Beat Columns (Live Music)

I can’t remember a year in which the Toronto jazz scene suffered so many momentous losses; it’s been absolutely dreadful and has left many of us reeling in grief and shock. Close on the heels of Ed Bickert dying in late February, Norma Thompson (wife of the brilliant multi-instrumentalist Don Thompson) and pianist Gary Williamson both passed over the Easter weekend. We had barely begun to absorb those losses when drummer John Sumner died in early June after suffering a massive stroke. And in late July came the news that Rochelle Koskie, long-time Toronto jazz fan and co-founder of JPEC, had died unexpectedly. I hate to keep using this space as a floating jazz obituary, but when in Rome, as it were. Each of them deserves remembrance and never so more now that they’re gone.

Don Thompson is a private and stoical man, so there was very little public marking of Norma’s death. Out of respect I won’t say much except that Norma had been suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s for some years and Don had been looking after her with heroic dedication, hence his reduced presence in public recently. Norma was a lovely woman, kind and vivacious, and also a talented musician – she played the bagpipes and the drums. She’ll be missed by many of us who knew her for a long time and our hearts go out to Don, who will miss her most of all.

Gary Williamson died at 75 after a long struggle with cancer which had left him unable to play much in recent years. Perhaps for this reason, Gary’s passing didn’t attract a lot of public attention either, but it certainly did among his fellow musicians. In fact, Gary was a classic example of a “musician’s musician” – one capable of improvising extraordinary things on the piano which might have gone over the heads of many listeners, but regularly left his musician colleagues open-mouthed.

He was a brilliant man who had an unusual and interesting life. His gifts extended beyond music to the academic sphere, where he particularly excelled in sciences and math. He made the Ontario Scholar’s list and was in the Engineering Physics program at U of T when he decided he wanted to pursue music full-time, much to the initial chagrin of his parents. As a young man, he played around Toronto on all manner of gigs, jazz and otherwise, including a stint in the house band at the Victory Burlesque Theatre which he often looked back on with great affection.

Gary spent much of the mid-to-late 1960s on an extended tour with a showband covering most of Asia. It was adventurous to say the least, leaving him with many great stories and a lifelong interest in all things Oriental. He met his lovely wife Rose in Hong Kong and brought her home to Toronto, where they bought a house and raised two beautiful children, Ty, and Sue May.

He became a fixture on the Toronto jazz scene from the early 70s on, performing regularly at Bourbon Street, George’s Spaghetti House and many other clubs, as well as doing his share of jingles and other studio work. He was the pianist with Nimmons ‘N’ Nine Plus Six during its heyday, and Gary and I often performed together with Phil Nimmons in his quartet and with trumpeter Sam Noto’s quintet among other groups. In recent years, he could be heard in many of bassist Dave Young’s bands. He was very active on the Local 149 TMA board and for a time edited its publication, Crescendo. He taught piano in the jazz program at U of T for many years and the list of fine young pianists who benefitted from his guidance is a long and distinguished one.

Pianistically, he had very few peers. His studies with Darwin Aitken left him with a thorough mastery of the instrument which he augmented with his own incisive intellect – especially when it came to harmony – and his wide-ranging and adventurous tastes in music and pianists. Gary had a natural feeling for blues and gospel and blended these with elements from older bebop masters like Bud Powell, Red Garland and Phineas Newborn, and more modern players such as Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett to form a challenging and intense personal style with great scope and a very wide, swinging beat. His playing was invariably inventive and uncompromising – he came at you – and expected you to respond in kind. I always found playing with him immensely rewarding and being around him a lot of fun, largely due to his rich sense of humour and wit.

I wish Gary had cultivated himself more as a leader and made more recordings of his own – there’s only one, long unavailable – but it wasn’t in his nature to do so. For this reason, he’s much less well-known than he should be and his illness keeping him off the scene in recent years didn’t help. Simply put, he was one of the very best pianists I’ve ever heard or played with. Like many, I miss him a lot but am glad his suffering is at an end.

Though a vastly different character than Gary Williamson, John Sumner was similarly under-recognized by the jazz public, even locally. Part of this was due to his somewhat reserved and standoffish nature – at least until you got to know him – and like Gary, John’s declining health had kept him out of the public eye lately. Along with long-term hypertension, he began suffering from acute fibromyalgia in the last 15 years, which left him with constant muscle/joint pain and fatigue, hampering his mobility in recent years. He somehow managed to still play the drums well through all this, but as the condition worsened, he was less able to get out and play, which was sad for his friends to witness.

He had become virtually housebound, and when he suffered the stroke in late May, doctors told his wife Juanita that even if he recovered, his days of living at home were over. This was unthinkable to his many friends because John was a guy who loved to be at home surrounded by his incomparable library – many thousands of CDs, scores of jazz books, favourite films, DownBeat magazines dating back to the 50s and all sorts of other goodies.

In this sense, and this sense only, John’s death was a mercy; otherwise I’ve found it personally unsustainable. He was my closest jazz friend for 34 years, and even though I’d seen him almost gradually disappear before my very eyes in recent years, he’s loomed so large in my life that I simply can’t believe he’s gone.

I’m in the midst of writing a long memorial blog on John that may take the rest of my life, so I’ll confine my remarks to the musician side of him rather than the personal. He was a superbly musical drummer, not given to technical displays – he often eschewed solos or even exchanges of eights – but always listening, always knowing what to deliver and when. He valued swing, groove and sound, and understood the subtleties underlying them, the value of texture and dynamics and how to develop these over a long arc in a performance.

He and I had an effortless rhythmic consensus, which developed when we first met and played together on an epic jazz concert tour of the Soviet Union led by Fraser MacPherson in 1986. After 30 concerts in 30 days we were joined at the hip, both musically and personally. Not long after that, he and his beloved Juanita moved to Toronto, and I soon introduced John to pianist Mark Eisenman, knowing that the rhythmic chemistry would extend to three. And it did. Playing with that rhythm section has provided me with many of the most enjoyable and satisfying musical moments of my career.

John was the ultimate autodidact. With only a couple of introductory drum lessons, he was playing high-level professional jobs in Portland, Oregon by the time he was a teenager, followed by vast experience playing with just about everyone imaginable in San Francisco and Los Angeles before moving to Canada in the early 80s. He knew more about jazz than anyone else I’ve ever met and was extremely generous in sharing his vast knowledge with anyone who showed interest. I can’t possibly say how much I learned from him and his vast collection of records and stories over the years. Suffice it to say that not one word of anything I’ve written about jazz in numerous blogs and articles would have been possible without knowing him, and that’s no exaggeration. I’m enormously grateful to have had John Sumner as a friend for so long and will miss him for the rest of my days.

And then out of nowhere, the news that on Sunday, July 28, 2019, Rochelle Koskie died suddenly and peacefully at home. Along with her husband Ray, Rochelle was co-founder of the Jazz Performance and Education Centre (JPEC) which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. The vitality that fed Rochelle’s love of jazz could be seen in everything she did and her relationships with jazz musicians were personal and long-lasting. I observed this often with both local and American musicians over many years of knowing Rochelle as a jazz fan. She was also a grandmother extraordinaire. Condolences to Ray and the rest of her family, and to her JPEC colleagues; she’ll be greatly missed.

Her special love was JPEC’s School Outreach program, which she created. As a former teacher, bringing music to children was extremely important to her and she was personally involved in arranging and paying musicians to head up JPEC workshops in schools with little or no music education.

A memorial fund has been set up to keep her love of music for students alive. Donations can be made to the Rochelle Koskie Jazz Student Scholarship Fund c/o The Benjamin Foundation, 416-780-0324. www.benjamins.ca.

In the midst of all these losses, I suffered a small calamity of my own: on June 20th I had a small fall and tore one of the rotator cuff muscles in my left shoulder. It left me unable to play the bass and I had to cancel out of all upcoming gigs, some of them on short notice. The good news is that it’s improving thanks to physiotherapy and I’ve been able to resume practising and actually did my first real gig in almost two months on August 17. I was rusty, but it went pretty well and I didn’t have to stop playing at any point during the one-hour concert. As John MacLeod told me when I first began, the key to playing jazz bass is not stopping, no matter how much it hurts.

Oddly, this time on the shelf has helped me deal with the reeling sense of loss I’ve felt all spring and summer. Not being able to play made me realize how much I love it, and never to take it for granted again. The same goes for knowing these departed ones and others. Never take your friends for granted, mourn their passing but be grateful for the gifts they brought. And keep on, one foot in front of the other. It’s all we can do. The living owe the dead that much and more. 

Toronto bassist Steve Wallace writes a blog called “Steve Wallace jazz, baseball, life and other ephemera” which can be accessed at wallacebass.com. Aside from the topics mentioned, he sometimes writes about movies and food.

Regular WholeNote opera columnist Christopher Hoile embarked on a year that includes an enviable amount of travel. Consequently, with all the world as his stage, his attention to the local stages that comprise our opera beat is going to be significantly compromised. So during his agreed semi-sabbatical, the opera patrol here at The WholeNote is going to be something of a team effort. So away we go, with what promises to be a season of operatic proportions, both onstage and off.

September Start at the COC

The first of the COC’s two fall operas, Puccini’s Turandot, gets under way September 28, with the second, Rusalka, a couple of weeks behind, usually an indication that the first of the two shows requires all hands on deck, more often than not because it is a new production. Under other circumstances, the cast that has been assembled for this production would be the story, but the name that jumps off the page for me is Robert Wilson, 77-year-old, Waco, Texas-born theatre artist extraordinaire.

Those of you who saw the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson Einstein on the Beach at Luminato 2012 will be aware of the extent to which Wilson, while no slouch at deploying scenic machinery on the grandest scale, is also capable of achieving the subtlest of effects, minimalist visual moments of excruciating beauty and power. So, given the split personality of opera-going audiences in Toronto we’re almost guaranteed a hung jury, with fans of the grand gesture and lots of moving parts feeling cheated, and others, count me in, who can’t wait to see what Wilson makes of little things. “If I go to the opera,” Wilson himself said recently, “I really want to hear the music. I close my eyes. So the challenge is to find how I can keep my eyes open? How what I see can help me to hear music better.”

