Montreal-based string ensemble Collectif9 stopped by Lula Lounge on November 12 on their way to Mexico for a three-day visit November 15 to 17. It was the second Toronto appearance for the double string quartet plus double bass – the first was for Music Toronto in March 2016 – and meant to launch their latest CD, No Time for Chamber Music, which is wholly devoted to the music of Mahler. But as bassist Thibault Bertin-Maghit told me after the show, when he saw Lula’s salsa dance floor he scaled back the Mahler content, using only three of the CD’s nine tracks, and filled out the evening with works by Golijov, Schnittke, Enescu, Brahms, Ligeti, Berio and Mexican composer Arturo Márquez.

Bertin-Maghit does most of the arrangements for the group, which made its debut in 2011. They were students at Université de Montréal and McGill who wanted to create something different yet complementary to traditional classical music. The result was a genre-bending, innovative approach that uses lighting techniques and amplification not usually associated with the classical concert stage. They started out playing Piazzolla and Golijov, Bertin-Maghit said, but the lack of repertoire for their particular nine-instrument ensemble led him to expand their playlist to encompass arrangements of a variety of symphonic and chamber works. They perform them with an infectious energy and vigour that grabs an audience’s attention.

Lula Lounge’s warm, relaxed atmosphere and intimate nightclub feel made it an ideal setting for Collectif9’s music and undoubtedly stoked the enthusiasm of the crowd.

The set began with tonal and atonal fragments reminiscent of the opening of Max Richter’s Recomposed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Out of the improvisatory noodling came the unmistakable Frère Jacques tune set in a minor key by Mahler from the third movement of his Symphony No.1. Hushed in the bass and cellos but amplified, its presence straddling centuries, it moved to the higher strings who convincingly mimicked Mahler’s woodwinds. The tune grew out of that foundation into a sudden quick folk dance, exaggerating its klezmer quality while building to a full, rich sound before returning to the Frère Jacques melody, diminishing in scope and fading into atonality. Brilliantly arranged and exuberantly performed, it was typical of the evening as a whole.

“A new one for us,” is how Bertin-Maghit introduced Osvaldo Golijov’s Romantic-tinged rhapsody, Night of the Flying Horses. It starts with a Yiddish lullaby that (according to Golijov) metamorphoses into a dense and dark doina (a slow, rubato, Romanian genre) and ends in a fast gallop with a theme Golijov “stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks.” With his folk-based, often pastiche-laden works, Golijov is a natural fit with Collectif9’s aesthetic.

A teaser of Stravinsky, the opening minutes of The Rite of Spring, followed, putting Collectif9’s togetherness on display. Then came the Allegretto from Schnittke’s Violin Sonata No.1 (from their Volksmobile CD), an energetic, joyful, jazzy showcase for violinist Robert Margaryan. An elegant pizzicato dance was next, a brief ländler that begins the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No.2. Then the agonizing Farewell from Mahler’s Song of the Earth, given a touching, passionate performance that shone a light on its folk references.

Enescu’s Octet for Strings (with double bass added) was one of the first pieces Collectif9 read through when they first formed seven years ago. “Now we’re finally ready to perform it,” said Bertin-Maghit. Its soaring melodies and propulsive dance-like rhythm elicited a virtuosic performance from the ensemble that was contrasted by the light touch navigating the dense lyricism of the Scherzo from Brahms’ Sextet No.2 that followed.

As played by Collectif9, the fourth movement of Ligeti’s Concert Românesc was a perpetual-motion achievement featuring impressive ensemble playing, the perfect appetizer for the highlight of the night: the third movement from Berio’s Sinfonia. Built on top of the Scherzo from Mahler’s Symphony No.2 and incorporating a text from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable as well as eight singers and a large orchestra, it was the inspiration for Collectif9’s new album and its ironic title, No Time for Chamber Music, which is part of the Beckett text. In fact, the Berio was supposed to be included on the CD but they couldn’t get the rights. With its many references to Ravel, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Debussy, Boulez and more, it’s a masterpiece of mid-20th-century music given an electrifying 21st-century reading.

Then it was literally and figuratively off to Mexico, with a sunny performance of Márquez’s Danzón No.2, made famous by Gustavo Dudamel’s popular recording with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.

Collectif9’s next visit to Toronto cannot come too soon.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

Magic sparked through the air as Harry Potter fans crowded into the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts on November 15 to experience Patrick Doyle’s soundtrack from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth installment from the film series, performed live by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Hogwarts took over the Sony Centre, as the crowd proudly showed off their Hogwarts house colours with bright red, green, yellow and blue scarves and robes. Fans young and old gathered in the lobby, some even flocking to the merchandise table to purchase authentic Harry Potter-themed snacks like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans.

As everyone settled in their seats in the packed theatre, Evan Mitchell, the conductor, encouraged the crowd not to hold back, and to cheer, laugh, and cry at our favourite scenes and characters. The audience proved throughout the night to be fiercely passionate and lively at all the right moments.

