single-minded, visions.

The October 11 Soundstreams event offers a veritable smorgasbord of performers, drawn from a wide range of sources specifically for this event. Among them: David Fallis and Joaquin Valdepeñas, conductors; Ryan Scott, percussion; Shannon Mercer, soprano; Julie Ranti, flute; Choir 21; the Gryphon Trio; and NEXUS, in works by Frehner, Llugdar, Pärt; Fuhong Shi and Schafer. Cherney’s presence as artistic director will be almost entirely behind the scenes, evidenced in the careful shaping of the event.

October 14, at the Esprit concert, the surprise will not be in the players, the vast majority of whom are the backbone of the orchestra, appearing year in, year out in almost every Esprit event. Pauk will lead from the front, on the conductor’s podium and the overall thrust will be much more strongly large scale, as befits Canada’s only orchestra solely dedicated to the commissioning and performance of new orchestral works. Schafer’s new work for the concert is titled Wolf Returns, and will feature along with the orchestra a chorus drawn from participants over the years in Schafer’s annual summer Haliburton wilderness project, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon.

Works by Esprit perennial composers John Rea, Alexina Louie, Iannis Xenakis and Colin McPhee will round out the event, and Schafer himself will be there in the lobby for the official launch, and signing, of his newly released memoir, My Life On Earth and Elsewhere.

All too briefly: the above barely scratches the surface of an extraordinarily rich month of music which also includes the following, each in its way worthy of an article all on its own (and all referenced in our listings so that you can begin supplying for yourself the missing details in this hasty list):

October 25 4:00 to October 28 1:30: Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. Future of Cage: Credo. A spectacular conference to mark the 100th birthday of composer John Cage, featuring performances, panel discussions, keynote addresses, lectures and installations. “This interdisciplinary conference is both a celebration of John Cage, 100 years after his birth, and an opportunity to explore Cage’s influence on music, writing, performance and critical scholarship,” says their press release. “Fundamental to the development of innovations in performance art, contemporary music, graphic notation, audience reception and theories of social practice, Cage remains one of the most, if not the most, influential figures in 20th- and 21st-century art and performance. Such a legacy necessarily resonates beyond any single artistic or historical trajectory, and “The Future of Cage: Credo” will explore not only Cage’s output, both artistic and philosophical, but its after-effects through a variety of fields, genres and modes of presentation.”

Monday October 22 8:00: Continuum Contemporary Music. Finding Voice. “Another season of musical and extra musical exploration: influential works reconceived, new works on their way to being influential, revelatory performances, discussion among friends new and old” starts with a concert featuring, at its outset, an old friend of ther ensemble, Dutch composer Martijn Voorvelt and rivetting mezzo soprano Marion Newman. “Finding Voice” is a concert of vocal music about the voice and about communicating. It is also about history, the past given contemporary voice.”

Friday October 12 to Friday October 19: Music Gallery. X Avant New Music Festival VII: Expanding Circuits. Fortunately fellow columnist Andrew Timar has turned some of his erudite attention to this event, in World Music on page 28 and the Music Gallery’s own website gives a very detailed overview of a boundary-testing event that goes from strength to strength every year.

Friday October 19 8:00: Arraymusic. The Poets. A mix of words and music by poets and members of Arraymusic. Fides Krucker, mezzo; Phoebe Tsang, violin; Lydia Munchinsky, cello; Stephen Clarke, piano; Nilan Perera, guitar; Rick Sacks, percussion. and Ideas Studio, 980 O’Connor Dr., 416-778-7535. $10; $20(workshop and evening concert, see listings section A, Oct.13 at 8:00). 

David Perlman has been writing this column for the past season and a bit and is willing to entertain the notion that it’s someone else’s turn. He can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

These days, with so much to bring us down — the lousy economy, rampant shootings, political turmoil, crushing poverty, grave threats to the environment, the possibility (even the remotest one) that Mitt Romney might win the upcoming U.S. presidential race or, closer to home, that certain mayors might get re-elected for a second term — who isn’t looking for a reason to lift the spirits and celebrate something ... anything. Any excuse for a party, right?

