Beat Columns (Live Music)

Two of my favourite things in life are Bach and espresso. So when someone gets the idea of actually combining the two, I get the feeling he’s done it just for me. There’s a Bach-playing duo who obviously have a plan to meet me for coffee, and they are baroque violinist Edwin Huizinga and harpsichordist Philip Fournier. Their plan: an ingenious tour of coffee houses in Toronto’s west end, designed to forever ensnare unsuspecting coffee drinkers into an everlasting love of Bach and classical music performance. The engaging Huizinga (you may have noticed him playing in any one of several groups in town — Tafelmusik or Aradia for example — he’s the imposing fellow with the long red hair who plays his violin with obvious passion) tells me more:

“The idea is that so many musicians travel the world, and often don’t really get the benefit of getting to know their community, people on their street, people in their ‘hood.’ And vice versa, where the community often doesn’t realize the talent living ‘in their own backyard.’ These evenings will be free, super casual, super intimate, super up close and personal, and will feature an hour or more of music of Bach for harpsichord and violin; we will be playing some solos and some of the obbligato violin sonatas as well. The events will also include some words about the pieces, some conversation about us and the instruments we play.”

And they are two interesting musicians. Besides being an accomplished violinist in a whole range of genres from improv to indie rock to baroque to modern, Huizinga was a founding member of the international network Classical Revolution — an organization of musicians dedicated to performing high-quality chamber music in non-traditional settings — begun in San Francisco in 2006. Fournier is organist and music director at St. Vincent de Paul, a specialist in Gregorian chant, a well-known recitalist on harpsichord and organ who has been called one of the finest organists of his generation.

You’ll find them in three coffee houses on these dates: May 6: Baluchon (Sorauren Ave.); May 7: The Common (College and Dufferin); May 8: Sam James (Harbord and Clinton). It all culminates in a concert of Bach at Holy Family Church on May 18, where hopefully some of the audience will have had the pleasure of first hearing them over a latte.

There’s a different tour you can take this month, one which centres on the theme you could call aspects of the feminine nature.

On May 10, 11 and 12, Toronto Masque Theatre’s “The Lessons of Love” pairs two masques drawn from two traditions, Blow’s Venus and Adonis of 1683 and Alice Ping Yee Ho’s newly composed The Lesson of Da Ji, which is scored for voices and an ensemble of baroque instruments including violin, lute and recorder as well as traditional Chinese instruments. The Blow piece relates the story of the beautiful and seductive goddess Venus, tragically struck as a result of her own selfish decisions. Ho’s work, on the other hand, tells of a Chinese concubine of the Shang dynasty, now understood mostly as an interfering supernatural being or a conniving seductress — ah, but is she tortured by deep inner conflicts? This presentation features among its wonderful cast Peking Opera artist William Lau, who plays a traditional female role representing the “Dark Moon.”

On May 24, 25 and 26, women of talent and vision are celebrated in the Toronto Consort’s “A Woman’s Life,” created by Alison Mackay. She is the designer of such multi-disciplinary shows as “The Galileo Project,” House of Dreams” and “The Four Seasons, a Cycle of the Sun,” each one incorporating stunning imagery, movement and gorgeous music to allow the audience to bear witness to a culture vividly brought to life. In the present production, she explores the lives and accomplishments of women composers and singers from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and early Baroque — women such as Hildegard of Bingen, Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini. The Consort is joined by guests, actors Maggie Huculak and Karen Woolridge.

Aspects of Venus, even her ablutions apparently, are explored by soprano Dawn Bailey and the Elixir Baroque Ensemble, in TEMC’s last concert of the season on May 26. Bailey is surely one to watch; her extensive résumé includes art song, oratorio and operatic appearances in Canada and abroad, in new music and old. She’s especially sought after for her interpretations of music from the 17th and 18th centuries. In this concert she and the Elixir Ensemble perform music of the French Baroque, including a cantata by Colin de Blamont, La Toilette de Venus.

And finally, on May 27 the Toronto Continuo Collective presents “The Immortal Soul of Psyche.” An astoundingly beautiful mortal woman, Psyche had to overcome impossible obstacles in order to win her lover, the god Eros; through perseverence she was rewarded with immortality and everlasting happiness. Works by Locke and Lully unfold her story, performed by singers, guest instrumentalists and the Continuo Collective themselves, a group dedicated to the study of the art of expressive continuo playing.

Others of note

May 10: Michael Kelly was an Irish tenor, composer, actor and theatrical manager whose career led him to artistic centres all over Europe; along the way he met and made friends with many of the most celebrated musicians of the day. Not the least of these friendships was with Mozart, whom he met in Vienna. In Kelly’s memoir Reminiscences he describes an evening’s entertainment he attended, a quartet party where the performers were Haydn, Dittersdorf, Vanhal and Mozart — it must have been quite an event! In “An Evening with Michael Kelly,” the Eybler Quartet recreates the music heard that evening while their guest, actor R.H. Thomson reads from Kelly’s memoir and other writings. Gallery Players of Niagara present the same program May 12 in St. Catharines.

May 11: The Peterborough Singers directed by Sidney Birrell is a 100-voice choir which celebrates the conclusion of their 20th season in their hometown of Peterborough with the performance of a masterpiece, Bach’s B Minor Mass. Soloists include soprano Leslie Fagan, mezzo Laura Pudwell, tenor Adam Bishop and baritone Peter McGillivray.

May 25: Who else but I FURIOSI Baroque Ensemble would present a program titled “HIGH”? The plot is best described by themselves: “I FURIOSI rises from the depths and soars to new heights in this program of lofty heavens. Baroque gods always descended in a machine — but whence? Since those gods always returned up high, the ensemble endeavours to find out what all the fuss is about up there.” Guest for this concert, which takes place at St. Mary Magdalene Church, is lutenist and theorbist Lucas Harris.

May 30, 31, June 1 and 2: You shouldn’t be surprised to find 19th-century repertoire on Tafelmusik’s upcoming program (namely, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, the Coriolan and Egmont Overtures, and Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto) — after all, they’ve been pushing the boundaries of their repertoire for some years now; also, they have as their next soloist the wonderful Polish-Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska, a Chopin specialist, playing an 1848 Pleyel piano — the same model as that used by Chopin when he gave his last concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1848, and one of very few to survive.

June 2: In a concert titled “Master Works of J.S. Bach,” organist Philip Fournier (of the coffee house duo above) plays three great works: Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G, several fugues from the Art of Fugue, and the C Minor Passacaglia, on the Gober/Kney tracker organ at The Oratory, Holy Family Church. 

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.

In last month’s column, I spoke about the act of listening, and how music creators have been evolving compositional strategies that bring more awareness to the ways we listen. When we slow down and open our whole being to engage with the sounds our ears are receiving, we truly do enter into a realm of perception that transcends normal everyday life. This can, of course, happen when we are listening to traditional music, but when the creative and artistic intention is focused on creating shifts in our perception of sound, it is easy to feel as if we are slipping into an “alternative universe.” This is how Musical Toronto blog-writer John Terauds describes his experience of listening to Ann Southam’s music as performed by Eve Egoyan — a concert I wrote about in that same column in April.

The Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound on May 31 and June 1 in Kitchener presents a perfect opportunity to stretch our listening awareness even further. This year’s festival, “Between the Ears,” offers a wide range of events including concerts, sound installations, a regatta of origami boats in a reflecting pool, performative sculptures, late night improvisations and a street market. On May 31, some wild things are in store for festival-goers, including the percussion music of Australian composer Erik Griswold. His pieces have been described as the place where music and kinetic sculpture merge. Imagine a percussionist playing an array of temple bells and bowls accompanied by the sounds and rhythms created by a cone-shaped pendulum spilling 50 pounds of rice through a large funnel. This is Griswold’s work Spill. In his piece Strings Attached for six percussionists, the gestures of the performers become a living sculpture. Their mallets are attached with nylon ropes to a lighting rig, thus visually magnifying their movements.

Other features of the Friday evening event include a performance of James Tenney’s Having Never Written A Note for Percussion — a stunning acoustic experience sure to stretch you wide open. In fact, my body can still remember the reverberations I experienced back in 2000 when this piece was performed at the Tenney farewell concert in Toronto. A single note on an instrument of choice is played as a tremelo for “a long time.” It begins at the threshold of hearing and rises in volume to an extreme threshold before returning again to silence. A simple concept yet the complex sonic results are unforgettable.