The quote in question is from an interview Wilson did this past February, with OperaWire contributor, Polina Lyapustina, when this Teatro de Madrid/Lithuanian National Opera/Canadian Opera Company co-commission touched down in Lithuania, the second stop on its three-nation tour, having started out in Madrid. It’s an interesting read, dotted with Wilsonian gems. He recounts a conversation with Lady Gaga: “You know, Gaga, in the theatre the last second is the most important, and next is the first second. Sometimes, if you get the last second right, they will forgive you for everything you’ve done all night.” Then continues: “In making Turandot I always tried to figure what that last second is. And then, where we began. And then, how you would draw a line from the beginning to the end.”

And this: “A stage is unlike any other space. I hate naturalism. To be on stage is something artificial. And if you try to act naturally it seems artificial. But if you accept it as something artificial, it becomes more natural.”

I can’t wait.

Neef

The production also gives the opportunity for some early reflection on what the implications will be of Alexander Neef’s announced move, after ten years heading up the COC, to assume the position of General Director of Opéra National de Paris. From where I sit, looking at Turandot, it’s potentially really good news, looking at the calibre of casts he’s attracted and the international co-producing allegiances he’s been able to build. Having someone “on the other side” with a bedrock understanding that this is a good place to build bridges to can only be a good thing. It’s an offstage season story that will unfold very interestingly over time.

Opera Atelier

With Atelier’s fall production, Don Giovanni, still a month away (October 31), their big news is also a “French connection” story, with Atelier founders and co-directors, Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg, having been invited to stage and choreograph Grétry’s opera Richard Coeur-de-lion, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Royal Opera House at Versailles from October 10 to 13, 2019 at Château de Versailles. “This extraordinary event marks the ultimate recognition of Pynkoski and Lajeunesse Zingg’s interpretation of French Baroque repertoire – selected as the only non-French artists involved in this milestone anniversary of the most prestigious opera house in France,” said OA’s press release about the event. And I wouldn’t change a word of it.

Opera by Request planning the entire Wagner Ring Cycle over the Ontario Family Day weekend this coming February (hmmm, talk about dysfunctional families); Tapestry Opera embarking on their 40th season; Against the Grain Theatre completing its tenth …

Let the good times roll.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com. Opera-related leads and news should be directed to opera@thewholenote.com.

The Barricades

The Mysterious Barricades concert series came out of a tragedy: in 2015, the series co-founder and president, Edmonton-based mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Turnbull, lost her husband to suicide. “Beth and Chris and my husband Gord and I, and Russell Braun and Carolyn Maule and many others in this group – we were all friends mainly through University of Toronto Opera School,” explains Monica Whicher, Mysterious Barricades’ Toronto leader and presenter, when we meet in her home to talk about this year’s event. “Chris wasn’t a musician professionally, but he was a music lover. We were each other’s families essentially, as you are when you’re young in school and away from your own family. We have been friends for at least 30 years when it happened.” Turnbull herself speaks eloquently about her loss and her partner’s struggle with depression and anxiety in the video on the Mysterious Barricades website. Nothing, however, prepares one for the devastation that is the loss of a loved one.

“Beth understood that a way for her toward healing would be music,” says Whicher. The mezzo invited her musician friends to join forces and create a consciousness-raising event, rolling out as a series in multiple cities across the country in the course of one day. Each year, the event takes place during World Suicide Prevention Week and includes guest speakers and representatives from mental health organizations. Each concert has its own presenter and programmer. There will be a Kitchener-Waterloo concert on September 10 at 7pm. And on September 14, Ottawa (12pm), Toronto (1pm), and London (2pm) will be the three Ontario cities participating in what is planned as a 17-hour sequence, coast-to-coast concerts which will also be streamed live.

The 1pm Toronto concert will be in the University of Toronto’s Walter Hall. From the very start, the Toronto Mysterious Barricades concert has been under the auspices of the University of Toronto, where Whicher and many other musicians involved happen to be teaching. Everybody is volunteering their time. “There’s space, there’s some generosity amidst of it all, and there is a student body who we feel can use the knowledge and shared experience,” says Whicher. This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Andrea Levinson, psychiatrist-in-chief, Health and Wellness, University of Toronto. “Our goal is to make sure that everybody knows that there is help available. We will present these resources in between the music making. It’s easy when one is not struggling to let something in one ear and out the other; but when one is struggling or one’s loved one is, it becomes difficult to understand how to proceed in a crisis. The more we can put this info forward – the better.”

And we’re back. After The WholeNote’s typical aestival hiatus – and our packed-to-the-margins summer issue, which featured information on a wide assortment of excellent festivals in the Greater Toronto Area – I’m happy to be writing this column for you again, doing my best to provide a preview of some of the most interesting musical events that will be occurring around town each month. It has been exactly 12 months since I first took over this column, and the timing seems appropriate; though it has been a few years since I finished grad school, September still feels like the spiritual beginning of the upcoming year. Though we know that the month brings with it waning heat, it also heralds the promise of much to come: the return of musical friends from sweaty summer touring; the reinstatement of all of your favourite regular gigs, artist-curated concert series, and post-secondary-student nights at The Rex; scarves. It is, in short, one of the most exciting times of the year to be a jazz fan in Toronto.

To begin: there are quite a few notable festivals taking place in September. To run any festival in Toronto is a difficult, labour-intensive process; earlier this year, I wrote about the TD Toronto Jazz Festival’s shift to Yorkville, and the many challenges that artistic director Josh Grossman deals with on a regular basis in order to keep an established, decades-old, major-Canadian-banking-institution-sponsored festival ticking. The prospect of establishing a new festival – of working with local communities, of soliciting sponsor partnerships, of booking venues and talent and vendors and making sure that guests are happy and artists are hydrated and, oh my god, did no one think that we might need porta-potties?! – is a daunting undertaking indeed. But that is exactly what the Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival (TUJF) and the Kensington Market Jazz Festival (KMJF) have done.

The TUJF, which began in 2015 in the Distillery District, with 26 distinct undergraduate bands performing over the course of three days, has grown into a five-day affair, from September 3 to September 7. The bulk of the programming will take place on September 6 and 7 in Mel Lastman Square, with a kick-off performance by the Robi Botos Trio at Hugh’s Room on September 3, and two days on September 4 and 5 at The Frog, a pub owned by the Firkin Group, located a convenient seven-minute walk from the Square. The TUJF will feature performances and master classes by a variety of local and not-so-local groups, including the aforementioned Robi Botos Trio, the Pat LaBabera Quartet and Donny McCaslin.

While the TUJF has emulated, to a certain degree, the large, primarily outdoor format of traditional Canadian jazz festivals, the KMJF has chosen a different approach. Taking place, as the name suggests, in Kensington Market, the KMJF does not have an expansive communal space like Mel Lastman Square to transform into festival grounds. Instead, under the guidance of the unsinkable Molly Johnson, they have opted for a more grassroots approach, working directly with pre-existing venues and other businesses throughout the Market to create a network of unique performance spaces. Last year, acts played at traditional venues, such as Poetry Jazz Café and Supermarket, at which it is possible to hear live music throughout the year; at Café Pamenar and Koi Koi Saké Bar, at which it is not typically possible to hear live music, but at which one can imagine performances taking place; at the men’s clothing store Tom’s Place, at which, presumably, no one has ever expected to hear live music. (Far from being an outlier, Tom’s Place – and eponymous Tom’s Place owner, Tom Mihalik – is a major festival sponsor. Mihalik is referred to as “the festival’s patron saint” on the KMJF website. In 2018, the clothing store provided the location for the “Yamaha Grand Piano Room,” which, considering the complications of moving a grand piano anywhere, let alone into a retail space in a busy neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, should be proof enough of Mihalik’s commitment to the festival’s artistic cause.) Performers for this year’s festival, taking place from September 13 to 15, include Chelsea McBride’s Socialist Night School, Jozsef Botos, Ethan Ardelli and Virginia MacDonald, to name but five of the well-over-100 established local musicians who will perform in more than 30 venues around this iconic market neighbourhood.

Outside of the Greater Toronto Area, the Guelph Jazz Festival (GJF) will celebrate its 25th birthday this year, continuing to fulfil its stated mission of inviting “listeners to be inspired by and engaged with creative music,” from September 11 to 15. As this mission statement suggests, the focus of the GJF is on creative, improvised music that falls outside of either mainstream modern or neo-traditionalist jazz styles; this year’s festival will include performances by Jen Shyu, Malcolm Goldstein and Rainer Wiens, the Brodie West Quintet and Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey and Hank Roberts. As in past years, the GJF will also partner with Guelph University’s International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation to convene a colloquium on improvisation and its social contexts. Some of this year’s presentations will include Jesse Stewart’s “Different Drums: Unorthodox and Unusual Percussion Instruments,” Niel Scobie and Alyssa Woods’ “Finding the Groove: A Workshop on Hip-hop Turntablism and Improvisation,” and Lee Blalock’s “Instr/Augmented Bodies: A Performative Artist Talk About Hybrid Bodies, Modes of Communication, and Modified Behaviours.” 2019 will also mark a year of new artistic leadership for the GJF, with Scott Thomson assuming the role of artistic and general director, and Karen Ng taking on the role of assistant artistic and general director.

There are also a number of excellent non-festival performances happening in September. Head to Burdock on September 12 to catch saxophonist Matt Lagan, on September 19 to hear TuneTown (Kelly Jefferson, Artie Roth, Ernesto Cervini), and on the 21st to hear Mingjia Chen and Claire Lee. At The Rex, check out the return of Monday nights with University of Toronto Jazz Program students, Humber College’s Annual Back-to-School Faculty Jam on September 19, and a full schedule of great music for the rest of the month. 