Fortunately for us, in October and early November there’s some serious (and eclectic) celebrating going on by several orchestras: from the CAST (Chinese Artist Society of Toronto) Philomusica Orchestra’s commemoration of the 15th anniversary of Hong Kong’s accession to China, and the Korean Canadian Symphony Orchestra’s celebration of its 25th anniversary, to the Ontario Philharmonic’s recognition of violinist Shlomo Mintz’s 50 years on stage, and the curiously-named Medical Musical Group Chorale and Symphony Orchestra’s acknowledgment of “200 years of peace and friendship” with an “American-Canadian Friendship Concert.” I did say eclectic.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, the art of the solo piano is being celebrated by a number of presenters, covering the gamut from Bach to John Cage (who’s also being celebrated in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birth, well-noted in last month’s issue). You’ll find those listed below in the Quick Picks.

All in all, there’s some pretty compelling and unusual music making this month to take your mind off the woes of the world, if only for the length of a concert. Let the celebrations begin!

A Banner Month for Anniversaries

15 years: 1997 marked the year of Hong Kong’s accession to China (after 156 years under British rule) and its establishment as a “Special Administrative Region.” The Chinese Artist Society of Toronto (CAST) and the Multi-Culture & Folk Arts Association of Canada are honouring the 15th anniversary of this historic juncture with a concert on October 28 at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts. On the varied program: Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor; Mozart’s (unfinished) Concerto for Violin and Piano in D Major K.anh.56 (315f); Chinese music for violin and piano; narration with music arranged from songs that evoke images of Hong Kong; and a violin ensemble of 100 children performing popular Hong Kong songs.

The concert features 20-year-old Hong Kong pianist Rachel Cheung, making her Canadian debut. Also performing are well-known local soloists (with Hong Kong connections) Conrad Chow, violin, and Ka Kit Tam, piano, and the CAST Philomusica Orchestra. Erhei Liang, who wears many hats including one as president of CAST, another as composer-in-residence of the Hong Kong City Choir and yet another as an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, conducts. The evening gets underway at 7:30pm.

25 years: On its website, the Korean Canadian Symphony Orchestra states that its mission is “to present the highest quality classical music to our audience, many of whom are not regular concertgoers, to present Korean-Canadian soloists and composers and provide work and experience to young musicians from the GTA.” On October 20, regular and “non-regular” concertgoers can see that mission executed as KCSO presents its “25th Anniversary Gala Concert” at the Toronto Centre for the Arts’ George Weston Recital Hall, beginning at 7:30pm. While the program does not contain any Korean works, it does offer Mozart’s Andante in C K315 and Rondo in D K184, the first movement of both Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor and Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, as well as Symphony No.7 by Beethoven (in full). Korean-Canadian musicians Sylvia Kim, flute, and pianists Jason Lee and Donna Lee will perform under the baton of Richard Lee who, in addition to being the KCSO’s music director, is also an assistant music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

50 years: The Ontario Philharmonic (OP) must be getting pretty pumped about their upcoming set of concerts titled “Shlomo Mintz, Violin Legend: Celebrating 50 Years on Stage.” I don’t know when it was that Mintz last performed in Ontario (or with the OP), but his early November engagement with the Oshawa-based orchestra is being billed as a “long-awaited return.”

Interestingly, both the OP and Mintz were born in 1957 (which means Mintz must have had his first stage appearance at age five). Mintz, considered one of the greatest violinists of our time (and who, at age 18, added the role of conductor to his long list of achievements), has had a celebrated career, beginning with his Carnegie Hall debut at age 16 with the Pittsburgh Symphony. We are lucky to have him in the GTA for two performances: the first, November 3, is at Oshawa’s Regent Theatre; the second, on the 6th, is at Koerner Hall and is part of the OP’s special Great Soloists Series which showcases some of the world’s most distinguished artists.

It’s an all-Tchaikovsky program for each concert with Mintz performing the Violin Concerto in D Op. 35 and Marco Parisotto, OP music director, conducting the orchestra in the Symphony No. 5 in E Minor Op.64. Both concerts begin at 8pm.

200 years: I simply could not resist including the Medical Musical Group Chorale and Symphony Orchestra’s “Canadian-American Friendship Concert: 200 Years of Peace and Friendship!” in this collection of celebratory concerts. Based out of Washington, DC, the 200 members of MMG are “healers: doctors, nurses and others from medical centers and schools all over the USA.” Their mission? “To perform ‘Music with a Message’ — of healing, hope, inspiration, patriotism and peace at home; and peace and international friendship overseas.” MMG is the largest musical medical group in America — there are many such groups, as I discovered at www.doctorshobbies.com; who knew? — and performances have taken the group to Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the United Nations and the White House, as well as to overseas destinations such as Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand and Russia.