The festival evening will wind down with Hit Parade by Christof Migone. Participants lie face down and pound the pavement with a microphone. Everyone has their own amplifier positioned as far away as possible and can take breaks after each 100 hits. A sonic playground extraordinaire!

June 1 brings a performance by current and founding members of the legendary improvising ensemble CCMC (who also were the founders of the Music Gallery), and a cutting edge electronic piece, La chambre des machines, created by Martin Messier and Nicolas Bernier who digitally transform sounds made from machine gears and cranks. The night ends at the Walper Hotel with the members of Freedman (Justin Haynes, Jean Martin and Ryan Driver) performing on a ukulele, a suitcase and a street-sweeper bristle.

Xenakis and Beyond: Just preceding “Between the Ears” is another festive gathering called “Random Walks: Music of Xenakis and Beyond” running from May 24 (in Toronto) to May 25 (in Waterloo). Presented by the Fields Institute, the Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, this two-day event will focus on the music, ideas and influence of Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis. Concert presentations of his string quartet, percussion and electroacoustic music will be intermingled with lecture and discussion sessions. Xenakis was a 20th-century “heavy weight,” whose ideas continue to have a profound impact across many disciplines. Part of the festival will be devoted to exploring and taking stock of the range of this influence on, among others, composers, mathematicians, architects and computer scientists.

Xenakis’ music is often quite physically demanding on the performer, requiring a high level of technical prowess. That should bode well for some extraordinary concert experiences. Performers include the JACK Quartet, renowned for its “explosive virtuosity,” and an extensive list of percussion soloists and ensembles, including Montreal’s Aiyun Huang and Toronto’s TorQ Percussion Quartet. For a great essay on Xenakis’ string quartet music, I recommend the article written by James Harley, accessible through a weblink on the festival’s home page (google “Random Walks”). Noted speakers include musician and author Sharon Kanach who worked closely with Xenakis for many years, and composer/computer programmer Curtis Roads, former editor of the Computer Music Journal who also pioneered a form of computer sound creation known as granular synthesis.

More on string quartets: May seems to be the month not only for experimental music festivals, but also for string quartets specializing in contemporary music. Besides the JACK Quartet mentioned above, the Mivos Quartet from New York will be offering two concerts with slightly varying programs on May 24 at Gallery 345 and May 25 at Heliconian Hall. The young players of this quartet came together in 2008 after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music and set out to expand the quartet repertoire by commissioning and collaborating with a wide cross-section of contemporary composers. A third quartet — the Toronto-based Magenta String Quartet — will be presenting works by Toronto composers Eatock, Gfroerer and Vachon on May 25 at Eastminster United Church.

East and West: The East and West musical dialogue continues in two extraordinary events this coming month. First up is a production by the Toronto Masque Theatre of The Lesson of Da Ji written by two of Toronto’s own: composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and librettist Marjorie Chan. Traditionally, masque is a fusion of music, dance and theatre which flourished in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. This new work, which runs from May 10to 12 at the Al Green Theatre, will be a contemporary take on the older form based on the true story of the Shang dynasty concubine Da Ji and the King who took revenge on her secret lover. The music will blend European baroque instruments with various eastern instruments including the pipa, erhu and guquin, which Da Ji learns to play as part of the narrative. A traditional Peking Opera dance performance will complement the blending.

The second East and West event will be Soundstreams’ season finale concert, “Music for China,” on May 14, which also happens to be their first stop on the way to touring in China. Featuring music for chamber orchestra written by Chinese, North American and European composers, the concert will include performances by the Canadian Accordes String Quartet and the Chai Found Music Workshop — an ensemble from Taiwan that specializes in contemporary classical as well as traditional Chinese and Taiwanese music. I do have to note a heartening feature of this concert program, even though it is not mentioned in any of the media releases (which is not to be taken as a criticism, but rather a sign of progress). All works on the program are written by women, with the exception of the piece composed by Murray Schafer. This fascinating lineup includes composers Dorothy Chang (USA), Fuhong Shi (China), Alexina Louie (Canada) and Kaija Saariaho (Finland).

Contemporary choral: Four concerts of contemporary choral music are in store for lovers of this genre. The Oriana Women’s Choir celebrates the 80th birthday of Ruth Watson Henderson on May 25 with a concert featuring several of her compositions along with premieres by emerging composers. On June 1 the Amadeus Choir joins with the Bach Children’s Chorus to present Henderson’s Voices of Earth and a premiere by Eleanor Daley. And on May 10, the Upper Canada Choristers sing music of the Americas, including pieces by Astor Piazzolla (Fuga y misterio) and Eric Whitacre (Lux Aurumque) sung by their highly accomplished Latin ensemble Cantemos. If you haven’t yet heard the virtual choir version of Lux Aurumque — it’s a must. Go to YouTube and search it out. Whitacre’s music is also included in the Da Capo Chamber Choir’s concerts on May 4 (Kitchener) and May 5 (Waterloo), along with works by Leonard Enns and Glenn Buhr.

Emerging: New sounds by young composers can be experienced at two events, both happening on May 25. At the Music Gallery, the ∆TENT ensemble performs works by emerging local and international composers, while the group called “(insert TITLE)” showcases works for the marimba. Arraymusic presents their annual Young Composers’ Workshop Concert with premieres by four emerging composers who have spent the month workshopping and experimenting with members of the Array ensemble to create their new pieces.

With such an eclectic mix of concerts representing widely diverging aesthetics to choose from, this month offers the perfect time to open your ears to something you may not have encountered before. And in so doing, you will be right in step with the stimulating forces spring offers. 

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

More than any other musician before Wagner, Beethoven exemplified the idea of composer as spiritual leader, the artist as visionary genius who compels the support of performers, teachers and historians to realize his dreams and ideas.

Beethoven is an approachable genius, though. His achievements are leavened and humanized by his vulnerability, his awkwardness bordering on misanthropy and his loneliness. Through the insights we garner from his letters and notebooks we are witness to his very human struggles with friends, family and colleagues, to his frantic rewriting and experimentation with his own work.

With few exceptions, every note of Beethoven’s oeuvre feels like something is at stake. To be involved in a performance of his work sometimes seems, in a small way, like sharing in his struggles. As much as any of his works, the Missa Solemnis — performed in Toronto on May 15 by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir — exemplifies this phenomenon.

It’s generally accepted that Beethoven did not write sympathetically for voices. He was certainly not alone in this. In many instances Bach appeared to think of the voice as an instrument with a human being attached. Many of both composers’ solo and choral vocal lines, beautifully wrought, are only possible to execute faithfully as long as the singer does not have to breathe for minutes on end.

The choral section of Beethoven’s famous Ninth Symphony is a half-hour long vocal rollercoaster ride that taxes both the solo quartet and the choir with sustained high tessitura writing, dynamic extremes that require skilled vocal control, long instrumental-style passages with no room to breathe, all combined with the challenge of being heard over the wall of sound created by brass, winds, strings and tympani.

The Missa Solemnis is the same thing, multiplied by three.

It is the extreme nature of the vocal writing in the Missa Solemnis that makes it especially challenging. Beethoven’s cruelly high melodic lines and virtuosic instrumental writing were well beyond the capabilities of the players and singers of the time, and the first performance of the work (in Russia, 1824) was famously ragged. It was not published in its entirety until after his death.

But in writing music that outstripped the capabilities of the musicians of the time, Beethoven founded the idea of the composition as artistic and spiritual summit, to which musicians must aspire and strive. Wagner and Stravinsky would continue this tradition, forcing musicians to develop new technical prowess, matching their abilities to new sounds that the world had never experienced. The Italian verismo vocal training of the late 19th and early 20th centuries founded a tradition of vocal heft that could deliver the heaviness of sound required by late Beethoven composition and the music that followed in its wake.

The Missa Solemnis is infused with the same spirit as the Ninth Symphony and other late period Beethoven — a musical expression of faith locked in combat with doubt. Extremes of mood convey an almost desperate sense of Beethoven’s desire to connect to the world around him.

