Who knew that an album launch could become a unique theatrical experience? Yes, all right, the stars of pop music with mega-budgets and production companies do, but experimental mixed genre pop singers and small opera production companies don’t usually seek each other out for projects. Singer Kyrie Kristmanson invited the team of Against the Grain Theatre to create a theatrical component to the Canadian launch of her songs from Modern Ruin, and Friday night’s delightful do “Une rêverie musicale,” at the small theatre space at the Alliance Française, was the result.

Amanda Smith directed the first act. The little fantasy with a dancer (Mary-Dora Bloch-Hansen, in her own choreography) and a baritone (Adam Harris) had few props – some chairs covered with shiny metallic paper and some balloons. Music was a combination of purely instrumental and vocal, mostly French except for a bit near the end from Philip Glass’ Glassworks. It all sounded like one atmospheric piece thanks to the instrument that carried it all, marimba (Nathan Petitpas). Satie’s Gymnopedie 1 started the proceedings, and we got to meet the androgynous dancer (with glorious face make-up) first. The baritone entered as a late audience member and joined her onstage. Their interaction had, refreshingly, nothing to do with a potential seduction or couple formation. They were, more imaginatively, like two creatures from different planets trying to communicate through play.

Petitpas also played Satie’s Gnossiennes 2, 3 and 5, and accompanied Harris in Poulenc’s Hôtel and the final Après un rêve by Fauré, which I’ve never before heard in baritone register. A lot of sopranos perform this song, but it’s obvious to me now that it’s more appealing in a lower voice. Marimba added a dream-like quality.

It’s how opera as an art form began, really – as an intermedio between something else, between the acts of a theatre play for example. “Une rêverie” reminded us that it can still work perfectly fine like that – in this case, as an album launch with an operatic interlude of its own.

The second half of the show was Kyrie Kristmanson’s set. Kyrie Kristmanson is a new artist to me, but I’m glad I discovered her. The labels “folk” or “pop” or “baroque” don’t quite do her justice. Friday night she performed a set with the amplified Warhol Dervish string quartet. Among her singer-songwriter interests are recomposing and arranging what’s left of the songs of the trobairitz, the Occitan female version of the troubadours, and some of the songs in the program did have a distant medieval musical ring to them. Mostly the numbers they performed were musically more complex than medieval music, and more complex than any of the stuff performed by folk or pop or cabaret musicians. Few songs had a predictable danceable beat prevalent in pop concoctions. At first I thought I had finally found a Canadian version of what Rosemary Standley does in her baroque/folk work, but the music that Kyrie and the Warhol Dervish quartet play is more contemporary instrumental, with none of the simple and immediate appeal of pop songs. Kudos to them for smuggling in quite a bit of demanding listening into the popular song form and taking the road less travelled but more adventurous.

Kyrie Kristmanson, the Warhol Dervish quartet and artists from Against the Grain Theatre presented “Une rêverie musicale” on Friday, October 13 at Alliance Française, Toronto. Kristmanson’s next concert is at the NAC in Ottawa (October 19), after which she is off to Regina, Montreal and to a festival in France.

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

Tafelmusik, Toronto’s best-known period performance ensemble, played the first concert of their new season from September 21-24 at Koerner Hall. The program included concerti by Handel, Corelli and Vivaldi and a suite by Rameau, all led by their new music director, Elisa Citterio. The playing was incredible throughout, but I also experienced an unexpected revelation during the show: rather than seeing the performance as merely a gathering of musicians onstage, stuck in a static, determined and immovable formation (pairs of players sharing a music stand, ancient in its acoustically optimal strategies), I became aware of the subtle physical communications that took place between the orchestral players as they moved through the music. It occurred to me that they were dancing as well as playing, not just as individuals but also as a group, realizing the innately dance-based structures of the composers’ works through their bodies as well as their violins, violas, bassoons and flutes. They were, in essence, dancing a tango for us there onstage.

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The orchestra is onstage, dancing a tango; the leader is moving her hips, arms, legs, head, torso, clavicles heading the charge. Everything is vital and exciting but always in control, and the players behind her are feeding off her energy. Smiles are traded back and forth between players; the violinists smirk and wink and giggle (one misses the occasional entry, he’s having so much fun! He always recovers admirably.)

Everyone onstage is dressed in black, or close enough. A violinist downstage left, sparkling in a silvery, glittery dress, bops to the music like a go-go dancer on roller blades while cellists play solos like Dizzy Gillespie, riffing like Hendrix, fingers flying like Jimmy Page. A cadenza is improvised and for a moment the sounds of the prescribed, notated music on the page are overtaken by the vibe of an impromptu jam session. You forget that you’re in one of the city’s finest concert halls and get taken to that place all performers remember as the purest form of the art, spontaneous and free extemporization, that place where things happen that can never be repeated, although this performance has been and will be repeated throughout the week.

Bassoons look like saxophones boxing as they bob and weave, taking the bass line then the melody, oboes and violins and horns trading solos – a great feeling, a great vibe (and this is only the beginning!) and it seems for a brief moment like you’re the only one in the hall.