The repertoire for MMG’s November 7 concert will include everything from Foster’s The Prayer and Haydn’s The Heavens Are Telling to von Suppé’s Light Cavalry Overture, McCrae’s In Flanders Fields and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture Finale; plus another eight or so pieces as well as a “Beautiful Tunes Collage” of theme melodies. And as an extra special treat, Dean Martin’s daughter, Deana Martin, will be on hand to sing some of her father’s songs. In addition, there will be the narration of verse intertwined with music.

Joining the MMG for the evening will be tenor Mark Masri and soprano Lacey Purchase, while our very own Kerry Stratton will be among the seven narrators; that’s right, the busy conductor will not be the one with the baton this time. That honour will go to MMG founder and music director, Victor Wahby, MD, Ph.D., otherwise known as the “medical maestro.” Church on the Queensway is the “operating” theatre; “scrub in” is at 7:30pm. (sorry)

Quick Picks: Art of the Piano – Soloists in Recital

October 7 3:00: Hart House Music Committee. Sunday Concert: 653rd Concert. Works by Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich and Gershwin. Mauro Bertoli, piano. Great Hall, Hart House.

October 13 8:00: Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society. Eric Himy, piano. Debussy: Ondine; Ravel: Ondine; Schubert: 3 Impromptus Op.90; Gershwin: American in Paris; Rhapsody in Blue; and other works. KWCMS Music Room, Waterloo.

October 18 1:30: Women’s Musical Club of Toronto. Music in the Afternoon. Schubert: Sonata in c D958; Sonata in A D959; Sonata in B-flat D960. Paul Lewis, piano. Walter Hall, Edward Johnson Bldg.

October 28 3:00: Campbellville Chamber Concerts. The Art of the Concert Pianist. Works by Chopin, Liszt, Ravel and Rachmaninoff. Alexei Gulenco, piano. St. David’s Presbyterian Church, Campbellville.

October 30 8:00: Music Toronto. Piano Series: John O’Conor. Beethoven: Six Bagatelles Op.126; Sonata in D Op.10 No.3; Schubert: Sonata in c D958. Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

October 30 8:00: Les Amis Concerts. The Art of the Piano:
Nada Kolundzija, piano. Cage: Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948). Gallery 345, 345 Sorauren Ave.

November 4 3:00: Gallery 345. The Art of the Piano: Darret Zusko. Works by Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt, Buczynski and Kapustin. Gallery 345.

So, whatever your reason to celebrate, take yourself out to a concert for the occasion, and may your spirits be lifted! 

Sharna Searle trained as a musician and lawyer, practised a lot more piano than law and is listings editor at The WholeNote. She can be contacted at classicalbeyond@thewholenote.com.

Conductors learn that, in certain situations, to hear a sound exactly when you want it, you must indicate it slightly ahead of time. I’m uneasily contemplating this temporal disconnect as I write this column, several days before preparing for a big concert I’m conducting and playing in (a chamber performance of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers). As I write, the concert is several days in the future, but it will have been over for several weeks by the time you read this.

All of which should allow for a neat segue to an elegant, erudite little rumination on the nature of music and our perception of time. But I don’t have any time to write about time! I’ve got to practise this score. Or rather, last month, just slightly ahead of the time I should have been devoting to this column, I was practising a score and ... oh, forget it. Here are some choral concerts coming up soon, helpfully grouped into different areas of interest.

Requiems: November is the month for remembering the Commonwealth participation in WWI and Canadian choirs often program requiems for this time of the year. Here are several of note:

On November 3, the Cantabile Chorale of York Region performs Eternal Light a requiem setting by British composer Howard Goodall. Goodall’s work has enjoyed a popular reception in his home country, and this particular requiem setting has won an award as well.

The Islington United Church Choir performs Fauré’s Requiem on October 28. This piece is always worth a listen. Fauré’s elegant, unaffected writing is a welcome contrast to more bombastic settings of the requiem text.

The Orpheus Choir has transformed itself into one of Toronto’s vanguard groups for championing new music. On October 27 they perform Requiem for Peace by Canadian composer Larry Nickel. Nickel is a Vancouver-based composer who has had works commissioned by many groups, including some of the top west coast chamber choirs. Choir director Robert Cooper is also celebrating his tenth year as the Orpheus’ director. There will be more about that milestone in a future column.