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is perhaps the only group in the region that can marshal the forces for such a mammoth work. A large-scale choir in the 19th century mode, the TMC is well equipped to be able to handle the technical elements of the work and to have a fighting chance to avoid being swamped by the orchestra. This is a massive undertaking for any ensemble and a chance to hear it live is not to be missed.

The Missa Solemnis is a kind of apotheosis of the European mass tradition, but innumerable other mass settings exist to cater to all tastes. A homegrown Canadian example that draws on one important strain in our history is the Celtic Mass for the Sea written by Scott MacMillan, a legendary folk musician from the East Coast. For their “Celtic Tide” concert on June 1 the VOCA Chorus has assembled a kind of Canadian Celtic supergroup, experienced and renowned players who bring their deep knowledge of Irish folk tradition to the music.

The VOCA Chorus, led by veteran conductor and pianist Jenny Crober, has made a specialty of combining classical works with folk and popular elements. Their Celtic-themed concerts have been increasing in popularity each year, and tickets for this current concert are reportedly in high demand.

Celtic Mass for the Sea was commissioned by the CBC in 1988 and has garnered many performances since then. The work blends the exuberant nature of Celtic rhythms with the resonance of the ancient mass text. Macmillan is planning to travel to Toronto to attend the performance and will give a pre-concert lecture on the work.

Further on the subject of modern Canadian works: I took part in a concert recently where the hapless ticket seller was quizzed about the nature of the music involved. The potential concert-goer wanted to make certain that whatever works were on the program would not be too “modern.” Assurances that the most modern composer of the evening died in 1986 were barely sufficient.

Yes, this happened. It’s common enough, really, so there’s no point in being all snobby about it. Many people actively fear contemporary music, and I’ll address that in depth in future columns. But folks, your friends, neighbours and colleagues are exploring new works in their various choirs every week. All of them, or at least most of them, make it back after rehearsal with their sanity intact. If they can do it, so can you. Here are a few concerts to consider this month.

This year’s celebrations of Ruth Watson Henderson’s 80th birthday continue with a concert of her works by the Oriana Women’s Choir on May 25. Read my appreciation of Watson Henderson’s work in my October 2012 column.

On May 4 and 5, Waterloo’s DaCapo Chamber Choir performs “Leonardo Dreams,” a concert featuring works by the ensemble’s conductor Leonard Enns, fellow Canadian Glenn Buhr and American Eric Whitacre, all of whom write very well for choir and whose works have enjoyed repeated success with audiences.

Enns’ and Watson Henderson’s works are also featured in a concert by Barrie’s Lyrica Chamber Choir on May 25, along with works by Healy, Estacio and Mozetich.

On May 24 and 25, another woman’s chorus, Etobicoke’s Harmony Singers, performs an all-Canadian program of popular works, with songs by k.d.lang, Joni Mitchell, Barenaked Ladies and Michael Bublé. On June 2 the VIVA! Youth Singers perform Dean Burry’s A Medieval Bestiary, which is a cantata specially written for children’s voices. Burry’s work is both well wrought and appealing, and ought to be a very good introduction to classically styled music theatre for children.

On the subject of youth choirs, I recently had the pleasure of doing some vocal coaching for the Bach Children’s Chorus. It was an education to watch conductor Linda Beaupré — as experienced a choral musician as we have in Toronto — work with the next generation of choral singers. Her Bach Chamber Youth Choir, performing on May 11 with the Bach Children’s Chorus, is a rare youth ensemble catering to mid- and older teens interested in choral singing.

Finally, a free concert: the Caribbean Chorale of Toronto performs at the Church of St. Stephen on May 5. 

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

The high park sakura trees are finally in full bud — soon to be in glorious bloom–and spring is in the Toronto air. For Orthodox Christians this time marks Easter Sunday celebrated this year on May 5. And there is a springtide connection here with a new folk music scene with a distinctive pan-Slavic flavour that has been emerging among local young adults in the last few years. It’s attracting those of Eastern European, especially Ukrainian, descent but also folks from other ethnicities.

Whether called third wave folk revival, urban folk, or post-folk music, such descriptions are eventually bound to fail, relying as they do on older, shaky, stereotypes. A secure definition eludes even the wiliest ethnomusicologist. One thing is certain though, trained and amateur musicians and OCADU artist grads alike are gathering in private and public spaces in groups such as the Kosa Kolektiv, Lemon Bucket Orkestra and the Fedora Upside-Down, the latter“an urban folk movement, with 11 bands, four art collectives and two performance collectives.” As that self-representation illustrates, this scene includes the plastic movement and the often-neglected communal arts, as well as the purely sonic.

The women’s Kosa Kolektiv, barely three years old, expands that scope even further, aiming to revitalize and reinterpret the entire web of peasant folklore in an urban context. “We do this by singing songs, sewing, cooking, planting, crafting, putting on workshops and sharing ideas over tea and good food. There’s something to be said for the simpler pleasures in life, and Kosa Kolektiv embraces them.” Kosa means braid in Ukrainian. Young women traditionally wore long braids, or kosy, before marriage and this group uses it as an effective central image of cultural fusion, the braiding of old and new. “We seek to re-learn forgotten songs, rituals and stories, and to bring them to life in a relevant way within our urban communities,” they write on their website.

For the past two years the Kosa Kolektiv has hosted a string of choral folk song workshops focused on Slavic village music.The latest one titled “Vesnianky — Songs of Spring” taught Ukrainian spring ritual songs, as well as the hailky, a group activity which includes songs (haivky)performed while dancing and playing traditional games at (Orthodox) Easter.

You can take part along with the Kosa Kolektiv in the St. Nicholas Church community hailky on Easter Sunday May 5 at 4pm in Trinity Bellwoods Park. They will be joined by the members of the Lemon Bucket Orkestra, collectively leading village-style singing and community dancing. Not to worry if your Ukrainian is rusty, the dances will also be called in English. And one more thing: you’re invited to bring a blanket, your Easter baskets and nibbles to liven up the communal picnic. How fitting that the town where Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase is host to an exemplar of the global village.

Musideum around the world: Elsewhere downtown, the cozy venue Musideum continues its multi-genre music programming. This month alone I count at least seven concerts with world and/or folk music credentials. Here are just a few:

May 6 Toronto’s Debbie Danbrook performs on shakuhachi with Ottawa’s sound shaman Mark Daniel on crystal bowls in a program titled “Healing Music Mediation.” This concert reminds us of music’s other side: its calming gifts. Danbrook, the first professional female shakuhachi (Japanese end-blown bamboo flute) player to specialize in the healing- and meditation-aiding abilities of her instrument, has recorded 14 CDs specifically for that purpose. Her music, embraced by healers and spiritual practitioners, aims to bring its audience into a calming, peaceful and meditative state. Many of us could benefit from a deep relaxation of the body and mind allowing us, even for the duration of a concert, to let go.

The sitarist Partha Bose performs twice at Musideum, May 26 and June 2, the second time with Indranil Mallick on tabla, a leading student of the renowned Swapan Chaudhuri. Bose represents the newest generation of concert sitar players of the Maihar gharana (school or lineage) of Hindustani music which was propelled onto the international stage and record market by two musical giants, the late Ravi Shankar and his brother-in-law, Ali Akbar Khan.

May 30 local folk fiddle stalwart Anne Lederman leads a fiddle trio with Emilyn Stam and James Stephens called “Eh?!” Acknowledged at the 2011 Canadian Folk Music Awards, Eh?! mashes established fiddle traditions with composed and improvised music. They perform not only with three five-string violins, but also with piano, mandolins, accordion, guitars, kalimba and their voices. As their name suggests, Canadian fiddle music from Newfoundland, Quebec and Manitoba forms the group’s musical backbone–but with a twist: frequent detours to incorporate European and African models too.

Asian Heritage Month picks: In 2002 the Canadian government designated May as Asian Heritage Month and Small World Music was quick out of the blocks to mark the occasion. Its 11th Annual Asian Music Series continues May 4 with a concert featuring Rajeev Taranath on sarod (also spelled sarode, an Indian fretless lute) at the Maja Prentice Theatre in Mississauga. Taranath displays a brilliant technique, a wide emotional range and a disciplined strategy in developing a series of raags, the melodic types at the core of classical Hindustani music.