The lights dimmed, and the movie began. Goblet of Fire – based on the fourth book in J.K. Rowling’s renowned Harry Potter fantasy novels – follows Harry as he embarks on his fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where, as the school year progresses, a school tournament takes a sinister turn. With the first haunting notes of the opening piece, “The Story Continues,” the orchestra set the tone for the film, a much darker, more mature story than its predecessors: a rich, dark build of woodwinds and percussion, overlaid almost instantly by a shrill melody from the violins that left a sinister chill lingering in the air.

Goblet of Fire has one of the most diverse scores of the series, especially due to many pieces that exist within the film’s world which add opportunity to layer in unusual and surprising sounds. Much of this music is from the Yule Ball, the school dance that the students attend: “Potter’s Waltz,” “Do the Hippogriff,” and “Hogwarts Fanfare.” “Potter’s Waltz,” performed whimsically by the TSO musicians, complemented the glittering winter transformation of the Hogwarts Great Hall on-screen, while the other pieces contrasted the rest of the film’s score, with upbeat themes that played to the youth of the characters. In particular, “Do the Hippogriff,” a raucous rock song performed in the film by the wizard band The Weird Sisters, set up a chaotic on-screen scene, complete with mosh pit and crowd-surfing teacher—though this song was not performed by the live orchestra and simply played as a recording.

Another piece from within the film’s world is a march performed by the Hogwarts brass band, just before the third task of the school’s Triwizard Tournament. The piece is cheerful and animated – and yet when Harry returns at the end of the task and the march is reprised, the loud brass instruments seem to mock the audience, who have just seen Cedric Diggory, an innocent student, murdered. The orchestra performed an understated version of this march that blended seamlessly into the film while helping to accentuate the emotions onscreen – particularly the harrowing cry of Cedric’s father, who realizes what had just happened and rushes forward to clutch his son.

Throughout the film, the TSO had to strike a steady balance between the strength with which they performed certain music while keeping other moments quiet or understated, allowing the content of the film to speak for itself. Overall, though certain parts felt empty of musical presence, they managed to maintain this balance well. Some pieces also required more force – particularly the “Durmstrang Entrance,” when the students of a Bulgarian wizarding school enter the Great Hall with chants, stomps, and even a student who breathes fire from their wand into the shape of a phoenix. The Durmstrang students had all eyes on them from the Hogwarts students and Sony Centre audience alike, but the live orchestral rendition felt slightly lacking the same power and vigour that captured the audience’s attention onscreen.

In this performance, the music was brought to the forefront of the film, allowing audiences to hear little, often-overlooked details. These musical snippets were synchronous to some corresponding visuals, like the way an enchanted pen moved, or a flicker of fire reflected in Harry’s glasses – adding a new layer to the way the audience experienced Harry’s world.

While much of the audience filed out of the theatre during the closing credits, those who stayed behind were treated to the TSO briefly revisiting some of the notable pieces from the film without the distraction of watching the movie. This provided one last opportunity to appreciate the presence of the orchestra and the experience of hearing a beloved score performed live, in a theatre full of affectionate – and thoroughly enchanted – fans.

The Sony Centre for the Performing Arts and Attila Glatz Productions presented CineConcerts and Warner Bros.’ production of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire In Concert from November 15 to 17, 2018, with live music by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Jaimie Nackan is currently studying media at the University of Guelph-Humber. She is a pianist and former ballet dancer, with further passions in literature, writing, and film. She is pursuing a career in critiquing the arts, while also working on her first novel.

Art songs delivered in a full-on operatic register within a small resonant space such as Mazzoleni Hall can be hard to take, I’ve learned this Sunday.

On the program at the RCM’s intimate, chapel-like hall were French the mélodies with their Orientalist flair, as well as a selection of Lebanese and Turkish folk songs in new arrangements chosen by the two singers, soprano Joyce El-Khoury and mezzo Beste Kalender. Robert Kortgaard and Rachel Andrist accompanied from the piano, and for one Ravel cycle Nora Shulman (flute) and David Hetherington (cello) joined the mezzo onstage. It was a well-programmed concert, diverse and thematically unified at the same time.

El-Khoury, Lebanese-Canadian soprano highly in-demand internationally as Violetta and Mimi, is a singer of exceptional glamour and stage presence. Her voice is opulent, with a beautiful upper top, but it did not seem like El-Khoury recalibrated it for the more contained, subtle and withholding recital genre. Most of the singing, whether that was the intention or not, came through as fairly loud—and I was seated in the last row. On that level, Ravel’s ‘Asie’ from Shéhérazade sounds almost irate. ‘Île inconnu’ from Berlioz and Gautier’s masterwork Les nuits d’été was a very loud statement, rather than a cheery invitation to voyage that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But things changed in part two of the concert, in El-Khoury’s program of Lebanese songs which she introduced and which are personally meaningful to her. As if by a magic wand, there it was: the real song intimacy. As if a camera zoomed in to a private moment between friends. This was an entirely different singer, very much capable of pianissimi, full of thoughtful inwardness, implicit rather than explicit, and generous.