Opera: Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s rarely performed one-act opera, La vida breve is being given two concert performances in a Toronto Symphony Orchestra program featuring the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir on November 1 and 3. Falla composed in the first half of the 20th century and his music is a wonderful blend of modernist elements with indigenous Spanish sounds. To hear this work live is a rare opportunity.

The standard judgment of English baroque composer Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is that the music is brilliant — it is — but that the libretto is weak. I am not convinced that this is true; I have heard singers do subtle and moving wonders with the text, imbuing the words with perception and sorrow. Judge for yourself as the Georgetown Bach Chorale performs a concert version of this opera on October 26 and 27.

Opera aria concerts are always fun, although they are sometimes criticized for removing arias from their dramatic context. I say, why not? We know that all sopranos die beautifully, all tenors die bravely, all basses are evil and all mezzos are seductive. Think I’m wrong? Find out as Brantford’s Grand River Chorus performs “Great Moments from Opera“ on October 27.

Benefit concerts: On November 3 seven Toronto Beach area choirs perform together and separately in a benefit for the East End Refugee Committee. On November 4 the Mississauga Choral Society presents “Malawi Benefit Concert: Voicing Our Care,” performing music themed around social justice and global issues.

Liturgical text settings: There is a small Bach choral festival taking place over the next few weeks. On October 13 the Tallis Choir combines Bach motets with music by German Romantic composers whose music was inspired by Bach, Brahms, Bruckner, Rheinberger and Mendelssohn.

Bach’s church cantatas are miracles of formal design and emotional depth and are very difficult to execute. Two choirs that are rising to the challenge are the Toronto Beach Chorale, who perform Cantata BWV131, “Aus der Tiefe,” on November 3; and the Pax Christi Chorale who perform cantatas 80 and 147 on October 21. The second cantata, of course, contains the chorus well known in English as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” perhaps Bach’s most familiar melody.

On Oct 13 Toronto’s St. Anne’s Church choir performs Mozart’s Solemn Vespers. Mozart wrote two settings of the vespers, K321 and K339, and both settings wipe the floor with every mass Mozart ever wrote during his tenure in Salzburg. Go and hear it.

Other concerts of note: On October 13, 14, 20 and 21 the Peterborough Singers perform Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. This popular work is the musical equivalent of a house party — wild, chaotic fun with everyone trying to be heard over the percussion. The famous opening chorus has been used in every movie featuring medieval knights that you have ever seen.

On October 19 and 20 the Tallis Choir is the guest of the Toronto Consort in a concert of works from the English Renaissance, some of which the Consort recorded for the popular television program The Tudors. Scandalous rumours that series star Jonathan Rhys Meyers will appear for a special midnight date with a lucky ticket holder have no basis in reality and did not originate here.

The Toronto Chamber Choir is one the few choirs in the area that regularly programs early choral music. In an October 28 concert titled “Kaffeemusik: The Mysterious Pierre A-la-mi-re” featuring music by renaissance composers Josquin, Ockeghem, de la Rue and Willaert, the choir illuminates the fascinating story of brilliant music copyist Pierre Alamire and the stunning manuscripts that he created.

Three special tribute concerts: An October 21 concert by Toronto’s Vesnivka Choir features a tribute to Marta Krawciw-Barabash, the late founder and president of the Toronto Ukrainian Music Festival. They are joined by the Orion Men’s Choir and the Toronto Ukranian Male Chamber Choir.

On October 13 Toronto’s Xiao Ping Chorus celebrates its 20th anniversary with a concert of opera arias and art songs with music from both Western and Eastern traditions.

Finally, on November 3, University of Toronto choirs join together in a special concert commemorating the 80th birthday of Canadian composer Ruth Watson Henderson.This composer’s music has been programmed consistently by choirs in Southern Ontario and beyond, but within contemporary music circles her work tends to be overlooked or even ignored.

I hope that this changes. Watson Henderson’s music is not wildly experimental or technically innovative in the “reinvent the wheel” manner that contemporary composition series regularly demand. Instead, it is classical in the best sense — it balances popular appeal with artistic depth and rigorous formal design. It needs impeccable diction and great sensitivity to text, tuning and musical structure.

I am very glad to see this anniversary celebration taking place, and I truly hope that the next generation of choral conductors understands that this composer has created a body of work in which all Canadian choral musicians can join in taking pride. 