May 12 is Mother’s Day and Small World is commemorating it with Ramneek Singh’s vocal performances of Indian classical vocals in various genres, khayal, thumri, shabad-kirtan, sufiana and folk, also at the Maja Prentice Theatre. It’s a rare treat to have a concert with five such genres represented by a single vocalist who is among the GTA’s most accomplished Hindustani classical singers, a representative of the Indore Gharana.

Palmerston Library Community Asian Arts Fusion Festival:
To celebrate Asian Heritage Month, the Toronto Public Library is offering a wealth of live programs at various branches of which the Palmerston Community Asian Arts Fusion Festival on Saturday May 11 at the Palmerston branch just north of Bloor St. is perhaps the largest. It all starts at 11am with a street procession led by SamulNori Canada performing traditional Korean drumming in and in front of the library, animating the Koreatown neighbourhood. Tsugaru shamisen music follows played by Gerry McGoldrick a Canadian expert of this Japanese folk tradition. Choral music from the Republic of Georgia takes the stage at 1:30pm sung by the Darbazi choir representing music from the crossroads of Europe and Asia. They’re directed by the tenor Shalva Makharashvili who passes on a deep understanding and passion for the music of his Georgian motherland.

One of the centerpieces of the festival is the 11:40am performance of the 15-member Toronto group Gamelan Kayonan performing Balinese dance accompanied by live gamelan music co-led by the dancer Keiko Ninomiya and John Carnes. It’s followed by Javanese masked dancer Wiryawan Padmonojati, while his young son Rafifkana Dhafathi Padmonojati reinterprets the ancient art of Central Javanese shadow puppet theatre for Canadians. The Global Trio follows, serving up world music Toronto style, with a fusion of Persian, North Indian and Indonesian instrumental styles. And to cap off this Asian fusion afternoon Isshin Daiko (One Heart) of the Toronto Buddhist Temple sounds its thundering drums at 3pm to dispel all malevolent thoughts. Visit the Toronto Public Library’s website for more details on this and other Asian Heritage Month concerts, activities and reading suggestions.

Other picks: Those wishing to extend their May 11 world music immersion should visit the “World Music Collaborations Concert” at 3pm, presented at SING! The Toronto Vocal Arts Festival at Harbourfront Centre. Suba Sankaran, who among several other roles is the singer with Autorickshaw, is acting as music director for the concert. She’s teaching a selection of South Indian-focused vocal music to be interpreted by an eclectic group of participants including the Georgian trio Zari, Judeo-Spanish soloist Aviva Chernick, Tuvan throat singer Scott Peterson and Lizzy Mahashe, a South African singer and gumboot dancer. For the finale Sankaran is preparing an arrangement that draws on the strengths of each of these diverse singers. An insider informs me the new work’s provisional title is WorldsKaleid.

On a personal note I am excited to be performing in concerts with one of Toronto’s senior world music groups, the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan (ECCG), at Arraymusic’s bright new studio on Walnut Street. The concerts on May 18 and 19 are titled “In the Cage,” celebrating the group’s 26-year-old connection with American iconoclast composer John Cage secured by the group’s commission of his Haikai (1986). The concerts also feature Cage student James Tenney’s Road to Ubud (1986) for prepared piano and gamelan degung, as well as Gamelan Klavier (2009) for the same instrumentation by this year’s Governor General’s Award recipient Gordon Monahan. Emerging Toronto composer Elisha Denburg’s new work scored for the percussion ensemble TorQ and the ECCG receives its world premiere on May 19. 

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

Long-time readers of The WholeNote might have noticed that I am usually in Vienna at least once every year. Well this year is no exception — here I am, but seeing this lovely city from a quite different perspective — from that of a hospital bed! To make a long story short, if this were the précis for a horror movie a working title might be “The Return Of The Dreaded Cellulitis,” or “Lost Limbo.” It’s the return of a condition for which I was first treated over three years ago and if not cured can result in the loss of a limb or even limbs, which would leave me legless and I don’t mean drunk!

The loss of limb thought opens up possibilities for dark humour. Please don’t be offended by my making jokes about something which is really no laughing matter, but keeping a sense of humour goes a long way in helping to cope with problems.

I decided to follow the advice of an Eric Idle song title and “look on the bright side of life,” so that if worst came to worst and I was minus a lower extremity, I could, for example, learn to play bass drum, cymbals, harmonica attached to some sort of neck-piece and become a one-man group called “Stump The Band” and go out not on one-night stands but one-leg stands performing such songs as “Knee Up Mother Brown,” “Peg Of My Heart,” “I Only Have Thighs For You.”

A suitable condition, too, if you want to be a “legend” in your own time.

I played a number of times with Benny Waters who, in his later years, lost the sight of one eye. He then included in his standard repertoire “Please Don’t Talk About Me One Eye’s Gone.”

Pianists Eddie Thompson, George Shearing and Joel Shulman all coped successfully with blindness and were known for their highly developed senses be considered blind.

I used to have musical competitions with Eddie to see who could play the most quotes during a song. I remember that on a few occasions there was actually a scorekeeper in the audience! But some of them were much too subtle for the average listener. If one of us played a really obscure quote the other would call out “Yellow Card!”

Shearing had a really funny version of The Lord’s Prayer. I can’t remember it word for word but it went something like this:

Our Farnham, who art in Hendon
Harrow be Thy name

Thy Kingston come; thy Wimbledon,
In Erith as it is in Hendon,

Give us this day our daily Brent
And forgive us our Westminster

As we forgive those who Westminster against us.
And lead us not into Thames Ditton

But deliver us from Ewell

For Thine is the Kingston, the Purley and the Crawley,
For Esher and Esher.

Crouch End.

Trumpeter “Wingy” Manone, so called because he lost an arm in an accident, played using one hand. Joe Venuti, the legendary violinist and prankster used to send Manone one cuff link every Christmas!

Red Norvo the renowned vibes player went almost totally deaf but was able to continue playing not hearing the notes but picking up the vibes — no pun intended.

Then there was Arnett Cobb. The big-toned tenor player from Texas was 30 years old when he had to have an operation on his spine. He recovered and resumed touring but eight years later in 1956 his legs were crushed in a car accident and for the rest of his life he had to use crutches when playing.

One of the world’s greatest violinists, Itzhak Perlman, contracted polio at the age of four but learned to walk using crutches and he plays violin while seated.

Django Reinhardt was one of the greatest guitar players of all time and after surviving an accident in a fire could only use the index and middle fingers of his left hand on solos. Ludwig van Beethoven remains one of the best-known and greatest composers of all time even though in his mid-20s he lost his hearing, while Evelyn Glennie, an amazing Scottish percussionist despite the fact that she is deaf, performs barefoot, which enables her to “hear” her music by feeling the vibrations.

Completing the circle back to Austria, the No Problem Orchestra, an Austrian band comprised of musicians with physical and mental disabilities (mostly Down syndrome) was formed in 1985. It has since given more than 5,000 concerts around the world.

Anyway, what I’m getting at in this article is that one can overcome all kinds of adversities with the power of music — and it helps to maintain a sense of humour.

So here I am in station 3A of the Dermatological Unit, Rudolfstiftung Hospital, Vienna, and the staff have been quite wonderful in the way they have looked after me, but also telling me in no uncertain terms that they won’t discharge me until they are good and ready.

Happy listening and stay out of hospital beds. 

Jim Galloway is a saxophonist, band leader and former artistic director of Toronto Downtown Jazz. He can be contacted at jazznotes@thewholenote.com.

It all started with a very nasty accident but with an outcome that, as I witnessed, was anything but accidental, namely a well-crafted concert by a rarely heard form of musical ensemble. As for the accident, it happened a few months ago. After one of their regular rehearsals, members of the Wychwood Clarinet Choir saw a woman riding her bicycle getting tangled with the streetcar tracks and being thrown to the pavement. Immediately, those choir members sprang into action like a well-practised team. They rendered first aid and took the victim back to her home at the nearby Christie Gardens retirement residence.

Over the ensuing weeks, those choir members and the victim, Bruna Nota, remained in touch and developed a strong bond of friendship. As her recovery progressed, Nota suggested that it might be appropriate for the choir to perform a concert for the residents of Christie Gardens. I had the pleasure of being a guest at that concert, my introduction to the work of the Wychwood Clarinet Choir, their director, Michele Jacot and several excellent arrangements for the ensemble, several by choir members.