MAINLY CLUBS, MOSTLY JAZZ QUICK PICKS

SEP 3 TO 7: Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival, various venues. The best of Toronto’s undergraduate bands playing alongside established local and international artists, including saxophonists Pat LaBarbera and Donny McCaslin. tujazz.com

SEP 11 TO 15: Guelph Jazz Festival, various venues (Guelph). Canada’s most important creative/improvised music festival, complete with top Canadian and international performers and a colloquium co-presented with Guelph University.
guelphjazzfestival.com

SEP 13 TO 15: Kensington Market Jazz Festival, various venues. The fourth annual installment of this exciting new festival, which sees traditional and non-traditional Market venues come together to create a network of performance spaces.
kensingtonjazz.com

MONDAYS, 6:30PM: University of Toronto Jazz Ensembles, The Rex. Catch up-and-coming students from the U of T Jazz’s undergrad and grad programs performing in the comfortable confines of The Rex, in September and on most Mondays throughout the school year. therex.ca

Colin Story is a jazz guitarist, writer and teacher based in Toronto. He can be reached at www.colinstory.com, on Instagram and on Twitter.

This summer’s many festivals promise music to engage the most discerning listener across the GTA and the vast country beyond. What follows is meant to augment our Green Pages supplement, with special emphasis on the Toronto Summer Music Festival but touching on other noteworthy festivities elsewhere.

Toronto Summer Music

With more than 200 ethnic groups speaking 140 languages, Toronto is one of the world’s most diverse cities – slightly more than half the population is foreign-born – setting the stage for Toronto Summer Music Festival’s 2019 edition. “Beyond Borders” will explore and celebrate the “cross-cultural influences that have pervaded classical music from the times of Mozart and Mahler, right up to the composers of today.” With such a timely theme opening up our ears to listen afresh to the richness of a packed three weeks of concerts, TSM’s 14th festival has become the go-to musical event of the summer.

A look at the content of the opening night Koerner Hall concert on July 11 gives us an insight into how these cross-cultural influences work in practice. Soprano Adrianne Pieczonka’s part in the evening includes Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques directly inspired by Greek folk songs. Violinist Kerson Leong contributes Sarasate’s electrifying Zigeunerweisen, an homage to Gypsy fiddling prowess. Pianist Jon Kimura Parker will perform Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.11 in A Major, K331 with its famed “Turkish March” final movement; as well as Chopin’s Ballade No.4 in F Minor, Op.52, written in France, far away from his native Poland.

An unusual connection to the Beyond Borders leitmotif is Madeleine Thien’s pre-concert conversation with Eric Friesen preceding Angela Hewitt’s Koerner Hall performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations on July 30. Thien’s novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing is filled with musical references from Bach to Beethoven and Shostakovich. The Malaysian-born, Chinese-Canadian began writing the novel in a Berlin cafe, spending five hours a day listening on headphones to Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldbergs on repeat to block out the cafe’s noise as she wrote. She told the literary journal Brick that she was experimenting with musical time in her novel (which won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction) and that the Goldberg Variations “is both a structure for the novel and a way of trying to make space for the vast inner lives of the characters.” She said: “Bach always seems to me to be creating time. He makes space where there seems to be none and makes something feel eternal in a finite space.”

Other examples of border crossing? On July 12, the world premiere of Greek-born Canadian composer Christos Hatzis’ String Quartet No.5 “The Transmuting” is part of the New Orford String Quartet’s tenth anniversary celebration which also includes one of Beethoven’s finest achievements, his String Quartet No.9 in C Major, Op.59, No.3, the last of the three string quartets that Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador in Vienna commissioned. Then, on July 15, the fruits of a five-year collaboration between the musicians of Montreal’s Middle Eastern/early music group, Constantinople, and Ablaye Cissoko, a West African griot, will be on display in Walter Hall. And the remarkable Dover Quartet’s concert on July 17 at Koerner Hall features three works with strong links to the USA: England’s Benjamin Britten composed his String Quartet No.1 in California in 1941; Hungarian composer Bela Bartók’s String Quartet No.3 was dedicated to the Musical Society Fund of Philadelphia; and Antonin Dvořák spent three years in America away from his Czech homeland – he wrote his immensely popular “American” Quartet in Spillville, Iowa, a town of 300 Czech immigrants where he was surrounded by his home culture.

Charles Richard-Hamelin’s July 19 recital in Walter Hall includes Chopin’s Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante Op.22, a piece he began composing soon after he left Warsaw for Paris in 1830. Also on the program (with members of the Dover Quartet) is Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.1 in G Minor, Op.25, with its Hungarian-rhapsody finale. A July 26 Walter Hall concert titled “Souvenir of Florence,” headed by violinists Jonathan Crow and Jennifer Koh, and pianist Philip Chiu, features Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous Sextet in D Minor, Op.70 (written while the composer was visiting Florence, Italy), Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major (also while living in Italy), and Prokofiev’s Five Melodies for violin and piano, written in 1920 while touring California.

Crow and Chiu, incidentally, give a recital on July 29 that reaches beyond TSM’s thematic borders but one that, based on its recent COC noon-hour preview, should not be missed: their performance of César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major was truly transformative, dramatic, delicate and dynamic, from its magical hushed opening onwards.

World-class performers like Pieczonka, Parker, Hewitt, countertenor Daniel Taylor, tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, and the New Orford, Dover and Rolston String Quartets, are only part of what TSM offers: 32 emerging professionals are given the opportunity to be mentored by a faculty of established musicians. These fellows, as they are called, from TSM’s Art of Song and Chamber Music Institute come together to perform at the Festival’s reGENERATION Saturday concerts, alongside their mentors. In addition, Chamber Music fellows also perform in ensembles that receive coaching from mentors at free noon-hour concerts in Heliconian Hall.

From July 11 to August 3, TSM provides a sumptuous serving of midsummer music. I will be there.

Stratford Summer Music

After 18 years as founding artistic director, John Miller has ceded leadership of Stratford Summer Music to violinist Mark Fewer, and Fewer’s interest in jazz and improvisation shows in this year’s program. Stephen Prutsman, Duane Andrews, Phil Dwyer, Jodi Proznick (with Heather Bambrick), John Novacek and Fewer himself will participate in a Friday night series at Revival House. There will be tributes to Nat “King” Cole and Dave Brubeck, and appearances by John McLeod’s Rex Hotel Orchestra, Laila Biali and The Two Bass Hit (Joel Quarrington and Dave Young) with Novacek.

That being said, Stratford Summer Music’s longstanding focus on chamber music as “a vital aspect of music-making … fostering listening, awareness, flexibility and collaborating with others, while offering the audience exposure to different styles, genres, and forms of music” still remains. Highlights include Isabel Bayrakdarian with pianist Robert Kortgaard and violinist Fewer in recital August 9; “Party Like It’s 1689” with Suzie LeBlanc, Matthias Maute (recorder) and Fewer on August 22; cellist (and SSM favourite) Stéphane Tétreault, Prutsman and Fewer on July 21; the Dann Family in separate chamber and jazz programs on August 8; clarinetist James Campbell, Stephen Prutsman and friends on August 22. Pianist Janina Fialkowska presents an intriguing recital of Mozart, Debussy, Ravel, Chopin and more on August 3.

Of special note, in a nod to the 1960s when Glenn Gould was part of a triumvirate (with violinist Oscar Shumsky and cellist Leonard Rose) directing music programs as part of the Stratford Festival, Art of Time Ensemble is reviving “Hosted by Glenn Gould” where the iconic pianist introduces performances of chamber music by Shostakovich and Beethoven via clips from the CBC’s Glenn Gould on Television. Fewer’s first Stratford Summer Music promises to enhance this music festival’s reputation as something more than a sidebar to Stratford’s theatrical main event.

Ottawa Chamberfest

There is a plethora of musical pleasure to be found July 25 to August 8 at this year’s Ottawa Chamberfest – beginning with the collaboration between the St. Lawrence String Quartet and versatile pianist Stephen Prutsman in Franck’s masterful Piano Quintet and then, later that evening, providing the soundtrack for Buster Keaton’s classic comedy, College. On July 26, Finland’s KallaKvartetti (flute, violin, viola and cello) harkens back to its Nordic ancestors; on July 27, pianist David Jalbert performs an ambitious program of Shostakovich, Rzewski and Wijeratne; and on July 28, Janina Fialkowska offers a strong lineup of piano works by Mozart, Debussy, Ravel and a considerable selection of Chopin.

And there’s more. The Netherlands’ all-female saxophone quartet, Syrène Saxofoonkwartet, returns to the festival on July 29 with arrangements of Handel’s Water Music, Vivaldi, Barber’s Serenade for Strings and excerpts from Bernstein’s West Side Story. Honens laureate, German pianist Hinrich Alpes plays 15 of Beethoven’s first 20 piano sonatas in two concerts, July 30 and August 1. French string quartet Quatuor Danel plays Russian repertoire (Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Weinberg) on July 30. And James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong play all of Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano broken into two concerts on July 31 and August 2.

Other highlights: Ottawa’s own Angela Hewitt joins violinist Yosuke and the Cheng2 Duo for a tribute to Clara Schumann, August 3; then, August 5, Hewitt plays Bach, focusing on the first three English Suites and the Rolston String Quartet performs Schafer’s String Quartet No.2 and Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartet No.7, Op.59 No.1. Various combinations of the Manhattan Chamber Players perform diverse Mozart and Dvořák on August 6; and the next day they team up with the celebrated Dover Quartet for Shostakovich’s String Octet.

Two Mini-Tours

National Youth Orchestra Canada’s 59th year has been an auspicious one so far with the spring release of the NFB documentary That Higher Level, the result of two months spent with the 100 musicians between the ages of 16 and 28 who comprised the orchestra as they prepared for last year’s Canadian tour. A trip to Spain will follow this summer’s Odyssey Tour to five cities: July 21 during Ottawa Chamberfest; July 22 at the Maison symphonique de Montréal; July 25 in Parry Sound at the Festival of the Sound; Stratford on July 27 at SSM; and, finally, Toronto, July 29 at Koerner Hall, as part of TSM.