Mezzo Beste Kalender was more consistent. A fine French diction and rich dark timbre enhanced every song. Seductive and mischievous in ‘Les roses d’Ispahan’ by Fauré, Kalender added some wicked castanets playing to her gamut in Ravel’s ‘Zaïde: Boléro’. She was particularly memorable in Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, alongside the flute and the cello. ‘Nahandove’ is unusually sensuous, even for a French song, and it would be fair to describe it as, in fact, sexual (‘Arrête, ou je vais mourir / Meurt-on de volupté’). It, and the third song ‘Il est doux’, are voiced by a male narrator. He greets the female lover in the first, and orders female servants gently about in the third, but the middle song ‘Awa!’ is an outburst and a warning against such men. ‘Do not trust the white men’ is its refrain, and the verses explain what will happen when they arrive on distant shores and settle.

In part two, Kalender presented a selection of Turkish songs. One among them, ‘My Nightingale is in a Golden Cage’, she explained, was Kemal Ataturk’s favourite, so she would sing it in homage to the Turkish statesman—the modernizer and secularizer of Turkey after the end of Ottoman Empire and the republic’s first president.

The two women finished the program with Delibes’ mega hit from opera Lakmé, The Flower Duet.

The Royal Conservatory presented “Mazzoleni Songmasters: L’invitation au voyage,” featuring soprano Joyce El-Khoury and mezzo Beste Kalender, on November 11, 2018 at Mazzoleni Concert Hall, Toronto.

Lydia Perović is an arts journalist in Toronto.

Digital organs are a contentious topic amongst pipe organ aficionados. Until recently, the term “electronic organ” was unlikely to imply a high-quality instrument, and digital instruments were scorned as poor substitutes for the grandeur and acoustic superiority of an authentic pipe organ. In recent years, however, rapid advances in digital sampling quality, memory capacity, and processing speeds have made electronic organs a more viable substitute for their acoustic counterparts, giving these digital instruments an increasingly prominent place in music programs around the world. Frequently considered by churches facing the renovation or restoration of an existing, ailing pipe organ, the quality and affordability of digital instruments make them practical alternatives for large cathedrals and smaller churches alike.

Such is the case at St. Timothy’s Anglican Church, which recently installed one of Canada’s largest digital organs as a replacement for their 70-year-old pipe organ. The new instrument, built by Phoenix Organs, is described by director of music Edward Connell as “a masterpiece of modern organ technology,” for it contains three renowned pipe organs in one: the Willis organ of Hereford Cathedral, the Cavaillé-Coll organ of Notre-Dame de Metz, and the Müller organ of St. Bavo. Rather than being approximate reproductions of these magnificent historical instruments, the Phoenix organ is loaded with digital samples, recordings of each note of each pipe from the original organs themselves (tens of thousands of individual sounds), which are arranged and manipulated by the digital processor within the organ. These sound samples are integrated into the organ’s mechanical console so that the performer can control individual pipes through the same methods that one finds on an authentic pipe organ.

And who better to play this new instrument’s inaugural recital than one of the finest organists in the country? On October 30, St. Timothy’s welcomed Matthew Larkin as he played a wide-ranging program intended to display the international capabilities of the organ. With works by Bach, the English composers Howells and Elgar, the French organists Franck, Vierne, and Duruflé, and the Ottawa-based Andrew Ager, Larkin’s virtuosity and musicianship were on display as much as the new instrument itself. Maurice Duruflé’s Prélude et Fugue ‘sur le nom d’Alain’ was particularly thrilling, as the opening prelude’s fast fingerwork and clearly-presented thematic material (Duruflé quotes Jehan Alain’s famous organ work Litanies) paired beautifully with the increasingly dramatic fugue, all of which was brought to life through the sounds of the Notre-Dame de Metz pipe organ.

William Boyce was a student of Handel in London, and his Voluntary in D Major was the vehicle for exploring the Willis tubas of Hereford Cathedral. An opening adagio played on flutes gave way to a Da capo-style trumpet tune, displaying the impact and breadth of sound present in the Willis’s high-pressure reed pipes. The one disappointment of the evening was that we were unable to hear the Müller organ of St. Bavo, in the Netherlands. This instrument, built in 1738, received complimentary reviews from none other than Handel, Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and the opportunity to hear Bach played on this historical organ sound set was enticing. Unfortunately, a computer error resulted in only a partial load of the data, so that we heard the modified mean-tone temperament of St. Bavo and the equal-tempered organ of Hereford simultaneously. This technical error (and its corresponding cacophony) could not be remedied despite numerous memory resets and reboots of the system, so Larkin continued with Bach on the Hereford organ sound bank. Although a different timbre and temperament than originally intended, the Bach was very well done, particularly the articulation and phrasings within the chorale trio Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns Wend.

Although the new digital organ at St. Timothy’s has some technical issues that still need to be resolved, it should soon be a worthwhile addition to the Toronto organ scene. And despite the curveballs thrown his way by the organ’s computer, Matthew Larkin demonstrated that he is indeed a master of his craft; his ability to create maximum impact through technical interpretation and instrumental manipulation is second to none, and he was able to adapt and give a performance that was convincing from beginning to end.

St. Timothy’s Anglican Church (North Toronto) presented organist Matthew Larkin in concert on October 30, 2018.

Matthew Whitfield is a Toronto-based harpsichordist and organist.