Jacot grew up in Toronto in a house where there was constant good music. I asked her one of my usual questions: “Did you choose the clarinet or did the clarinet choose you?” Apparently the clarinet chose her, when she began music studies at Oakwood Collegiate. After undergraduate studies in music performance at the University of Toronto and a master’s degree from Northwestern, she returned to Toronto and embarked on a career of performing and private teaching. Now in its fourth season, the Wychwood Clarinet Choir was the brainchild of Jacot and a few of her adult clarinet students. It now numbers 20 regular members including her former teacher at Oakwood.

To acquaint audience members with the many diverse voices of the six members of the clarinet family, a sextet consisting of one of each instrument performed a very clever arrangement of What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor by choir member and former teacher, Roy Greaves. This was followed by one movement of a transcription of a Mozart serenade for wind octet also arranged by Greaves.

In the planning for this performance and their spring concert, the hunt for suitable arrangements led to another “happy accident.” It turned out that choir member Katherine Carleton knew renowned Canadian composer Howard Cable. Might he have written or arranged works for such a group? Yes he had. He hadn’t seen them for quite some time, but with a bit of digging, he provided two works. The first was an original 1964 composition, Wind Song, which he wrote for members of the Band of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs. The other was an arrangement of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” from the 1940 Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical Pal Joey. So Cable was there to guest conduct these two works, mentioning that he had not heard either work in 50 years.

As a surprise for Cable, two former choir members, Harry Musicar and Sydney Gangbar, were invited to this performance. They were both schoolmates of his at Toronto’s Parkdale Collegiate and played with him in the school orchestra under Leslie Bell (who later achieved prominence as conductor of the Leslie Bell singers). In so many ways this concert really clicked for all concerned.

If you have never heard a clarinet choir with its many voices, it’s time to do so. Wychwood will be performing their spring concert at 3:30pm, May 12 at the Church of St. Michael-and-all-Angels in Toronto. While Cable has a prior commitment which will preclude his attendance at that spring concert, a bond has been formed with the choir. Rumour has it that he has already written a new work which will feature Jacot as soloist. We’ll be looking for him and that work at their fall concert.

Hannaford: April also saw the great Hannaford Street Silver Band’s annual three-day festival. The winner of this year’s Hannaford Youth Rising Stars Solo Competition was Jonathan Elliotson from Orangeville who has just finished second year in the performance program at U of T’s Faculty of Music. He played Jubliance by William Himes on cornet from memory. Elliotson has been the end-chair solo cornet in the Hannaford Youth Band this past season. The Hannaford Youth final concert of the season will be May 11 at 2pm at the Church of the Redeemer in Toronto. It will feature Andrew McCandless, principal trumpet of the TSO as guest soloist.

Speaking of Hannaford, at last year’s Hannaford Rising Stars competition, Jacob Plachta, now in third year trombone performance at U of T, won performing his own composition Sonata for Trombone and Brass. At this year’s HSSB festival, the Youth Band premiered Plachta’s new work for brass band titled Celebration. Another Youth Band member, Adrian Ling, has written a three-movement work titled Progressions for Brass Band, with one movement for each band of the Youth Program: Junior, Community and Youth. These three movements will be performed at their spring concert with the three bands set up in different locations in the church. Ling is a first-year composition student at U of T and started with the Hannaford Youth Program seven years ago. At the Junior Band’s Christmas concert, they performed a piece called Elf Factory composed by nine-year-old percussionist James Muir, about the elves complaining about working for “the man” who is of course Santa. It even has lyrics that are sung in the middle by the band members. At the Community Band’s February concert, they performed a piece written by grade nine tuba player Blaise Gratton called The Perfect Storm. This has lots of rhythm and percussion with lots of notes for the tubas. Who thought that composition was only for the old fogeys?

Ensemble time: It was gratifying this month to learn of a number of concerts by small ensembles. There is nothing like playing in a small group to hone one’s timing, tuning, phrasing and sense of cohesion with fellow musicians. This month, Western University professor Henry Meredith told me about a student concert set up to do just that, with pieces featuring students with like instruments, in ensembles with such clever titles as the “Majestic Trumpets,” the “Trom-Bonus” and the “Horn-Utopia.” Meanwhile, members of the four Toronto New Horizons bands organized an afternoon of “Chamber Sweets” where at least 17 small groups performed while audience members indulged their sweet tooths on the assortment of goodies provided. On May 25 the Milton Concert Band will present “Maytoberfest.” That’s their version of Octoberfest in May, complete with a full-course German dinner and a special musical treat: the guest small ensemble will be the Alphorn Choir of the Ein Prosit German Band of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Kudos: Our hats are off to the Newmarket Citizens Band for their performance at the recent Music Alive festival. This is a non-competitive adjudicated festival, and they were awarded the highest possible Platinum rating for their efforts. It takes lots of confidence to start off an adjudicated performance with a number like Amparito Roca to establish your credentials. 

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

April has become a month so replete with opera that May, which used to be rather quiet, is beginning to fill up with opera as well. The Canadian Opera Company’s production of Salome continues to May 22 and its production of Lucia di Lammermoor to May 24. They are joined on May 8 by the final opera of the 2012/13 season, Dialogues des Carmélites. What is usual among the other offerings this month is the high concentration of 20th- and 21st-century operas.

Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) by Francis Poulenc has not been seen at the COC since 1997. The opera is based on the true story of the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiègne who were martyred during the Reign of Terror on July 17, 1794. The upcoming production is notable for its high concentration of Canadian talent. The cast unites such stars as Isabel Bayrakdarian as Blanche de la Force, Judith Forst as Madame de Croissy, Adrianne Pieczonka as Madame Lidoine, Hélène Guilmette as Soeur Constance, Frédéric Antoun as the Chevalier de la Force and Jean-François Lapointe as the Marquis de la Force. Except for the role of Mère Marie sung by Russian mezzo Irina Mishura, all the remaining roles are sung by such well-known Canadian singers as Doug MacNaughton, Megan Latham, Rihab Chaieb, Michael Colvin and Peter Barrett.

The production is directed by Canadian Robert Carsen who created it for De Nederlandse Opera in 1997 and is designed by Canadian Michael Levine, who designed the COC’s Ring cycle. The physical staging is minimalist, relying on a few significant props and the use of light to set the many different scenes. Carsen’s staging, however, uses more than 100 supernumeraries to evoke the constant threat of the French Revolution that Blanche does not escape by taking the veil. The opera runs May 8 to 25 with Johannes Debus conducting the COC Orchestra.

Among the new operas is the welcome return of Laura’s Cow: The Legend of Laura Secord composed by Errol Gay to a libretto by Michael Patrick Albano. The 75-minute opera written for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, premiered in 2012 during Luminato as part of the commemoration of the War of 1812. It was specifically written to include all levels of the 200-voice CCOC from oldest to youngest, with the addition of three professional adult singers. Emily Brown Gibson and Mary Christidis alternate in the role of Laura Secord, Andrew Love sings the roles of Caller, Balladeer and Lt. FitzGibbon as he did last year; and Tessa Laengert sings the delightful role of the Cow. Having reviewed the opera last year for The WholeNote blog, I can testify that it is an ideal opera for the whole family. Laura’s Cow runs from May 3 to May 5 at the Enwave Theatre. Michael Patrick Albano directs and Ann Cooper Gay conducts the 14-member orchestra.

From May 10 to 12, Toronto Masque Theatre presents the world premiere of The Lesson of Da Ji by Alice Ping Yee Ho to a libretto by Marjorie Chan. The one-act opera plays on a doublebill called “The Lessons of Love” with John Blow’s 1683 opera Venus and Adonis and thus provides a view of the masque from past and present, West and East.

The story is inspired by real events in the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bc). In the version by Ho and Chan, Da Ji, the king’s concubine, takes music lessons from the young nobleman Bo Yi to play the guqin, a type of zither. The king becomes jealous and exacts a grisly revenge on Bo Yi.

The singers include Vania Chan, Charlotte Corwin, Benjamin Covey, Alexander Dobson, Derek Kwan, Marion Newman, Xin Wang and Timothy Wong; the dancers are Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière and traditional Peking Opera dancer William Lau. Derek Boyes directs and Larry Beckwith conducts the TMT ensemble. Ho’s composition blends period baroque instruments (recorders, violins, viola da gamba, lute and harpsichord) and Chinese instruments (guqin, pipa, guzheng, erhu, gongs and drums).