The summer tour concert program includes Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Op.64; Suites Nos.1 and 2 from Manuel de Falla’s The Three Cornered Hat; Mahler’s Symphony No. 5; and Sinfonia Sacra (Symphony No.3) by Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik. The tour will also feature Brahms’ Double Concerto for Violin and Cello Op.102, with the winners of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Michael Measures Prize as soloists (to be announced in July).

Simone Dinnerstein, the soloist in Philip Glass’ Piano Concerto No.3 when it had its Canadian premiere at last year’s 21C Music Festival in Koerner Hall, is on something of a mini-tour of her own, with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra: this summer she performs the work in Ottawa (at Music and Beyond July 15, 16), Stratford (July 17), Festival de Lanaudière (July 19), and Westben Concerts at the Barn (July 20). A treat to savour.

Two 40th Anniversaries

The Festival of the Sound begins its 40th anniversary year on July 19 with a celebratory Gala Opening Concert comprised of highlights from past seasons. From Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah; excerpts from Bach’s B-Minor Mass and Orff’s Carmina Burana; Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and favourite bits from Gilbert and Sullivan, the specialness of the occasion is underlined.

Other highlights include two concerts by the Rolston String Quartet playing pillars of the classical repertoire: Beethoven’s String Quartet Op.59, No.1 “Razumovsky” and Piano Concerto No.5 “Emperor” (with Janina Fialkowska), July 24; and Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet and Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”, July 25. Larry Beckwith’s production of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is enhanced through narration by Indigenous elder John Rice (who participated with Beckwith in last year’s FOTS opening event), an art song, the sonnet on which the concerto is based, and projected images. With Mark Fewer, violin; John Rice, narrator; Julie Nesrallah, soprano; Robert Kortgaard, piano; and the Festival Ensemble, July 30.

The first concert of the FOTS was held at 2pm on August 5, 1979 in the Parry Sound High School Gymnasium under the direction of Anton Kuerti. That same all-Beethoven program will be replicated at 2pm on August 5, 2019 at the Stockey Centre, headed by artistic director James Campbell and the Cheng2 Duo. There will be an all-day celebration of 40 works from 40 years of the festival’s history on August 9, beginning with a musical morning cruise, followed by several events running concurrently from noon to 4pm, an afternoon tea and an evening concert.

Not to be outdone, the Elora Festival’s 40th Anniversary Opening Night brings together many world-class artists for a celebration in song on July 12 in the Gambrel Barn. Carmina Burana heads a varied program featuring the Elora Singers, the State Choir LATVIJA, members of the Grand Philharmonic Children’s & Youth Choirs, singers Jane Archibald, James Westman and Daniel Taylor, TorQ Percussion, two members of Piano Six, and conductors Maris Sirmais and Mark Vuorinen.

Some of the festival’s many highlights include the entire lineup of Piano Six on July 13; André Laplante (piano), Mayumi Seiler (violin) and Colin Carr (cello) performing Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio and Ravel’s Piano Trio on July 14; the Cheng2 Duo on July 20; countertenor Daniel Taylor and tenor Charles Daniels, on July 21; and Measha Brueggergosman on July 27.

My Magic Carpet Wish

If I had a magic carpet, I’d ride to the Festival de Lanaudière northeast of Montreal on July 12 to hear Charles Richard-Hamelin and Les Violons du Roy perform Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos.22 and 24. And I’d return on July 28 for Marc-André Hamelin, Yannick Nézet-Seguin and Orchestre Métropolitaine for Brahms’ Piano Concertos Nos.1 and 2.

Safe travels and happy listening.

Circle the Dates

June 28, 29, 7:30pm; June 30, 3pm: Anticipation for these concerts has been building since last September when Spanish-born conductor, Gustavo Gimeno, was announced as the TSO’s 11th music director. Having guest-conducted the orchestra in February 2018, this will be his second appearance on the Roy Thomson Hall podium. The appealing program opens with Sibelius’ richly melodic Violin Concerto, with concertmaster Jonathan Crow as soloist. Prokofiev’s exuberant Symphony No.1 “Classical” and Stravinsky’s ever-popular Suite from the Firebird follow. Gimeno’s term as music director begins with the 2020/21 season.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

“Idecided to noise-cancel life,” begins Olga Khazan in a provocative recent article What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones in The Atlantic’s Health section. “The buck stops at my cochlea. Just like we choose everything else, I choose exactly what to put in my ears.” she concludes.

Early in May of this year, the Global Musics and Musical Communities conference at California’s UCLA posed a question: “How and why [do] specific musical genres travel outside their countries of origin and lead to the formation of new musical communities?” Presenters examined genres such as hip-hop, gamelan and taiko as musics that have “become global in the past century.” Ethnomusicologist Henry Spiller’s talk sported the cheeky yet insightful title The Hereness of the There: Making Sense of Gamelan in the United States.

So what do Khazan’s noise-cancelling earbud manifesto and the Global Musics and Musical Communities conference have to do with my summer column?

The UCLA conference reminded me that the examination of musical nation-hopping performed every day in Canadian locales has been one of my main subjects here over the years, arguing strenuously that cross-cultural musical interaction is the norm rather than the exception. The widespread, speedy transmission of these genres to musical communities around the world, beginning in the second half of 20th century, and their adoption and incorporation, is a significant and remarkable development.

As for living a “noise-cancelling life” – I’m not sure that, even if attainable, it is a healthy goal. I’m all for choice and for protecting the health of one’s ears in an increasingly noise-polluted environment, but for me the joy of music includes the excitement of exploration, the pleasure of surprise, chance, or even surreptitious discovery.

What does that sound like?

It’s the feeling of walking through the lush shrub- and tree-filled lakeside Toronto Music Garden on a hot summer afternoon – the garden that was co-designed by cellist Yo Yo Ma to reflect in landscape Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major for cello. The music of a small group you’ve only read about slowly emerges out of the city’s din as you come to the brow of a knoll in the garden. They’re playing at the bottom of a modest grassy amphitheatre sheltered by a mature weeping willow.

There’s no front of house, program, no ushers or bar to contend with. You’re in a T-shirt, shorts and sandals, wearing a protective hat. If you’ve ridden your bike down, as I have on occasion, you search for a safe place to park it. Pleasure boats are moored at Marina Quay West to the left, Billy Bishop Airport’s prop planes within earshot. On the right, the Lakeshore Blvd. and Gardiner Expressway traffic sings with an eternal buzz, like the drone of thousands of urban cicadas.

That urban Toronto scene for me is one of the great and unique joys of music in the summer. It can’t be experienced with earbuds on, noise-cancelling or otherwise. So, with transcultural music in mind, and minds and ears open rather than closed, let’s explore just a few of the summer global music treats in store in the urban jungle, the GTA and beyond.

Labyrinth Musical Workshop Ontario: Have Yourself a Modal Summer

Let’s begin by following up on two of the stories from my column last month.

Labyrinth Musical Workshop Ontario (LO) recently announced several concerts in addition to its June modal music workshops (check its website to register) and its June 8 concert, “Modal Music Summit: Ross Daly with This Tale of Ours plus Tzvetanka Varimezova,” at Eastminster United Church. On the July 1 weekend it is programming three separate performances as part of the Aga Khan Museum’s Rhythms of Canada program (more on this further on). Then on consecutive Saturday afternoons – August 3, 10, 17 and 24 – LO offers afternoon concerts in Flemingdon Park (at Don Mills and Eglinton), supported by the Toronto Arts Council’s Arts in the Parks program. The concerts are billed as “family-friendly” and will include a chance to meet the musicians and instruments. Start time is around 3pm. Best confirm both the Aga Khan Museum and Flemingdon Park events in the listings or on the LO website.

Didgori Ensemble: Georgian Polyphony Tours Ontario and Quebec

My other lead story last issue was on the six-member Didgori Ensemble, the award-winning choir from the Republic of Georgia, and its June Canadian tour. As I mentioned, such a rare moment for Canadian Georgian-music lovers only happens once a lifetime.

We pick up the choir’s tour on June 7 when a consortium of Toronto presenters showcase the Didgori Ensemble at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre’s Jeanne Lamon Hall. Audiences can expect brilliant performances of Georgian polyphony, with ensemble members accompanying themselves on traditional Georgian instruments. June 8, Didgori gives a public Georgian choral workshop from 5 to7pm at the St. Vladimir Institute, 620 Spadina Ave., and the next day they hold a five-hour Georgian choral workshop at the MusiCamp Studio, 11 Cobourg Ave., starting at 11am. Check MusiCamp’s website for registration information.

June 10, Didgori travels east to Kingston Ontario’s St. George’s Cathedral where they sing liturgical music at 12:15pm, presented by MusiCamp, the Melos Choir and Period Instruments. They continue east to Quebec, where on Wednesday June 12, Gabrielle Boutillier presents “Didgori en concert à Québec” at the Voûtes de la Maison Chevalier. The next day, they perform and conduct a workshop at the Auberge La Caravane, in North Hatley, QC. The tour then concludes on Saturday June 15 at 8pm in Montreal where the Harira Ensemble and MusiCamp present Didgori: Live in Concert at the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes. For those eager to experience this extraordinary music first-hand, Didgori offers an all-ages Workshop for Singers of All Levels June 15 and 16 at the Centre des Musiciens du Monde, 5043 St Dominique St, Montreal. You can reserve a spot at hariraensemble@gmail.com.

