Diffuse was the name of a concert I attended on October 16, the second night of the Music Gallery’s X Avant Festival, this year titled TeXtures, now in its 19th season. The event was the realization of a long-held dream by Michael Palumbo – to produce a concert where the music is diffused through multiple speakers. At its heart, the evening was both a celebration of improvised music and the release of the vinyl LP You are the Right Length.   

Palumbo organizes and curates Exit Points, a monthly series of recorded, free-improvised concerts held at ArrayMusic on the last Friday of every month. Excerpts from these improvised sets were selected for the LP, and this concert premiered both sides of the just-released vinyl album in surround-sound mixes co-created  by Palumbo and sound engineer Matt Legee. The album is a kind of sampler of the entire Exit Points discography, crafting shorter beginnings and endings from the more extensive original improvisations. Each excerpt was then given an innovative title. 

Audiences returned to Roy Thomson Hall on November 10 for the first time since March 2020, welcoming the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and their new music director, Gustavo Gimeno, for a musical triptych—three programs spread over seven evenings. It was Gimeno’s initial foray into repertoire selection for the TSO, his first venture into curation—which became a means for conductor and audiences alike to get reacquainted with their orchestra. 

Unusually, the opening trio of concerts began with a stage empty of musicians. Half of the orchestra members entered single file from a door on the left, the other half from a door on the right. For a brief moment they stood in place beside their chairs before noisily applauding in anticipation of Gimeno’s entrance. The audience, as if on cue, then stood and applauded in an emotional welcome which grew as the conductor made his way through the first violin section to the podium—a veritable lovefest.

The opening program was designed for the occasion. It started with Anthony Barfield’s Invictus for brass ensemble, completed in the summer of 2020 as Black Lives Matter protests intersected with COVID-19, a Lincoln Center commission that represented, in part, the resilience of the arts and the Black community. Hearing it in Roy Thomson Hall in its Canadian premiere felt like a rallying cry: “Unconquered.”

On July 23, I was invited to Koerner Hall to watch a hybrid in-person/livestream event presented by JazzinToronto, in collaboration with the Royal Conservatory of Music. The performance – a double-bill featuring Heather Bambrick, in quintet format, and the Jane Bunnett Maqueque Trio – was the culminating event of JazzinToronto Live: A Community Celebration, a multi-day festival that also presented shows in mainstay local venues, including the Tranzac, the Emmet Ray, and Lula Lounge.

I had not entered the RCM building since the start of pandemic lockdown measures last March. Though the conservatory has been open in a limited capacity for some students, staff, and teachers, the facilities have been closed to the general public. The inaccessibility of communal indoor spaces has been one of the enduring minor tragedies of the past 16 months; as in many of my post-pandemic fantasies, I imagined that returning to a major concert venue would be a boisterous, celebratory affair. The reality of the gradual return to normal, however, was much different. As one of 50 attendees, the experience of walking into Koerner was unreal, the cavernousness of the hall complicated by the many cameras, avatars of our virtual compatriots streaming the show at home. (At the time of the show, it had been but a week since live music was permitted to resume in Ontario; large indoor venues are still mostly closed.)

As the event started, a sense of familiarity quickly set in, dispelling, to some extent, the lingering sense of the uncanny. The house lights dimmed; the audience hushed; Ori Dagan – the evening’s emcee, and a representative of JazzinToronto – gave some background information on the festival, listed major sponsors, and appealed to the audience for donations.

The annual Collingwood Summer Music Festival has made an inspiring comeback following last year’s pandemic-induced hiatus.

Held from July 10 to 16, 2021, this year’s festival featured outdoor and drive-in events for local audiences, as well as an online component for those staying home through the pandemic. The concerts included performances by artists such as Ekaterina Shelehova, soprano, a rising star in the international opera scene. Much like her electrifying performance on Italia’s Got Talent earlier this year, which reverberated around the world with more than 28 million views, she was captivating in Popera, the festival’s opening concert featuring a selection of arias and duets, accompanied by the National Academy Orchestra of Canada under Boris Brott.

The drive-in events took place at the New Life Church (28 Tracey Ln. in Collingwood) and were simultaneously livestreamed online. “The response to our drive-in and online performances has been tremendous,” says Daniel Vnukowski, the classically-trained concert pianist who’s the founder and artistic director of the Collingwood Summer Music Festival. “We had tickets already up for sale in April.”

The festival partnered with a multi-camera film production crew to capture the intricacies of each performance in striking detail, effectively rendering a live concert hall experience to drive-in and online audience members alike. Prior to the start of each performance, Vnukowski facilitated lively Q&A discussions to engage artists and audience members alike.