On May 14 and 15, the COSI Connection will present the world premiere of The Wings of the Dove by Canadian composer Andrew Ager based on the 1902 novel by Henry James. The story concerns Kate Croy and Merton Densher who are engaged but too poor to marry. The entrance of the rich but terminally ill Milly Theale complicates and completely alters the couple’s relationship.

Toronto audiences will remember Ager as the composer of the opera Frankenstein, first performed by TrypTych Productions in January 2010. When Ottawa’s Thirteeen Strings premiered the Interlude from the opera in 2011, the Ottawa Citizen declared, “It’s gorgeous, if intensely wistful. Ager’s writing is subtly layered, its emotions being persistent and powerful without ever venturing into a hint of melodrama.”  “COSI” stands for the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy that commissioned the work. Ager’s opera will launch the COSI Connection which intends to bring back to Canada the fruit of the labour and training Canadians have received at the centre in Sulmona, Italy.

The staged production at the Heliconian Hall in Yorkville will feature soprano Leigh-Ann Allen, baritone Bradley Christensen, soprano Clodagh Earls, mezzo Stephanie Kallay and baritone Dimitri Katotakis. Michael Patrick Albano is the stage director and the composer will provide the piano accompaniment. After the produc-tion in Toronto, the opera will be produced in July at COSI in Italy, with full orchestra, choir and soloists.

Opera by Request has several operas-in-concert on offer in May. There is Janáček’s Jenůfa on May 5, Mozart’s Così fan tutte on May 24 and Puccini’s La Bohème on May 27. The rarest of the offerings, however, is Douglas Moore’s 1956 opera The Ballad of Baby Doe on May 11. The plot is based on the true story of the “Silver King” Horace Tabor (1830–1899), who built the opera house in Central City, Colorado, his wife, Augusta, and the woman, Elizabeth “Baby Doe” McCourt, with whom Tabor had an affair before divorcing his wife. Lisa Faieta sings the title role, Keith O’Brien is Horace Tabor, Eugenia Dermentzis is Augusta and Tracy Reynolds is Baby Doe’s mother. All the Opera by Request performances this month take place at the College Street United Church and are accompanied by William Shookhoff at the piano. OBR takes a new step withBaby Doein that the performance will not be in concert but semi-staged, with Lisa Faieta as the director.

Those seeking out 20th-century operas from Spain need look no further than the double bill by Opera Five of Goyescas (1915) by Enrique Granados and El retablo de maese Pedro (1923) by Manuel de Falla. The singers include mezzo Catharin Carew, soprano Emily Ding, soprano Rachel Krehm, baritone Giovanni Spanu and tenor Conrad Siebert. Maika’i Nash is the music director and pianist.Aria Umezawa directs. Performances on May 1 and 2 take place at Gallery 345.

From May 2 to May 5, Toronto Operetta Theatre presents Offenbach’sLa Vie Parisienne(1866) as its season finale. Last staged in 1992, the new production stars Elizabeth DeGrazia as the Swedish baroness with Stuart Graham as her wayward husband. Adam Fisher and Stefan Fehr play Parisian rogues ready to show the two foreigners a good time and Lauren Segal is the glamorous comedienne, Métella, ready to gamble for love. Christopher Mayell sings the role of the billionaire Brazilian whose masked ball concludes the madcap proceedings. Larry Beckwith conducts TOT Orchestra and Guillermo Silva-Marin directs. 

Christopher Hoile is a Toronto-based writer on opera and theatre. He can be contacted at opera@thewholenote.com.

In Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, the painter Lily Briscoe is much troubled when she recalls a young ambitious male academic saying: “Women can’t write; women can’t paint.” Nobody has ever doubted that there have been great women performers. Just think of the concerto delle donne in late 16th-century Ferrara or the girls who were trained at the Ospedale della Pietà in 18th-century Venice, of actresses like Sarah Siddons, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse or dancers like Anna Pavlova. But the ability of women to become creative artists has in the past been questioned. It was sometimes asserted that women could never become great poets since they lacked creative power. I suspect that this attitude goes back to a long discredited physiological theory that held that only men could create, since the homunculus was already present in the sperm and that a woman simply provided a space where the embryo could develop.

Of course, there have been a number of important women composers from Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century to Germaine Tailleferre and Lili Boulanger in the early 20th and Kaija Saariaho, Sofia Gubaidulina and Ana Sokolović in our time. I also suspect that there would have been others had the intellectual climate been more sympathetic to the female composer. Several women composers have been close relatives of more famous men: Francesca Caccini was the daughter of Giulio Caccini; Clara Schumann was the wife of Robert Schumann; Fanny Mendelssohn was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn; Pauline Viardot was the daughter of Manuel García. As a consequence they are sometimes seen as pale reflections of the male figures to whom they were related.

Sometimes too, a woman may have been content to be a “helpmeet.” There are two extant manuscripts of Claudio Monteverdi’s last opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea; one of these shows that Francesco Cavalli, Monteverdi’s pupil and successor, had made a number of revisions. But two-thirds of the manuscript is in the hand of Cavalli’s wife Maria. We know little about her: she was a widow when Francesco married her in 1630; she began copying in 1650 (her hand has been detected not only in the Monteverdi but also in several of Cavalli’s own operas); she died in 1652. She must have been musically literate to be able to do this work. Could she have become a composer herself? We shall never know. When Gustav Mahler courted Alma Schindler (who had studied composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky), he insisted that she could not be a composer, as it would be wrong to have more than one composer in the family. Like Maria Cavalli, she became a copyist of her husband’s music. (Mahler was to change his mind about Alma’s compositions later.)

Alison Mackay has played violone and double bass for Tafelmusik since 1979. For Tafelmusik she has created several highly successful multi-media projects: “The Galileo Project;” ‘The Four Seasons;” “The House of Dreams.” Her next project is for the Toronto Consort: “A Woman’s Life” on May 24 and 25 at 8pm and May 26 at 3:30pm at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre. The program will explore the lives of women composers and singers from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Baroque. It will feature vocal music by von Bingen, Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi.

Other events: Tafelmusik presents arias and choruses from Handel’s oratorios with Sophie Daneman, soprano, and Rufus Müller, tenor, at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, May 1 to May 4 at 8pm and May 5 at 3:30pm, and at the George Weston Recital Hall, May 7 at 8pm.

The Aldeburgh Connection continues its Britten Festival of Song with “The Song Cycles,” with Shannon Mercer, soprano, and Susan Platts, mezzo at the Glenn Gould Studio, May 7 at 8pm and “A Time There Was,” with Virginia Hatfield, soprano, Scott Belluz, countertenor, Colin Ainsworth, tenor, and Geoffrey Sirett, baritone, at Walter Hall May 26 at 2:30pm.

On May 7 and 8 the Talisker Players presents a program of works that evoke birds. It includes music by Telemann and Arvo Pärt. The singers are Erin Bardua, soprano, and Vicki St. Pierre, mezzo, at Trinity St. Paul’s Centre at 8pm.

I met R.H. Thomson more than 40 years ago when we were both in a production of the crucifixion scene from the York Mystery plays. Thomson played Pilate and I was one of the malefactors who torment Christ. This may have been the high point of my theatrical career but Thomson’s had barely taken off. Over the years he has become one of our most distinguished actors. Earlier this season he performed (for Tafelmusik) the fictional memoirs of an early 18th-century oboist. On May 10, Thomson appears in an Eybler Quartet performance titled “An Evening with Michael Kelly” at the Heliconian Hall; repeated at St. Barnabas Church, St. Catharines, May 12 at 2pm. Although the works played are instrumental, the program will be of interest in relation to the history of vocal music. Kelly was an Irish tenor, who created the roles of Don Curzio and Don Basilio in The Marriage of Figaro andThomson’s performance will be based on Kelly’s Reminiscences. Thomson will also perform in “The Star of Robbie Burns” (Church of the Redeemer, June 7) with Virginia Hatfield, soprano, and Benjamin Covey, baritone.