Ben Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist. He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at benjaminstein.ca.

What is a song? When I started these columns, I realized that I had to make some attempt to decide what to include and what to exclude. I decided that opera, whether staged or in concert, was not part of my beat, although I could include vocal recitals that contained arias as well as songs. Similarly with choral music: it belongs in Benjamin Stein’s column, but I might talk about vocal soloists in such concerts (and have done so). Yet it was clear to me that the main emphasis should fall on songs (Purcell, Britten), lieder (Schubert, Wolf), chansons (Fauré, Poulenc).

The Aldeburgh Connection: We are lucky in Toronto to have the Aldeburgh Connection, an organization founded and led by Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata, pianists who first met when they coached at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh on England’s east coast. Subsequently, they founded the Aldeburgh Connection, which had its first concert in 1982. Over the years many distinguished singers have performed with the group and many young singers have sung there at an early stage in their careers. The performers have always been Canadians. Programs are never a series of individual items thrown together; they are always carefully constructed around a central theme. This season begins with “The Lyre of Orpheus: Robertson Davies and Music,” a program of works that Davies referred to in his novels or that he liked to sing and play. The soloists will be Miriam Khalil, soprano, Allyson McHardy, mezzo-soprano, and Geoffrey Sirett, baritone at Walter Hall, Edward Johnson Building, October 21.

We can also look forward to their concerts later this season: “Madame Bizet” in December, “Valse des fleurs: Music in Imperial Russia” in January and the annual Greta Kraus Schubertiad in March.

One of the singers who has performed with the Aldeburgh Connection is the soprano Shannon Mercer. You will be able to hear her this month in a concert of contemporary music given by Soundstreams, in which she will sing Analia Llugdar’s Sentir de Cacerolas and Fuhong Shi’s The Mountain Spirit at Koerner Hall. This may be your last chance to hear Mercer in 2012, since, immediately after this concert, she will start a European tour with the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre in a series of performances of Ana Sokolovic’s Svadba (The Wedding). Butshe will be back in the spring and one of the events in which she will sing is a Benjamin Britten concert with, you guessed it, the Aldeburgh Connection, May 7; it’s part of a series of three concerts titled “A Britten Festival of Song.”

Canadian Voices: Although it is regrettable that Koerner Hall no longer has a vocal series, we can welcome “Canadian Voices,” a series at the Glenn Gould Studio mounted by Roy Thomson Hall, now in its second year. These concerts are designed to showcase young Canadian singers and are therefore a perfect complement to the series presented by the Aldeburgh Connection, although they would seem to be concerned more with singers who have an established reputation. By contrast, Ralls and Ubukata are always careful to balance well-known singers with emerging talents.

The first concert in the “Canadian Voices” series will be performed on October 28 at 2pm by Phillip Addis, baritone, and Emily Hamper, piano. The program includes Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, four songs from Op.38 by Tchaikovsky, Fauré’s L’Horizon chimérique and three folksong arrangements by Benjamin Britten. Addis is coming off a very busy and very successful season: in September 2011 he performed Count Almaviva in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with l’Opéra de Montréal; this was followed by a performance of the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni for Opera Atelier in Toronto in October; in March he sang Roderick Usher in Debussy’s Fall of the House of Usher in Paris and this was followed by another Debussy role, that of Pelléas in Pelléas et Mélisande, in a concert performance in London. That was in July and in that month he also sang Demetrius in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Rome.

There will be three further concerts in this series later this season: David Pomeroy, tenor, will sing on February 24 and he will be followed by two mezzo-sopranos, Wallis Giunta, on March 24 and Allyson McHardy on April 14. These three singers are all former members of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. Like Addis, they are largely known for their work in opera and it will be interesting to hear them in recital. Pomeroy is world famous for his portrayal of the leading tenor roles in 19th century opera: Hoffmann (Offenbach), Faust (Gounod), Alfredo and the Duke of Mantua (Verdi), Rodolfo and Cavaradossi (Puccini). But he has also performed in lesser known works such as The Two Widows by Smetana and The House of the Dead by Janáček (in a memorable production mounted by the COC in February 2008). Giunta sang Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in Fort Worth last year and she will be singing the role of Annio in another Mozart opera, La clemenza di Tito, for the COC later this year. I first heard McHardy in 1997, as the Drummer Girl in Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, a performance of which I have a very vivid memory. Last year she sang Juno and Ino in Handel’s Semele for the COC. She also performed the title role in Bizet’s Carmen for Pacific Opera in Victoria. (Now that is something I would like to have seen!) In December she will sing the alto part in the Tafelmusik Messiah.