But you’re not. The man in the row behind seems unaware that he is whispering, more than audibly, throughout the concert:

“Yesss…”

“Mhmmmm…”

And, once a movement or work is over,

“That’s the end.”

He whispers with delight at a skillfully executed cadenza or flourish even when others in the crowd look bored. Listening attentively takes a lot of different forms.

At intermission there’s a reception for the younger crowd (hosted by Tafelscene, the under-35 club that has intermission parties at certain shows throughout the year) in a bustling cordoned-off area with free beer and wine. Everyone seems to know each other, breaking into cliques and groups like a high school reunion or an office lunch break around an alcoholic water cooler, and it’s good to see so much support from and for a younger demographic, still underrepresented in the classical world. Some of the performers step out onto the mezzanine and mingle with these young concertgoers, exchanging looks and smiles and conversation, welcoming them and encouraging them in their exploration of this ancient music and its age-defying wonders.

Later in the evening the final suite jives along, lively and sprightly and ebullient, vivid in its characterization. You can imagine the first performance in 1763 Paris: powdered wigs, ridiculously voluminous gowns, collars, gold and palatial scenery as the gentry dance and the performers perform.

The drummer hammers a beat and the players stomp through the Airs gay:

“Yeeesssss…”

The string players’ fingers move frantically but uniformly, choreographically, on their fingerboards as the Contredanses sprint past our ears – if they had ribbons, the bows would look like gymnastic wands:

“Mmmhmmmmm…”

As the last notes are played, the audience stands in rapture:

“That’s the end.”

Onstage these masterful musicians possess dual powers – part black-collar courtiers playing the baroque folk’s jazz, entertainers like Counts Basie, Bernstein, Brubeck and Barenboim – part mythical gatekeepers, opening our ears and minds to the wonders of the past. Where else can someone with no everyday musical, artistic, or spiritual knowledge suddenly become enlightened by and immersed in previously unknown cultural wonders? Such is the beauty of this music, a time capsule opened before our eyes and ears. For two short hours that Saturday night all sense of the present was lost, overwhelmed by the energy put out by that group of dancers that took us all for a ride through some of the great songs of long ago, and we are the better for it.

Matthew Whitfield is a Toronto-based harpsichordist and organist.

Mont Orford is nestled in Mont Orford National Park, in the eastern townships region of Quebec. It's also where the New Horizons International Music Association – perhaps best-known for their New Horizons band program for mature student and amateur musicians – held a music camp, from September 10 to September 14, 2017. As a clarinetist and member of the New Horizons Band in Toronto, I packed up my instrument and prepared to attend.

The New Horizons philosophy of music-making for mature adults, founded by Dr. Roy Ernst, was prevalent at this camp. Ernst, former professor emeritus at Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, attended himself, and performed in many of the camp’s activities.

The talented faculty from Canada and the United States enjoyed sharing time and music-making with over 150 mature attendees, over four days of rehearsals and workshops. Music sessions included several interesting and motivational choices: conch choir, Celtic and ukulele ensembles, and Jazz and Dixieland bands; chorus and pop song choirs; and concert bands at both advanced and intermediate levels. Excellent performances by all camp attendees at the final concerts concluded the four-day program.

Several members of the New Horizons Toronto Band were in attendance. The talented Toronto musicians participated in all sessions, playing a cross-section of wind and string instruments. One outstanding instrument was the alphorn, played daily by none other than Dan Kapp, music director of the New Horizons Band of Toronto. At 7am every morning, camp attendees/musicians were awakened with that tone! Dan also conducted the advanced band. The president of the New Horizons Band of Toronto, flutist Randy Kligerman, was also in attendance, performing in the advanced band as well as in the woodwind and ukulele ensembles.

As I have discovered, a music camp experience has many motivational aspects. For mature adult music makers, the self-directed learning opportunities in music ensembles, sectionals, choirs, choruses and bands are available, for those who seek them out – with New Horizons being a prime example. Attending my third International New Horizons Band Camp was rewarding – and with this motivation, I will continue to attend band camps in 2018.

On that note, do attend a New Horizons band camp. Soon.

More information on New Horizons music camps, as well as the New Horizons band programs, can be found at www.newhorizonsmusic.org.

Gail Marriott is a clarinet player (intermediate and jazz) and an educator/financial planner.

It is almost three years to the day that I first covered the Polaris Music Prize Gala for The WholeNote.

I’ve spent my creative and journalistic career in the classical, contemporary concert and various world music camps. Founded in 2006 by Steve Jordan, a former A&R Executive with Warner Music Canada and True North Records, Polaris seemed to me to represent an alternate – and in many ways much more mainstream – picture of our national music scene. Embedded in the Canadian music industry and notwithstanding its inclusive-sounding mission statement – “A select panel of [Canadian] music critics judge and award the Prize without regard to musical genre or commercial popularity” – I must admit Polaris was just not high on my personal radar.