The Toronto Masque Theatre will give its final concert of the season on May 10 and 11 (at 8pm) and May 12 (at 3pm; all at the Al Green Theatre). The program consists of John Blow’s masque, Venus and Adonis, and a newly commissioned opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho, The Lesson of Da Ji. The singers are Vania Chan, Charlotte Corwin and Xin Wang, soprano, Marion Newman, mezzo, Timothy Wong, countertenor, Benjamin Covey and Alexander Dobson, baritone.

Klara Ek, soprano, and Gerald Finley, bass-baritone, will be the soloists in Brahms’ German Requiem, with the Toronto Symphony (Roy Thomson Hall, May 22, 23 and 25). The first two of these concerts will also include Lieberson’s settings of poems by Neruda.

Recitals at Rosedale kicks off its 2013/14 season with a special launch concert on June 1 (Rosedale Presbyterian Church at 7:30pm).

This month in its free Vocal Series the COC presents: Anna Christy, soprano, the star of the current production of Lucia di Lammermoor, in recital on May 21; a concert by the graduating artists of the COC Ensemble Studio on May 23; and a sneak preview of this year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival on May 30. All three concerts are in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre in the Four Seasons Centre from 12 noon to 1pm and are free.

And beyond the GTA: Leslie Fagan, soprano, Laura Pudwell, mezzo, Adam Bishop, tenor, and Peter McGillivray, baritone, will be the soloists in a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass (George Street United Church, Peterborough, May 11 at 7:30pm).

A postscript: I enjoyedthe lively performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by students of the Glenn Gould School (although I have always seen the opera more as an account of frustrated desire than as an indulgence in bunga bunga). The Don (Diego Catala) sang a beautiful “Serenade” and Don Ottavio (Justin Stolz) was terrific in “Il mio tesoro.” The finest performance came from Beste Kalender as Zerlina. She sang with warmth and had just the right mixture of naiveté, spontaneity and artfulness. 

Hans de Groot is a concertgoer and active listener. He also sings and plays the recorder.

Highly eccentric and strangely fascinating — much like the man himself — the music of Gia Ionesco is anything but background music. To describe his unconventional artistry in words seems like an exercise in futility, but it’s worth a try. Classically trained from a young age, Romanian-born Ionesco is a formidable pianist who plays with fiery passion, sometimes playing multiple keyboards at once (!) but his unique writing style makes him a composer first. Considering the arrangements, instrumentation and influences associated with his writing, there is a lot to digest here, perhaps even too much for certain listeners. While on the one hand Ionesco’s rollercoaster-like blending of jazz, world, fusion and progressive rock might be dizzying for some, on the other, his growing fan base ranges in age from 6 to 92, a compliment that speaks volumes. Actually, judging by the smiles on their faces alone, some of his biggest fans include guitarist Reg Schwager, percussionist Alan Hetherington and saxophonist Johnny Johnson, all members of Ionesco’s band, Gia & The Unpredictable Update.

Around this time last year, I saw the band in action at The Rex Hotel, and will not forget the contagious joy that emanated from the stage that night. It was a sight to behold, as if a gifted group of middle-aged men were rocking out like teenagers in their parents’ basement! In particular, Johnny Johnson — one of the most sought-after horn players in the country, frequently seen and heard around the globe with Molly Johnson and Holly Cole — seemed like he was having the time of his life, so I asked him a few questions, starting with his first impression of Ionesco’s music:

“It was like hearing the past, present and future of music, all at once,” he said. “So of course, the first time I heard Gia’s music I was speechless. My mind needed some time to process it all ... What makes this music unique is its compositional versatility. Because Gia incorporates so many styles in his writing there are any number of directions the band can take during a performance ... Honestly you never really know what’s in store at the end of the song but we do know it will be fun getting there. And there are a lot of songs. I’m guessing Gia has written over 250 songs and I’m sure there are at least that many more in that crazy creative brain of his.”

Big news: on Monday, May 6, 8:30pm at Hugh’s Room, the band will perform a concert to celebrate their upcoming tour of China, which will culminate in an appearance at the prestigious Shanghai Spring International Music Festival. This is the first time that a Canadian act has been invited! The Unpredictable Update at Hugh’s Room will be: Gia Ionesco, keyboards; Bruce Cassidy, trumpet; Johnny Johnson and Clifford Ojala, saxophones; Reg Schwager, guitar; Alex St. Kitts, bass; Alan Hetherington, percussion and Wilson Laurencin, drums. Come to Hugh’s Room to wish this group well as they tour the other side of the world later this month!

Lula Lula! Living in this vast country of a city, one sometimes takes for granted the little things. This is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, where just about any kind of cuisine can be found, and the same goes for music.

On that note, the Lula Lounge Music and Arts Centre presents its annual multicultural music festival, Lulaworld 2013. Opening this festival, Friday May 10, is a unique collaboration: the Jay Danley Ethio Jazz Project featuring special guest, master Ethiopian musician Fantahun Shewankochew on vocals and Krar, and Toronto’s own Danley on guitar, Chris Gale and Elena Kapeleris on saxophones, Sam Petite on bass, Jeff Halischuck on drums and Richard Whiteman on piano.

Danley, himself a versatile guitarist who has spent the past two decades playing traditional Cuban music and traditional jazz, was inspired to play Ethiojazz by listening to Les Ethiopiques, a series of recordings by the inventor of this style, Mulatu Astatke. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Berklee-trained, Ethiopia-born Astatke was the first to combine modern jazz with Ethiopian scales.

“The very difficult musical challenge of composing, arranging and improvising using these scales is very rewarding to me,” says Danley. “I have also added some of my own personal tastes and influences to my compositions that make them unique.”

The collaboration with Danley’s group and Shewankochew has an interesting back story; they played a gig at Lula back in February, ten days before the Batuki Music Society presented a concert at the Glenn Gould Studio called Abyssinian Roots. The special concert brought to Toronto some of the hottest Ethiopian musicians from the nightclub scene of Addis Ababa, including Henok Abebe, Martha Ashagari, and Fantahun Shewankochew himself. Danley was in the audience that night and was absolutely amazed; meeting Shewankochew afterwards, it turned out that the Ethiopian master had attended their gig at Lula and wanted to work together. The organizers of Lulaworld were approached and decided that this collaboration would be a great way to open the 2013 festival.

Meanwhile, one of the few Toronto players on the aforementioned Batuki Music Society concert was drummer Daniel Barnes, who has recently put together “DB3” — the Daniel Barnes Groove Trio, another new world/jazz music band with an Ethiopian connection, playing every second and fourth Thursday of the month at Hirut Restaurant, 2050 Danforth Ave. “We’ve taken root at Hirut because audiences enjoy the place, the cuisine and our show,” adds Barnes. “It’s exciting cultural times with global interconnectedness and Toronto itself being a cultural force of diverse backgrounds for generations now.” But that will have to be a story for another day. 

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

Last September Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata, the artistic directors of the Aldeburgh Connection, announced that this season, their 32nd, would be their last. Sad news, but nobody would want to force the directors to see the series as a life sentence. In any case, they want to end things now rather than wait until the time when people would say, “they have obviously run out of ideas,” however remote and even hypothetical that must seem at present.

Ralls’ work at Aldeburgh, the seaside town in southeast England, and his professional involvement with the operas of Benjamin Britten, began in 1972 when he worked as pianist and vocal coach on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; subsequently he played the piano in Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice (he can be heard as the pianist on the opera’s original recording). Ubukata arrived in Aldeburgh in 1977 with the intention of auditing some of the masterclasses, but there was a last minute vacancy and he stayed as a coach and accompanist instead. It was then that Ralls and Ubukata first met but they realized they could have met four years earlier when Ubukata was in the audience at an Edinburgh performance of Death in Venice, in which Ralls played the piano.