Small World Music: Free Summer Lunch

Small World Music presents its free Summer Lunch concert series in partnership with Union Station on the latter’s TD Stage, 65 Front St. W. on nine consecutive Wednesdays from 12 noon to 1pm. SWM’s Summer Lunch lineup launches June 5 with Mimi O’Bonsawin who recently won the Best Pop Album at the 2019 Indigenous Music Awards. It continues June 12 with Moskitto Bar, the Toronto quartet musically covering territory from Brittany to Bagdad, through Ukraine and the Balkans. June 19 the Polky Village Band, an energetic Polish-Canadian folk music group takes audiences on a musical journey to Poland, “the melting pot of Eastern and Central Europe with Carpathian, Jewish, Gypsy, Ukrainian, Slovak and Hungarian influences.” June 26 the Tich Maredza Band, fronted by Toronto-based Zimbabwean singer, guitarist, mbira-ist and composer Tichaona Maredza takes the stage.

Of the five additional acts appearing on the Summer Lunch series, Fränder, a Swedish and Estonian folk quartet, is the only non-Ontario group, appearing on July 17. Representing the latest generation of talented musicians to take their rich heritage of indigenous songs to the world stage; it’s worth taking your soup, sandwich or sushi to their set.

SWM’s Summer Lunch series, incidentally, is part of Union Summer: Presented by TD, a sprawling 50 consecutive days of summer programming on the Front St. TD Stage, promising to “showcase …Toronto’s talent, culture and spirit right at the gateway to the city.”

Summer Music at the Museum: Aga Khan Museum

Earlier I mentioned Labyrinth Ontario’s three Canada Day weekend performances at the Aga Khan Museum. The AKM is producing three festivals this summer celebrating “Canada’s contemporary fabric, a dynamic mix of world views, cultures, stories, and rhythms. Our festivities honour the Indigenous people of this land … much of it planned to happen outdoors.”

Some other selections from its “Rhythms of Canada” festival, running Sunday June 30 and Monday July 1:

Sunday opens with the 13-member Asiko Afrobeat Ensemble led by Nigerian-born bandleader Foly Kolade, and includes Toronto-based singer and composer Hussein Janmohamed, plus two-time world-champion hoop dancer Lisa Odjig from the Odawa/Ojibwe/Pottawatomi Nations from Wikwemikong, Manitoulin Island, Ontario. Headlining the event is the Cris Derksen Trio, led by rising star musician and composer Derksen, who describes herself as a “half-Cree, half- Mennonite classically trained cellist.” Also on the bill is the Waleed Kush Ensemble offering percussion-driven African jazz, led by Sudanese multi-instrumentalist Waleed Abdulhamid. The next day on July 1 Toronto’s Maracatu Mar Aberto perform the rhythms, songs and dances derived from the traditions of Northeastern Brazil, while other world music and dance events fill out the Canadian Day afternoon.

The AKM’s “Moon Landing Festival” (July 20 and July 21) plus its “First Five Fest” celebrating five years of programming (August 31 and September 1) both have plenty for global music explorers. Please check the listings and the Museum website for details.

Harbourfront Centre: Summer Music in the Garden

My introduction to this month’s column makes it pretty clear how I feel about Harbourfront Centre’s delightful annual series of al fresco concerts. Summer Music in the Garden ranks among our city’s essential music-in-the-park experiences. Now entering its third decade, artistic director Tamara Bernstein always makes room for top-rank global music in her astutely curated series. The concerts are scheduled for Thursdays at 7pm and Sundays at 4pm, so it pays to check the listings. Pro tip: unless it’s sunny, best call the info desk at 416-973-4000 for the up-to-the-minute rain call.

Sunfest: “Canada’s Premier Celebration of World Cultures”

Every summer for a quarter of a century the southwestern Ontario city of London has hosted what has become “one of the best overseas [world] music festivals,” according to the UK’s prestigious Songlines Magazine, transforming London’s central Victoria Park into “a culturally diverse jewel, where 40 top world music and jazz groups from all corners of the planet entertain.” This year from July 4 to 7 the admission-free festival jams the park chock-a-block with five stages and more than 225 exhibitors, including vendors of global cuisine, crafts and visual art.

I spoke directly with co-artistic director Mercedes Caxaj. “This is the 25th edition of Sunfest,” Caxaj explained, “which my father Alfredo Caxaj founded.” Mercedes has literally grown up with the festival. “You could consider it a family operation since my mother and brother are also involved in running Sunfest,” she added.

On the fact that Sunfest’s website the festival’s lineup is divided into International and National performers, so I asked her about that. “It’s one way visitors can get a feel for the world music scene today,” she replied. “Also, by separating Canadian acts from those we’ve invited from abroad, we can highlight homegrown talent. Our main aim is to represent as many cultures as possible, and to ensure that Sunfest 2019 in the centre of London, Ontario, is an inclusive space.”

Indeed, the geographic scope of the festival is vast, covering music from five continents. Caxaj listed groups from Cape Verde, Spain, England, Scotland, Netherlands, Norway, Czech Republic, Russia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Niger, Cameroon, Uganda, Palestine and Canada. It would be impossible to list them all. I don’t think it would be fair to highlight just a few either, so I invite you to visit the Sunfest 2019 website for details. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

There is one more thing to note: Sunfest’s community-level arts engagement, a key reason why it’s thriving and moving into its second generation. “Sunfest has accomplished in 25 years what has eluded municipal planners, politicians and corporations alone,” states its media release. “From the beginning, the Sunfest Committee recognized the inestimable power of the performing arts to effect cultural and social change in this community and, despite the incredible challenges, organizers, patrons and sponsors were willing to take a chance on what’s arguably one of London’s most inspired utopian projects of the past quarter century. At its heart, TD Sunfest is about vision and hope: along with providing exemplary representation and accessibility … [it] offers inclusiveness to our visitors through the common denominator of their shared humanity.”

Is Sunfest’s inspirational model one that other festivals and presenters could emulate?

Stratford Summer Music

One of Ontario’s most venerable annual summer music festivals takes place in Stratford. Last year the award-winning Canadian violinist Mark Fewer was appointed Stratford Summer Music’s new artistic director, taking over the reins from John Miller who ran the extensive multi-week festival for 18 years.

This year, 100 events featuring more than 350 musicians in both indoor and outdoor venues will be heard throughout downtown Stratford – a great opportunity for what I described earlier as surreptitious musical discovery . As an example, two concerts with global themes, both presented at Factory 163 in Stratford: July 25, the Tehran-born Canadian musician Amir Amiri takes the stage. Amiri, a soloist on the santur (72-string Persian hammer dulcimer), composer and music director, strives to “explore the limits of music, stretching beyond the constraints of classical thought.” July 29, Toronto’s brilliant Payadora Tango performs a selection from their large repertoire of original compositions and arrangements of Argentinean tango and folk music.

Westben Concerts at The Barn

Also located in Southern Ontario, Westben Concerts at The Barn celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer. This rural music festival with a wide range of programs holds most of its concerts at The Barn, 6698 County Road 30 in Campbellford.

July 28, it presents Toronto’s Kuné – Canada’s Global Orchestra. Dubbing itself “a celebration of Canada’s cultural diversity” Kuné’s eclectic ensemble of Canadian musicians “hail from all corners of the globe, play over 20 instruments,” representing the musics of their home cultures. August 2, the 2018 Polaris Prize-winning Jeremy Dutcher, a classically trained tenor and composer plays The Barn. Dutcher’s music creatively blends his Wolastoq First Nation linguistic and music roots with Euro-Canadian classical and vernacular music. Come early for the 5pm feast featuring Anishinaabe BBQ; reservations are required two days in advance.

WORLD VIEW QUICK PICKS

JUN 7, 8PM: Small World Music Society presents Arnab Chakrabarty Sarod Recital featuring Arnab Chakrabarty (sarod), Zaheer-Abbas Janmohamed (tabla) in a concert of Hindustani classical music at the Small World Music Centre, Artscape Youngplace.

JUN 8, 8PM: Toronto’s most seasoned and celebrated taiko group Nagata Shachu presents Nagata Shachu and American Rogues at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre. Nagata Shachu directed by Kiyoshi Nagata performs with The American Rogues Celtic Band.

JUN 9, 7:30PM: The Toronto Chinese Orchestra presents The Butterfly Lovers, featuring The Butterfly Lovers Concerto at the Markham People’s Community Church, 22 Esna Park Dr., Markham.

JUL 21, 7:30PM: The Elora Festival presents Kuné, Canada’s Global Orchestra at the Gambrel Barn, at the corner of Country Rd. 7 and 21 in Elora, ON.

AUG 2 and 3, 7PM: The Collingwood Summer Music Festival presents Nhapitapi from Zimbabwe at the New Life Church, Collingwood ON August 2, followed by the Payadora Tango Ensemble at the same venue the following evening.

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

Luminato: Two years ago, in one of my first columns for The WholeNote, I interviewed the creative team of Theaturtle’s Charlotte: A Tri-Coloured Play with Music, Canadian librettist Alon Nashman, acclaimed Czech composer Aleš Březina, and legendary British director/scenographer Pamela Howard, as they were presenting a series of work-in progress performances at the Luminato Festival before touring to Europe. The play is inspired by the real life and artwork of Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon who was sent to Auschwitz at age 26 in 1942, and who in the last two years of her life created a sequence of nearly 800 paintings accompanied by text and musical references to which she gave the title “Life? Or Theatre?” – works which, against all odds, survived. At the time I was bowled over by the wild theatricality of their vision and the bright central message of hope in the arc of Charlotte’s story.

This summer, they are about to go on another tour, this time to Israel, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, with first, a one-performance-only send-off at Toronto’s Hart House Theatre on June 1. Always curious about what happens over time to things I first encountered as “works in progress,” I plan to attend and to reach out to the creative team again to catch up on what has been happening with this exciting show between world tours. Stay tuned!

This year is, again, a Luminato hotbed of creation including a number of exciting music theatre productions from both home and abroad. Stories shaped by political extremes, and the need to find a personal path through societies characterized by prejudice and oppression, again are highlighted particularly in two Canadian productions that caught my eye: Nicole Brooks’ large scale a cappella Obeah Opera and Tim Albery’s one-man (with one-piano accompaniment) Hell’s Fury; or The Hollywood Songbook starring Canadian opera superstar Russell Braun.