That was until Tanya Tagaq’s brilliant, overtly political album Animism made the 2014 Polaris shortlist. Joined onstage by her band (including violinist/producer Jesse Zubot and extraordinary drummer Jean Martin) and Christine Duncan’s 40-voice Element Choir, Tagaq’s Animism album was awarded the Prize later that September 22 night.

The video of their exhilarating 10-minute performance eventually garnered a record number of online Polaris views. Tagaq’s win marked an even more significant Polaris milestone – the first time the Prize was awarded to an Indigenous musician. (The album also took the JUNO Award for Aboriginal Album of the Year the following year.)

My report When Tanya Tagaq Won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize mentioned the importance of sonic mindfulness in her work, privileging not so much music as an entertainment commodity, but sound as a universal human experience, a force for good in this world. Animism embodied those notions, and more. I saw in the album “a musical, political and cultural act of great bravery, [as well as] a provocative confrontation on colonial and ecological fronts…[and] a platform from which to continue discussions of social reconciliation and healing.”

Fast-forward to the Polaris 2017 shortlist.

What immediately caught my attention was that four of the ten albums chosen this year directly reflected current Indigenous realities. A Tribe Called Red, Lido Pimienta, Tanya Tagaq, all Indigenous artists, were joined by Gord Downie’s Secret Path, a powerful concept album about Chanie Wenjack, the young Anishinaabe boy who died in 1966 after escaping from a residential school. Secret Path acknowledges a dark chapter in Canadian history – and offers the hope of starting our country on a road to reconciliation by facing up to some very troubling truths. “We are not the country we think we are,” wrote The Tragically Hip’s frontman and lyricist Downie. “It will take seven generations to fix this.”

Arriving at the seventh floor foyer of Toronto’s The Carlu for the Polaris Gala on September 18, 2017, I was met with a room full of very loud music industry buzz. I bumped into a friend, Lido Pimienta’s percussionist Brandon Valdivia. It was Valdivia’s first Polaris and he seemed a mix of bemusement and excitement. When I mentioned the sometimes-sketchy sound system in the hall, he adroitly replied, “but Glenn Gould called the Eaton Auditorium’s acoustics among the best in North America,” before rushing off to set up.

Of the performances at the gala, Tanya Tagaq’s performance, of songs from her album Retribution, stood out – and stunned the audience. She ended with a cover of Nirvana’s Rape Me, during which a number of women in the audience rose dressed in red, fists held high, reminding us of the tragedy of the multitude of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

A Tribe Called Red was represented not by a live performance but a music video, as was Leonard Cohen and BADBADNOTGOOD. Feist sang I Wish I Didn't Miss You solo, accompanying herself on guitar; Leif Vollebekk sang his loose-limbed ballad All Night Sedans with his band; and the band Weaves rocked the house.

The Colombian-born Canadian singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta, who identifies as Afro-Colombian with Indigenous Wayuu heritage on her mother’s side, sang an explosive set, animated by a group of white-clad dancers in the final minutes. In addition to her acrobatic voice, the sound of the tambura (Colombian bass drum), snare drum, electronics and a four-piece horn section dominated the music. Her album La Papessa “has no guitar! I feel like there’s too much electric guitar in music, and it’s just so dude, so guy,” Pimienta said in a 2014 Musicworks interview.

At the concert’s end, last year’s Polaris Music Prize winner Kaytranada revealed this year’s winner, calling up an excited Pimienta, her mother and her 9-year-old son to the stage.

Pimienta’s acceptance speech was peppered with references to themes she explored on her self-produced, independent, label-less album La Papessa (meaning The High Priestess, a card in the tarot), including racism, patriarchy, spousal abuse, resilience, independence and issues facing BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) communities. She made a point of acknowledging that we were guests on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land, and also the significance of winning Canadian music critics' top prize for an album sung mostly in Spanish, and not in English or French. She thanked “all the single mothers out there who inspire me.”

Pimienta’s 2017 Polaris win was a reminder of one powerful direction Canadian music is traveling today. Indigenous musical creators such as Tagaq, Pimienta, A Tribe Called Red and 2015’s Polaris Prize winner Buffy Sainte-Marie are being acknowledged by the mainstream not only for their artistic achievement, but also for their central contribution to the ever-evolving conversations about past, present and future Canadian identities. Like those forebears, Pimienta’s music is an act of political and cultural bravery, confronting mainstream white/settler status quos with fiery sounds and words.

The Carlu, in its previous incarnation as the Eaton Auditorium, was certainly an impressive and influential place – one that Glenn Gould described in the mid-20th century as one of the best acoustics in the world. But the 2017 Polaris Prize gala at the renovated and rebranded Carlu, unlike the Eurocentric music culture that the Eaton Auditorium once represented, points to a different reality. As Gord Downie framed it, the only viable way forward is to listen closely to one another, and to the many diverse voices among us – particularly those who were making music on this land thousands of years before countries like Canada were even imagined.

Andrew Timar is a Toronto musician and music writer.