The Aldeburgh Connection’s main goal has always been to help young Canadian singers gain experience in the song repertoire. Recently I have been struck by the way Aldeburgh’s concerts have maintained a balance between emerging singers and established artists. Its most recent concert, for instance, had the well-known soprano Monica Whicher but also the tenor Isaiah Bell and the bass-baritone Gordon Bintner, neither of whom is at all well known in Toronto. (That is bound to change now that Bintner has become a member of the COC Ensemble Studio.) But the established singers were also young emerging singers at one time and many were given important professional experience by the Aldeburgh Connection early in their careers. That is as true of singers who retired many years ago (Henry Ingram, Ingemar Korjus, Catherine Robbin, Janet Stubbs) as it is of those who are still in the middle of successful careers (Colin Ainsworth, Russell Braun, Brett Polegato, Michael Schade). A number of singers made their first professional appearance with the Aldeburgh Connection: Alexander Dobson, Virginia Hatfield, Joni Henson, Benjamin Covey and Lucia Cesaroni. Over the years the Aldeburgh Connection has commissioned a number of works. Several of these were recorded on the CD Our Own Songs, with Adrianne Pieczonka, Monica Whicher, Elizabeth Turnbull, Colin Ainsworth and Mark Pedrotti.

Ralls and Ubukata have always acknowledged the help they received from their patrons. First and foremost was Peter Pears, Britten’s partner and the singer for whom he wrote many of his works. Another was Greta Kraus, pianist and harpsichordist, vocal coach and accompanist. It is in her memory that the Aldeburgh Connection established its annual Schubertiad.

One of the finest things about the concerts of the Aldeburgh Connection is the work that the directors have done to establish the cultural contexts of the songs. The first of their concerts that I attended was based on songs that were performed in Jane Austen’s family. To prepare for that concert Ralls and Ubukata travelled to the Jane Austen’s House Museum (in Chawton in Hampshire) where they examined the music that Austen had copied out. The first half of their most recent concert consisted of Schubert songs with texts based on the poetry of Ovid, Virgil and Catullus. It is those poems that were read (Ralls and Ubukata are excellent readers). There have also been contributions over the years by leading Canadian actors. There my finest memory is Christopher Newton’s reading of the Christmas dinner chapter from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Incorporating readings is now a feature of many concerts, a practice no doubt influenced by the Aldeburgh Connection. The danger is that these readings are often rather loosely related to the music. That has never been true of the Aldeburgh Connection.

Special attention has always been given to the anniversaries of composers: Schubert, Poulenc, Hugo Wolf. It is fitting that in this, their final year, they will finish with three concerts devoted to the work of Britten, who was born 100 years ago. The first of these concerts, at Glenn Gould Studio on April 26 at 8pm, presents three of the Canticles as well as The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard and Britten’s Purcell Realizations. The soloists are Daniel Taylor, countertenor, Benjamin Butterfield, tenor, and Alexander Dobson, baritone. The second of the concerts will take place on May 7 in the Glenn Gould Studio at 8pm, featuring Shannon Mercer, soprano, and Susan Platts, mezzo, as soloists in On this Island, A Charm of Lullabies, The Poet’s Echo and some of the folksong arrangements. A Charm of Lullabies and The Poet’s Echo have a special meaning for Ralls and Ubukata as they were written for singers whom they knew and remember fondly: Nancy Evans and Galina Vishnevskaya. “A Britten Festival of Song” (and indeed the Aldeburgh Connection) will end with a vocal tapestry, “A Time There Was” in Walter Hall, May 26 at 2:30pm. The soloists are Virginia Hatfield, soprano, Scott Belluz, countertenor, Colin Ainsworth, tenor, and Geoffrey Sirett, baritone.

I feel confident about the continuing presence in Toronto of Ralls and Ubukata. Ralls will be the collaborative pianist in a recital with Allyson McHardy featuring works by Berlioz, Schumann, Rossini and Jonathan Larson, as well as Scottish folksongs, on April 14 in Glenn Gould Studio at 2pm. Last month Ubukata travelled to York University to direct a masterclass with the students of Catherine Robbin and Norma Burrowes. But I am less sanguine about the continuing presence of song recitals in Toronto. The celebrity recitals at Roy Thomson Hall were discontinued a couple of years ago and there is now very little vocal music at Koerner Hall. To some extent the slack has been taken up by the four-concert series “Canadian Voices,” organized by Massey Hall/Roy Thomson Hall and given at the Glenn Gould Studio, but, unlike the concerts of the Aldeburgh Connection, these concerts feature established singers, not emerging artists. There are, of course, other concerts that may feature songs. One of the finest things I have heard in a long time was the staged performance of Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, given by Against the Grain Theatre with Colin Ainsworth, Lauren Segal and Christopher Mokrzewski.

Other series will incorporate sung performances next season: Isabel Bayrakdarian will perform with Tafelmusik in April 2014 and Philip Addis sings for Music Toronto in December of this year. Addis will also pay tribute to the music of Britten: his recital includes the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake as well as one of Britten’s Purcell Realizations. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra program for next season includes Britten’s Serenade Op. 31 for tenor (Nicholas Phan), horn (Neil Deland) and strings, Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs (Erin Wall), Mozart’s Coronation Mass (Leslie Ann Bradley, Lauren Segal, Lawrence Wiliford and Philippe Sly), a range of soprano-mezzo duets (Yulia Van Doren and Wallis Giunta), an evening of music by Lerner and Loewe (Amy Wallis, Colin Ainsworth and Jonathan Estabrooks) and Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs (Sondra Radvanovsky). Many singers now organize their own concerts at venues like the Heliconian Hall on Hazelton Ave. It is there that recently we have been able to hear Meredith Hall (with Brahm Goldhamer), John Holland (with William Shookhoff), Isaiah Bell (with Stephen Ralls) and several others.

The new series that comes closest to what the Aldeburgh Connection has given us is Recitals at Rosedale (Rosedale is short for Rosedale Presbyterian Church), directed by Rachel Andrist and John Greer. The series opens on June 1 at 7:30pm with a special launch concert; the subsequent recitals are on October 6, December 1, February 9 and May 25 (all Sundays at 2:30pm, a day of the week and a time inherited from the Aldeburgh Connection). Like the Aldeburgh Connection, Recitals at Rosedale is committed to using only Canadian singers (their lineup includes major talents like Ambur Braid and Lauren Segal, Colin Ainsworth and Gregory Dahl). I am looking forward to these concerts but I have to add that the emphasis in their advance publicity on “renowned Canadian artists” does not suggest that bringing out emerging singers will be one of their priorities.

OTHER EVENTS

On April 5 and 6 in Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre at 8pm, the Toronto Consort presents Emma Kirkby, soprano, and Jakob Lindberg, lute, in a concert of music by Dowland and Purcell. Kirkby will give a masterclass on April 7 at 2:30pm, also at the Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre.

On April 11 and 13 in Roy Thomson Hall at 8pm, Measha Brueggergosman, soprano, will sing four songs by Duparc and Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano, will give a free recital in Mazzoleni Hall at the Royal Conservatory on April 14 at 5pm. The program includes songs for voice and harp — Rubbra’s Jade Mountain and Britten’s A Birthday Hansel, with Ingrid Bauer — and works for voice and piano — Hymnen an die Nacht by Vivier, Cinq mélodies de Venise by Fauré and The Ugly Duckling by Prokofiev, with Peter Tiefenbach. Fitz Gibbon will also sing at the Canadian Music Centre (20 St. Joseph St.) on April 13 at 5:30pm.

There are four free vocal performances at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre in the Four Seasons Centre next month, all at noon: “A Celebration of Canadian Art Song" on April 16 includes a world premiere of a work by Norbert Palej performed by Lawrence Wiliford, tenor, a new work by Andrew Ager, dedicated to and performed by Shannon Mercer, soprano, and songs by Jean Coulthard sung by Peter McGillivray, baritone — Stephen Philcox is the collaborative pianist; songs from Newfoundland sung by tenors Michael Barrett and Adam Luther are featured on April 23; the April 30 concert, “Inspired by Lorca,” showcases La selva de los relojes, a new chamber work by Chris Paul Harman with Krisztina Szabó, mezzo; and “Sérénade Française,” French arias and art songs with the COC Ensemble Studio takes place on May 2.

“Greece to Granada,” a program of Greek, Balkan and Spanish music, will be performed on April 26 at 8pm in the Heliconian Hall. The singer is the mezzo Maria Soulis and the instrumentalists are William Beauvais, guitar, and Julian Knight, violin. Soulis has had a busy career in Europe, where her roles included the title role in Carmen and Rosina in The Barber of Seville. She has recently returned to Canada. Here she has sung, among other parts, the role of Clara in a workshop production of the second act of The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G. (music by Aaron Gervais and libretto by Colleen Murphy) for Tapestry Opera. 

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