Obeah Opera has been in the works for ten years, a project of personal passion for creator, librettist, and composer Nicole Brooks. Inspired by a desire to tell the untold story of the female Caribbean slaves who were as much a part of the Salem witch trials as the white women and men whose stories have been recorded, Obeah Opera uses Caribbean-inspired music and dance to tell that story. Drawing on transcriptions of the actual trials in Salem, combined with in-person consultation with African spiritual practitioners, Brooks has created a libretto and score focused on the experience of Tituba (the Caribbean slave whom we know from Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible), and her fellow practitioners of “obeah” (witchcraft). A necessary story for our times, it is a reminder of the dangers of societal paranoia and also of histories lost that should be recovered and shared. The cast is 20 strong, all female, all singing and dancing. The dances, showcased last October as part of the Fall for Dance North Festival at the Sony Centre, won rave reviews for their superb theatricality and energy.

Hell’s Fury; or The Hollywood Songbook, on the other hand, is a one-man musical journey through the life of Austrian Jewish Marxist composer Hanns Eisler. Based on a concept from well-known opera director Tim Albery, it was originally developed with Soundstreams and Soundstreams’ artistic director Lawrence Cherney and given a work-in-progress showcase during Luminato last year. Eisler fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and landed in Hollywood where he worked successfully, composing many film scores including the Academy Award-nominated Hangmen Also Die (Fritz Lang) and None But The Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets). Privately, at the same time he was writing Hollywood Songbook, an evocative song cycle full of both wit and melancholy, often using for words, poems by his frequent collaborator Bertolt Brecht, weaving a tale of the horrors of Nazi Germany, the seductions of Hollywood, and a longing to return home. In real life, the seduction of Hollywood was interrupted in 1948 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities banished Eisler from the US, labelling him an “unperson.” The storyline is woven through the songs of Eisler’s own Hollywood Songbook, and is performed by acclaimed Canadian baritone Russell Braun accompanied by JUNO Award-winning pianist Serouj Kradjian.

In contrast to these two overtly political story lines, and yet with a central theme illustrating the hidden masked cynical truths of society, is Masquerade, a lavish spectacle presented by the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia, based on the verse drama of Russian poet and playwright Mikhail Lermontov. This production promises to be a tremendously theatrical event employing a clown-influenced physical theatre style of staging supported by and interwoven with a musical score by Faustas Latenas that incorporates the famous Waltz by Aram Khachaturian which was itself commissioned for a production of this play by the Vahtankgov Theatre in 1941. It also promises us “heaps of snow.” Judging by last year’s production of Uncle Vanya, this should be another theatrical feast.

Luminato runs from June 7 to 23 at various venues around Toronto; luminatofestival.com.

Stratford and Shaw

Once again we are entering the season of big musicals at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals. There is already great word of mouth about Stratford’s production of Billy Elliot, the 2005 Tony Award-winning musical inspired by the 2000 film set during the British miners’ strikes of 1984/85. Here again is a political setting, and a score that even includes a song, “Merry Christmas, Maggie,” mercilessly mocking then-British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. At the same time as depicting the destruction of a community, however, Billy Elliot is also a wonderful story of hope, of a young boy in a mining town who discovers an inborn talent for dance and finds a way to follow his dreams in spite of all the obstacles in front of him. Director and choreographer Donna Feore has reimagined the staging to work on the Stratford Festival thrust stage and talks in the show program about the inspiration of Elton John’s brilliantly contemporary score. Billy Elliot plays at the Festival Theatre through November 3.

The Shaw Festival reaches further back into the traditional musical theatre canon to bring us a much more escapist romance than the musicals discussed above: Lerner and Loewe’s 1947 classic Brigadoon, perhaps best known from the 1954 MGM movie starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. A brash young New Yorker, Tommy Albright, on holiday in the Scottish Highlands, falls in love with a girl from a magical village, Brigadoon, that only exists for one day every 100 years. After leaving Scotland Tommy finds himself torn between his increasingly empty life in the modern city and the love he left behind. Naturally there is a happy ending, though one could imagine a dystopian millennial sequel set 10 or 15 years later with Tommy now feeling trapped in the magical but tiny village. One of the great draws of the Shaw Festival’s production will be seeing former Stratford musical star Alexis Gordon as Fiona. Brigadoon plays at the Shaw Festival until October 13. 

MUSIC THEATRE QUICK PICKS

Around Ontario over the summer, there are many more musicals to be seen, with something for almost every taste. Consult our music theatre listings for details.

JUN 5 TO 22: Drayton Entertainment. Thoroughly Modern Millie. Huron Country Playhouse. The fun 1920s-set musical probably best known from the slightly goofy movie version starring Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Channing. And also from Drayton, Peter Colley’s You’ll Get Used to It!: The War Show, a nostalgic and fun Canadian look back at WWII with period songs, starting at St. Jacobs Country Playhouse, June 5 to 22, then continuing June 27 to July 13.

JUN 27, 8PM: Silly Stages. Chasing Rainbows. Songs of Judy Garland. Regent Theatre, Oshawa. The brilliant Canadian musical theatre star Louise Pitre sings Judy Garland.

JUL 24 TO AUG 16: Gravenhurst Opera House. Dean & Jerry: What Might Have Been. Created by Jesse Collins this two man show about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and their long partnership, has been gaining a growing loyal audience at summer stock theatres around Ontario.

Jennifer Parr is a Toronto-based director, dramaturge, fight director, and acting coach, brought up from a young age on a rich mix of musicals, Shakespeare, and new Canadian plays.

The summer season is always full of a remarkable array of opportunities to hear cutting-edge music in a variety of settings, and the Luminato Festival that takes place in June in Toronto is no exception. For this year’s edition, I decided to take a look at The Cave, a new work created by composer John Millard, lyricist Tomson Highway and dramaturge Martha Ross, which runs from June 18 to 23 at Soulpepper’s Tank House Theatre. An additional exciting feature of this performance will be the opportunity to experience it across the country through webcasting. Through partnerships with about 25 different institutions in places like Inuvik, Rumble Theatre in Vancouver, the Banff Centre, Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, and the Gander Institute for the Arts in Newfoundland, people will be able to gather together in theatres to watch a simultaneous live webcast. Home live streaming will also be possible.

I spoke with the composer of the project, John Millard, to get an inside look at what to expect from this project. He began by emphasizing that the piece is not based on any particular story, but is rather created from a premise. A group of animals find themselves trapped together in an unnatural environment – a bear’s cave – with a forest fire raging outside. What are their individual stories and what brought them to this place? What do they think about the human beings responsible for this fire? In the end Millard says, “we are trying to figure out something about ourselves by using the voices of animals,” with a particular focus on addressing the growing environmental crisis we are facing. Millard also emphasized that traditional Indigenous stories and legends are not used, but the lyrics come from Highway’s imaginative crafting of the dilemmas and issues that arose during the collaborative creative phase. One interesting example is the use of the Garden of Eden story, what Millard calls “an expulsion myth,” a type of myth that doesn’t exist in Indigenous mythologies. In one of the songs of The Cave, the snake character speaks about the tragic outcome that this myth has had culturally, a myth that has demonized women and led to a separation and banishment of the concept of paradise.

The piece is structured in the form of a cabaret with approximately 20 songs sung by both soloists and a quintet ensemble. The singers are from diverse backgrounds and include Neema Bickersteth (classical), Derek Kwan (opera), Andrea Koziol (cabaret/folk) and Alex Samaras (popular/jazz), as well as Millard whose musical influences include bluegrass, cabaret and classical. Each singer performs about two or three solos and they also come together to form a quintet at times. Instrumentation includes bass, percussion, reeds, accordion, keyboard and banjo, and Millard has composed various instrumental sections for this unusual ensemble. Since much of Millard’s work has been composing for theatre and its requirements, he told me that this piece is the first time he has written a through-composed piece that is primarily music-focused. Although there is some text in the role of the narrator who introduces the animals, this piece “is all about the songs”, Millard said. Working with musical director Gregory Oh and dramaturge Martha Ross, an emotional arc becomes the structure for the piece, rather than a plot arc, with the goal of discovering who these animals are, what’s important to them, and what the critical issues are for these creatures. The set design will be constructed as both a cave and a cabaret environment with the audience experiencing what it’s like to be inside this environment with fires raging outside. Sound designer Christopher Ross-Ewart will play an important role in creating this sonic world, and various elements of haute fashion will be incorporated into the costume design.

The Something Else Festival is Hamilton’s four-day festival of jazz and experimental music that runs from June 20 to 23 presented by Zula Music & Arts Collective Hamilton. It features an eclectic lineup of performers and improvisers including Czech virtuoso violinist/vocalist Iva Bittová who will be performing solo in a free/by donation concert on June 21 in the afternoon, before teaming up in the evening with drummer Hamid Drake. On Saturday June 22, the afternoon begins with a performance by bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck from Brooklyn, followed in the evening with another solo performance by Bittová, followed by a set featuring clarinet master Don Byron collaborating with Indigenous Mind (Joshua Abrams, Hamid Drake and Jason Adasiewicz). Many more cutting edge performances will occur, so do check out the schedule both in our listings and at zulapresents.org.

Summer Music Residencies

The Toronto Creative Music Lab once again takes up residence for a week in June at the Music Gallery. The TCML is an artistic and professional development workshop for early-career musicians, ensembles and composers committed to risk taking. This year they will engage with members of Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini to present the Toronto premiere of legendary French electronic composer Eliane Radigue’s Occam Delta XV on June 14. Other pieces on the program include new works from Cléo Palacio-Quintin and Andrea Young, along with Jason Doell’s …amid the cannon’s roar.