Other events in the GTA: On two consecutive Thursdays the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music, will present two performance classes for singers at Walter Hall. On October 11 at 12:10pm soprano Elizabeth MacDonald and pianist Steven Philcox perform “Women on the Verge,” with music by Mozart, Liszt, Schubert, Duparc and Libby Larsen. On October 18 in the Music Room, Hart House, there will be two performances of “Opera Scenes: Songs of Love and War” at 1pm and 7:30pm. Leigh-Anne Martin, mezzo-soprano, will be one of the soloists in a concert given in memory of Gustav Ciamaga, also at Walter Hall. Admission to these events is free.

The Canadian Opera Company has announced three events for October in its Vocal Series: on October 3 Sandra Horst and Michael Albano offer a preview of the 2012/13 season of the University of Toronto’s Opera Division; on October 11 members of the COC Ensemble Studio will perform highlights from Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus; on October 16 Ileana Montalbetti, soprano, Peter Barrett and James Westman, baritones, and Robert Gleadow, bass, all former members of the COC Ensemble Studio, will perform. These free concerts are in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre at noon

On October 11 Tafelmusik will team up with the Vesuvius Ensemble in “Bella Napoli,” a combination of refined concertos and traditional Southern Italian music. Francesco Pellegrino will be the tenor soloist at Trinity-St Paul’s Centre at 8pm; to be repeated on October 12 and 13, also at 8pm, and on October 14 at 3:30pm.

The Royal Conservatory presents a series of seven concerts in Koerner Hall called “Montréal à Toronto” (MàT). The first of these, one of three in a mini-series titled in impeccable Franglais, “Chansongs,” is given by two Canadian singer-songwriters, francophone Mario Chenart and anglophone Elizabeth Shepherd, on October 12 at 8pm. Next in the MàT series, on October 28 at 3pm, is a recital by Marie-Josée Lord, a soprano born in Haiti who grew up in Lévis and now lives in Montreal.

Two vocal concerts have been announced at Gallery 345, 345 Sorauren Ave.: on October 12 at 8pm Donna Linklater, soprano, is the soloist in a program of music by Weill; on November 2 at 8pm Leigh-Ann Allen, soprano, and Michelle Garlough, mezzo-soprano, will sing in “Lovers and Coquettes: An Evening of Opera and Song.”

On October 14 the Off Centre Music Salon kicks off its season with its “Annual Schubertiad.” Soloists Allison Angelo, soprano, and Lawrence Wiliford, tenor, perform at Glenn Gould Studio at 2pm.

Several of the “Music at Midday” concerts at York University will feature vocal music. In “Singing our Songs,” arias and lieder are performed by classical voice students, October 23, 25, 30, and there is a masterclass with James Westman October 26. These free events are in the Tribute Communities Recital Hall, Accolade East, at 12:30pm.

On October 30 the Talisker Players will present a concert of music by Barab, Füssl, Handel, Plant, Rubbra and Weill with soloists Anita Krause, mezzo-soprano, and Lawrence Williford, tenor, at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, 8pm; the concert is repeated on November 1.

And beyond the GTA: The “Music at Noon” series at Wilfred Laurier University’s Maureen Forester Recital Hall includes three free vocal concerts: Kimberly Barber will be the soloist in the first two on October 4 and 11; Jennifer Enns-Modolo will perform in the third on the 18th.

Penelope, a song cycle based on the Odyssey, composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider and with lyrics by Ellen McLaughlin, will be performed by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony with soloist Shara Worden, at the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts, October 11 and 12 at 7:30pm.

On October 24 at 8pm, arecital by Suzie LeBlanc, soprano, and Robert Kortgaard, piano, “‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer,” consisting of music ranging from Schubert to Gershwin, will take place in the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society Music Room, Waterloo.

A postscript: A few weeks ago my 11-year-old daughter Saskia (herself a singer and a member of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company) dragged me off to a pop concert sponsored by KiSS 92.5. Although I disliked the way the DJs whipped up the audience — mainly very young girls — into a frenzy, I found that I actually liked some of the songs. They certainly represent a different take on the Art of Song. 

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