The Westben Performer-Composer Residency occurs in southeastern Ontario’s Northumberland County near Campbellford and is an important milestone in Westben’s ongoing evolution from a summer festival to a multifaceted year-round centre. Their mandate for the residency is to encourage 11 young composers and performers from diverse countries and backgrounds to take creative risks by participating in a process of inter-generational exchange. Participants are expected to offer workshops to their peers featuring their own specialized approaches, with some of these workshops open to the public. This year’s residency features participants from Canada, the US, Chile, Argentina and Cuba, and the workshops will include explorations in four-handed piano, experimental luthiery, strings, dance, voice and custom-built electronics. The entire process will culminate with a performance on June 15 that will feature the collaborations and experiments that have taken place throughout the week.

Toronto Summer Music Festival

This year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival celebrates the various cultural influences on classical music from as far back as Mozart’s day up to today’s living composers. Two established Toronto composers will have world premieres at Walter Hall during the festival: Christos Hatzis’ String Quartet No.5 (The Transforming) will be premiered by the New Orford String Quartet on July 12; and Alexina Louie’s new (as yet untitled) work will be performed on August 2. I asked each of the composers to write a short description of their pieces for this column.

Hatzis writes that his String Quartet No.5 is “the closing statement of a cycle depicting a psychic development spanning 25 years (1994-2019) which is best described by the subtitles of each quartet: Awakening, Gathering, Questioning, Suffering and finally Transforming.” This final work of the cycle is written in three movements and is intended “as a psychological hermeneutic (or explanation) of the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection.” Psychologically there is a “strong resonance that radiates from these well-known events,” he says, which have left their spiritually transformative imprint upon humanity.

The inspiration for Louie’s new work began during a conversation with Jonathan Crow in his capacity as TSO concertmaster, while they were discussing her new piece, Triple Concerto For Three Violins And Orchestra, which premiered in 2017. Crow, as artistic director of Toronto Summer Music, suggested that she write a new piece for the same instrumentation as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire – flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano. Louie was inspired and got to work on it immediately. She describes the new work in this way: “The two outside movements are virtuosic and effervescent. In the middle movement, in order to evoke the mysteries of the night, I instruct the pianist to play on the inside of the piano, strumming and stopping the strings. The movement unfolds with quiet twitterings and undulating sounds played by the remaining musicians.”

Summer Music in the Garden

Celebrating its 20th season, this well-loved series, curated by Tamara Bernstein, is held along the waterfront at Harbourfront Centre’s Toronto Music Garden and offers several opportunities to hear new music. The dynamic TorQ Percussion Quartet will perform four works on July 21 by contemporary composers: Adam Campbell’s El Mosquito Marron; Steve Reich’s Drumming, Part 1; ensemble members Richard Burrows’ and Daniel Morphy’s Elements Suite; and Dinuk Wijeratne’s Ersilia from Invisible Cities. On August 22, the cello duo VC2 combines works from 18th-century Europe with contemporary works, including a commissioned world premiere by Kelly-Marie Murphy and two pieces based on Beethoven cello sonatas: Five Little Pieces by Andrew Downing and Entsprechung by Matt Brubeck. Towards the end of the summer on September 8, percussionist Aiyun Huang and violinist Mark Fewer join forces to present world premieres by Michael Oesterle and John Hollenbeck, with Huang performing Javier Alvarez’s Temazcal for two maracas and pre-recorded tape. 

IN WITH THE NEW QUICK PICKS

JUN 5, 8PM: Canadian Music Centre. The Canadian Piano Left Hand Commissioning Project features new works for piano left hand by Christopher Butterfield, Taylor Brook, Anna Hostman, Emilie LeBel, Adam Sherkin and others.

AUG 7, 6PM: Festival of the Sound’s Discovery Concert. Continuum Contemporary Music’s artistic director, Ryan Scott, invites three young composers to participate in a residency under the mentorship of composer Gary Kulesha. This concert will feature their works.

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

Antiquity is a foreign country: they love and desire differently there. Or do they really, asks Amanda Hale in her libretto for the lesbian-themed opera composed by Kye Marshall which is about to have its premiere, June 5, onstage at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Pomegranate is structured as a tale of two couples in two different time periods, though the text is open to interpretation – it could be the tale of one couple imagining their historical antecedents, or the story of obstacles to same-sex love which never disappear entirely even in liberal societies. The first couple is in Pompeii in 79 AD, before the Vesuvius eruption. In the second act, we are in a downtown lesbian bar in 1980s Toronto.

“I had been to Pompeii in the early 2000s and my inspiration for Pomegranate was the frescoes that I saw in the Villa of Mysteries there,” says Hale. To this day archaeologists are not sure what the frescoes depict, but it’s presumed to be some kind of a Dionysian ritual that involved women. “The images stayed with me so I formed a story for myself about two young girls falling in love. They’re teenage girls, they’re innocent, and the setting is sort of a Roman girls boarding school.” Worship of Isis was one of the unofficial religious traditions practised in Rome of the time, so Hale introduced a temple of Isis, as a refuge for the girls, and a temple priestess to the story.

Hale, a novelist and a poet, initially wrote a poem cycle about two young Pompeii women. Cellist and composer, Kye Marshall, set the poems to music, and the tale was told as a song cycle, at the Heliconian Club in 2014. “The audience responded so strongly to it that we decided to make an opera,” says Hale. It would take six years of work, grant writing, collaborator hunting, creating contacts in the opera world, two workshops, producer changes and cast changes until Pomegranate the opera was ready to premiere. “I first contacted Michael Mori from Tapestry who was always very supportive (and who is directing the June 5 to 9 run). He put me in touch with Marjorie Chan, who became my dramaturge. She helped me enormously. She coached me in the arts of the libretto.”

Mount Vesuvius has an eerie presence in the first act and its own changing soundscape. The catastrophic event brewing in the background, says Hale, is another parallel with our time. “We all have our little plans and machinations and arguments but we are facing climate-related disasters all over the world.”

In the libretto, which Hale shared with me, there are hints of a female-only utopia in the temple scenes and perhaps in the lesbian bar in the second act, but the idea is complicated. Would an all-women religion or a political party or a living setup be, in her view, a functioning social utopia of the Call the Midwife type, or a dystopia where women merge too much and ignore interpersonal boundaries, in the vein of Grey Gardens? “In my ardent feminist days in the 1980s when I was much younger, feminism was a real vehicle for my political education. I was quite a lesbian separatist and I had a lot of those utopian ideas but I have aged and mellowed,” says Hale. “I didn’t see it in those terms but there is a lot of conflict in the libretto. Another character, Julia, is almost in love with the priestess but she becomes jealous of Cassia, one of the principals. That, and the fear of being crucified as an escaped slave, leads her to betray everybody. In the second act there’s a big fight between the two women on whether one of them should finally come out to her conservative family who’ve come from a war-torn part of the world. Her mother is the one who betrays her and it’s often the women who betray their daughters, unfortunately. If you, for example, look at the clitoridectomy and infibulation today, it’s the mothers who take the daughters to have it done.” As well, the priestess of the women-centred temple is, it turns out, the sister of the Roman soldier pursuing one of the women. “I think it’s a fairly realistic view of how it might have been.”

The parallels between the past and today do not end there. Pompeii was a multicultural port city with people of all backgrounds living there and passing through; half the population of Toronto is foreign-born. Politics on the small and large scale was presumably as present in Pompeii’s citizens’ lives as it is for Torontonians today. Hale herself is foreign-born – British – and moved to Canada in 1968. She lived in Montreal through the 1970s and the War Measures Act and Bill 101, but describes herself now as “quite politically naïve at that time.” Her politically active life started in Toronto, where she moved in the 1980s and got involved with Nightwood Theatre, wrote for the feminist paper Broadside and founded Red Tree, a visual arts company, with Lynn Hutchinson. Today she divides her time between Hornby Island, BC and Toronto. Before returning to writing in the late 1990s, with her first novel published by Raincoast Books, Hale earned her living as a painter and sculptor in BC.

She still travels to England to visit family. “It was a good thing, leaving England, because when you leave a place, you can see it.” Her family’s story has been far from ordinary: Hale’s father was a supporter of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists during the Second World War, and died by suicide some years after the war. “That legacy has hung over me all my life,” says Hale, who has written about it in her latest novel, Mad Hatter (Guernica, Toronto), to be launched in September. “I feel absolutely liberated for having told that story. It’s been a great shame and humiliation so it was good for me to leave England and be able to see all that. But it’s taken my lifetime to process it.”

Hale’s own politics are at the opposite end of the spectrum to her father’s. She often travels to Cuba and has developed a lot of connections, personal and professional, over the last 15 years. “I went there first to paint a mural with Lynn Hutchinson in solidarity with the revolution and we made a connection with a gallery in Havana and did an installation there on colonialism and sugar, then another one about surveillance, which Cubans really understand.” Latin America was always of great interest. “I’ve had a lot of connections with Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile. A big change I saw here in Toronto in the 1980s was the refugees coming from those countries who’d experienced American interference, people who enriched Toronto tremendously during the 1970s and 1980s. There were Greeks coming here after the Junta and people emigrating to Canada after the Iranian Revolution. On Hornby Island we have an Iranian man who’s taken refuge there, who is a wonderful potter.”

While she would define herself as bisexual today (and is no fan of labels), Hale’s view on the importance of lesbian presence in culture hasn’t changed. “It’s still fairly new to see it – and women’s experience in general–- and some of the terrible things that happen to us and some of the great things that should be celebrated. I think it enriches the culture generally, and for men as well. It’s not being against men: it’s filling out a picture that has been half blank a long time.”

ART OF SONG QUICK PICKS

JUN 4, 7PM: Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto presents Hanna Dóra Sturludóttir, mezzo & Snorri Sigfús Birgisson, piano; atTimothy Eaton Memorial Church, Toronto.

JUN 8, 4PM: Lisa Di Maria, soprano, and Adolfo De Santis, piano; at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, Toronto. Barber, Fauré, Puccini.

JUN 10, 12:15PM: Music Mondays presents Heine’s Buch der Lieder. James McLean, tenor, and William Aide, piano; at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto .

JUN 19 TO 22, 7PM AND JUN 23, 2PM: Soundstreams, Luminato, & Pinkhouse Productions present Hell’s Fury, The Hollywood Songbook. Music by Hanns Eisler, staging and concept by Tim Albery with design by Michael Levine. Russell Braun, baritone, and Serouj Kradjian, piano. Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto.

JUN 27, 8PM: Muse 9 Productions/Village Opera present “Bon Appétit! A Musical Tasting Menu.” Lee Hoiby: Bon Appétit!; Danika Lorèn: The Secret Lives of Vegetables; Peter Tiefenbach: Chansons de mon placard. Katy Clark, soprano, Victoria Borg, mezzo. Hyejin Kwon is the music director, staging by Anna Theodosakis. Merchants of Green Coffee, Toronto..

JUL 11, 7:30PM: Toronto Summer Music opening night: “Beyond Borders.” R. Strauss: Vier letze Lieder; Ravel: Cinq mélodies populaires grecques; Sarasate, Mozart, Chopin and more. Adrianne Pieczonka, soprano, Jon Kimura Parker, piano, Kerson Leong, violin, and Steven Philcox, piano, with the New Orford String Quartet and Tom Allen hosting. Koerner Hall.

JUL 16, 7:30PM: Toronto Summer Music presents “Griffey & Jones in Recital.” Anthony Dean Griffey, tenor, and Warren Jones, piano. Music by Bridge, Griffes, Barber, Finzi, Laitman, Niles and Ives. Walter Hall, U of T.

Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto. Send her your art-of-song news to artofsong@thewholenote.com.

Opera performances in Southern Ontario are not quite as abundant this summer as they were last summer, but there is certainly enough activity to keep any opera-lover busy, especially those who have an interest in new opera.

June

Outside Toronto, the young opera company Vera Causa Opera is presenting its second annual Canadian Opera Fest in Cambridge, Guelph and Waterloo. A contest was held for local high school and middle students in the region to create the plot of an opera. Once selected, the students collaborated with VCO to turn these initial ideas into full stories with music, i.e. short operas.

Five winners were chosen. The first is The Village Girl, with a concept by Chloe Bissada and words and music by Dylan Langan. The story involves a young girl who wants to purchase a cow for her family’s farm to help boost the town’s economy, but the meat marketer refuses, putting the town on the brink of starvation. The opera explores family and responsibility.

The second is Refracted, with a libretto by Charlotte Lilley and music by Emma Verdonk. The work is a semi-abstract exploration of the influence of media and technology on one’s self-perception. A young girl debates with her reflection on how her culture is affecting her, and whether it is a welcome influence or not.

Third is La jugement, with a libretto by Emma Lemieux and music by Dylan Langan. This is an emotional musical soliloquy, relaying the story of a young woman battling an eating disorder. La jugement is performed in French.

Fourth is The Shoemaker’s Orphans, with a libretto by Rivi and Kyri Friedman and music by Emma Verdonk. The action takes place in France in the year 1600, during the outbreak of the Black Plague. After losing their father to the terrible disease, two sisters embark on a mission to prevent the spread of the disease, with the help of their kindly aunt.

The last of the five is L’étrange et belle, with a libretto by Lexie McCorkindale and Vanessa Kerr and music by Dylan Langan. The opera tells the story of an unstable young woman and her tempestuous relationships with her friends when she invites them to stay at her house for a Christmas celebration. This is the second opera of the five to be performed in French.

Performances will be held in Cambridge on June 14 at the Cambridge Centre for the Arts, in Waterloo on June 15 at Knox Presbyterian Church and in Guelph on June 16 at Harcourt Memorial United Church. The operas will feature performances by soprano Autumn Wascher, soprano Michaela Chiste and baritone Jorge Trabanco.

General Director Dylan Langan says: “It is great to see everyone coming together to make brand new opera, regardless of their previous experience. These are truly original and Canadian stories that need to be told.” VCO provides paid professional opportunities for youth, aimed at improving their health and well-being, while presenting affordable entertainment to the community with free admission for students and kids.

Closer to Toronto, Opera by Request has three presentations in June. On June 1 in Mississauga OBR presents Verdi’s Nabucco (1842) in concert with piano accompaniment at Christ Church UCC. Gene Wu sings the title role, Cristina Pisani is Abigaille, Dylan Wright is Zaccaria, Cian Horrobin is Ismaele and Meghan Symon is Fenena.

In Toronto on June 7, OBR presents a triple bill under the title “A Summer Feast,” at College St. United Church. The works include Henry Purcell’s If Music Be the Food of Love (1692), Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appétit!(1989) in which an television episode of Julia Child making a chocolate cake is set to music, and Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement (1954) about impoverished aristocrats having dinner for a wealthy prince they hope their daughter will marry. Performers include mezzo-soprano Meghan Symon, baritone Lawrence Shirkie, soprano Gwendolynn Yearwood, tenor Josh Clemenger and tenor Francis Domingue.

On June 15 in Toronto, OBR presents Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (1835) at St. Andrews United Church. Antonina Ermolenko sings Maria, Cristina Pisani is Elizabeth I, Paul Wiliamson is Leicester, Dylan Wright is Talbot, Henry Irwin is Cecil and Anna Belikova is Anna. For all three OBR operas in concert, William Shookhoff is the pianist and music director.

This year the Luminato Festival has two operas on its schedule. The first is a remount of Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks first seen in Toronto in 2012. The work, which runs from June 13 to 22, is an all-female a cappella opera that retells the story of the Salem witch trials from the perspective of the first woman accused, the young Caribbean slave Tituba.

The second opera, running June 19 to 23, is Hell’s Fury, The Hollywood Songbook. Last year Luminato presented it as a work in progress. Now it presents the finished piece. The story follows the life of composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), who escaped Nazi Germany for the US in 1938, only to be rejected for his adherence to Communism in 1948 and forced to return to Europe, finally settling in the new East Germany. The opera, conceived and directed by Tim Albery, constructs a song cycle of Eisler’s many Lieder to tell the story. Baritone Russell Braun is the soloist, Serouj Kradjian is the pianist and Michael Levine the designer.

July

This year the Brott Music Festival (June 27 to August 15) will again present a fully staged opera as part of its overall schedule. This summer’s opera will be Puccini’s La Bohème presented for one night only in Italian with English surtitles on July 18 at the FirstOntario Concert Hall. Natalya Gennadi sings Mimi, Andrew Derynck is Rodolfo, Chelsea Rus is Musetta, Kyle Lehmann is Marcello, Cesar Bello is Schaunard, Simon Chalifoux is Colline and John Fanning sings both Alcindoro and Benoît. The production changes the location from late 19th-century Paris to Hamilton in the 1930s. Boris Brott conducts the Brott Festival Orchestra.

Those who missed the Canadian Children’s Opera Company’s mainstage show earlier this year will have another chance to catch The Snow Queen (1993) by John Greer to a libretto by Jeremy James Taylor in Campbellford. On July 7 the CCOC will present the hour-long opera based on the 1844 Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale at Westben Concerts at The Barn. Rob Kempson is the stage director and Teri Dunn is the conductor.

On July 20 the Elora Festival hosts Shoestring Opera’s Schoolyard Carmen at the Heritage Barn in Fergus. In this adaptation for children in Grades 1 to 8, Carmen is a feisty little girl and newcomer to Canada who has a dark past. When Tory Adair, the “coolest kid in school” tries to bully her, she stands up to him. Shoestring Opera uses Carmen’s story to look at the immigrant in Canadian society, the child who is different, schoolyard bullying, personal independence and the saving properties of art.

Straddling July and August is Guillermo Silva-Marin’s venerable Summer Lyric Opera Theatre in Toronto. Founded in 1986, the training program culminates in staged concert performances. This year the operas are Verdi’s La Traviata (1853) on July 26, 28, 31 and August 3; Victor Davies’ Earnest, The Importance of Being (2008), an operetta based on Oscar Wilde’s well-known comedy, on July 27 and 30, August 1 and 4; and a double bill of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea (1937) and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (1918) on July 27 and 31, August 2 and 3. All performances take place at the Robert Gill Theatre on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto.

August

Last year Stratford Summer Music presented a staged version of J.S. Bach so-called Coffee Cantata of 1733 and followed this up with a more contemporary version called The Cappuccino Cantata. This year the festival keeps up with the times with a new work, the Cannabis Cantata, A Musical ‘Pot’ Pourri, commissioned by Stratford Summer Music and Ottawa Chamberfest from Peter Tiefenbach. Soprano Mireille Asselin, tenor Matthew Dalen and baritone Adam Harris explore the new landscape of legal weed in Canada through music by J.S. Bach with a libretto reimagined by Tiefenbach, on August 1 at Factory 163 in Stratford.

The Highlands Opera Studio is presenting two programs of opera. On August 15 in Haliburton and on August 17 in Orillia, it presents a fascinating triple bill under the title “Women in Opera: Then and Now.” First on the bill is Puccini’s Suor Angelica (1918) with Valerie Kuinka as stage director, Louise-Andrée Baril as music director and Lauren Margison in the title role. Next are two short operas from 2019.The Chair, by Maria Atallah to a libretto by Alice Abracen, focuses on a teenaged girl who tries to cope with the death of her best friend in an accident.Book of Faces, by Kendra Harder to a libretto by Michelle Telford, takes an irreverent look at the many faces of social media. Both short works were winners of the inaugural Musique 3 Femmes prize for emerging female opera creators. Jessica Derventzis is the stage director for both and Jennifer Szeto the pianist and music director.

In Haliburton on August 22, 24, 25 and 26, HOS presents Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos (1912) in German with English surtitles with one cast on August 22 and 25 and another on August 24 and 26. Valerie Kuinka directs the Prologue and Richard Margison the main opera, while Philip Morehead is the music director for both parts.

All of this operatic activity should be more than enough to occupy any Southern Ontarian operagoer until the fall season.

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