A wraithlike water-dweller, a covetous goddess, a phantom bride. Welcome to the world of Of Tricksters and Trolls, the Toronto Consort’s latest performance released March 16 on their new streaming platform, Early Music TV. Filmed earlier this year at the 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Arts, Media and Education, the virtual performance features traditional music from Scandinavia alongside dramatic retellings of medieval and folk tales from similar regions. Don’t be fooled by the whimsical premise – the Consort wades into the murk of early Scandinavian repertoire to retrieve pieces that are merry, mournful and haunting in turn. It is a seriously transporting concert.

The show opens with the eerie, decaying notes of a vielle à roue (hurdy-gurdy) played by Ben Grossman, and a close-up shot of five ivory figurines clutching knives, horns and shields – keen medievalists will recognize the Lewis Chessmen, 12th-century playing pieces carved into fierce Viking warriors. (We’re not in Kansas anymore.) Then Peter Tiefenbach, the evening’s storyteller, launches into the first of many tales starring the fickle and vindictive, yet beautiful and funny, Norse gods, as well as the shadowy creatures of later oral tradition.

Suspenseful sound effects are woven delicately into the narrative. Soft, spaced notes from harpist Paul Jenkins mimic falling snowflakes, while Grossman on drum and Katherine Hill on the nyckelharpa create rumbling, Thor-triggered thunder. Tiefenbach stays in character, if you will, easily flipping between whiny dwarves and breathy goddesses, without descending into pantomime. Refreshingly, nobody interrupts the flow to announce names or historical anecdotes; the tension is sustained, the spell unbroken.

The third annual Women From Space Festival, a Toronto-based concert series, is returning this year, livestreamed on www.womenfromspace.com. Recently postponed due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, the festival is now taking place April 9-11, 2021.

Festival passes this year are free, but there will be a PayPal donation button set up during the livestream to contribute to next year’s festival. The concerts will remain online for a week following the events. Access to the livestream will begin at 7:30pm each evening; the concert itself starts at 8pm (EST). The artists’ roughly 30-minute-long sets will be pre-recorded, with live MCing in between.

Founded by Kayla Milmine and Bea Labikova to celebrate International Women’s Day in 2019, the Women From Space Festival focuses on women-led experimental arts. The festival’s directive is “to celebrate and create a space for women [...] working within and between various exploratory musical traditions,” aiming to counteract underrepresentation and inspire a new generation of performing artists. Keeping with the festival’s boundary-pushing nature, this year’s virtual format is not your typical livestreamed concert, instead offering an innovative and exciting alternative to in-person performances: The Holobox Theatre, a miniature holographic stage hand-crafted by the festival and available for $10 plus shipping. 

On February 5, Toronto’s Voicebox: Opera in Concert (OIC) made its digital debut with a fascinating double bill: The Human Voice and La Voix Humaine. This choice of material—an English-language version of Jean Cocteau’s 1928 play, paired with the 1958 Poulenc opera inspired by it—was in part, according to OIC general director Guillermo Silva Marin, in tribute to OIC founder, the late Stuart Hamilton, who first programmed these two pieces together in 1975. It also, however, makes for a perfect entry into digital pandemic programming. That both are solo pieces is ideal for working in a state of safety from infection—and also creates a great opportunity to showcase top talent and virtuosity, in this case the outstanding Chilina Kennedy and Miriam Khalil.

Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine (1928) and Francis Poulenc’s 1958 opera of the same name, inspired by the play, tell the story of a nameless woman (“She” or “Elle”) in torment at the end of a love affair, longing and waiting for a phone call from her lost lover. That phone call, after several wrong numbers, makes up the whole of the play/opera. A woman alone in her apartment, her only connection with the outside world her phone, feels like an uncanny parallel to the lives so many of us are living now, prohibited from spending time with anyone outside our “bubbles.” When you have a bubble of one, the loneliness can be unbearable. This is the case with “She” in The Human Voice, alone on her end of the phone call and doing everything to win her lover back while knowing she has lost him forever.

According to biographies of Cocteau, the actors in his company had been complaining of coming second to directorial and design concepts in his productions. Taking up the challenge,  Cocteau created this one-woman play that needs, even demands, a bare staging, so that the audience’s attention is clearly focused on the story and the virtuosity of the performer. In the OIC-streamed production, both play and opera take place in the same setting, a living space delineated by starkly white furniture arranged around the familiar confines of OIC’s Edward Jackman Studio. The setting is simple while also giving opportunity for movement and levels of action, and highlights the differences between the spoken and sung versions of the story as we watch both in the same space.

In December 2020, nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Ontario was placed under lockdown for a second time, further limiting the already restrictive measures taken to control the spread of this virus. With firm (though somewhat inconsistent) restrictions making large-scale concert performances all but impossible, arts organizations across the city faced a demanding creative challenge—one that required equally creative responses.

On February 18, 2021, Toronto-based early music presenter Tafelmusik released Il Seicento, a virtual concert recorded at Jeanne Lamon Hall, featuring innovative music by trendsetting Italian composers from the 1600s. The concert title, “Il Seicento,” is a term that refers specifically to Italian history and culture during the 17th century, marking the end of the Renaissance movement in Italy and the beginning of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque era. While many of these names will be unfamiliar to all but connoisseurs, a few, such as Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger and Domenico Gabrielli, are recognizable as significant figures who straddled the Renaissance and Baroque eras, ushering in the new Baroque style and paving a way for the later generation, which included such household names as Corelli and Vivaldi.

Described by Tafelmusik music director Elisa Citterio as “a contrast between light and dark” inspired by the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s paintings, Il Seicento strives to bring light into a world that is currently shrouded in darkness, and it is strikingly successful in this regard. Indeed, with over a dozen individual works on the program, there are too many sublime moments to describe in such a brief review, but a few particularly remarkable instances deserve special mention.

I still remember my first Messiah: seated in the rather uncomfortable pews at St. Paul’s Basilica in Toronto, gazing up at the church’s ceiling instead of following along with the text in the program, and only drifting back into attentiveness for “All we like sheep have gone astray,” the lyrics of which I found most amusing at age eight. My appreciation for long-form classical music and my attention span have both, thankfully, matured since then, such that I can more properly enjoy and be challenged by a work such as Soundstreams’ Electric Messiah: a lively, free-spirited adaptation of Handel’s oratorio, performed with unbounded joy and more than a few electronics.

The Toronto-based music group Soundstreams usually produces Electric Messiah as a cabaret-style event at the Drake Underground, bringing together a vocal quartet with instrumentalists both classical and modern to rethink the melodies of Handel’s original. This year, Electric Messiah has moved online, taking the form of an hour-long music video paying homage not only to Handel’s timeless work, but also to the city of Toronto and its own artists. The YouTube premiere on Thursday, December 17 was no lagging live-streamed event: Electric Messiah is a highly-polished affair, a delight to both eye and ear, and available for multiple rewatches until the end of December 2020. 

Alex Winter’s new documentary – ZAPPA – about the iconoclastic musician and biting social satirist, Frank Zappa, has much in common with Thorsten Schütte’s absorbing, revelatory 2016 documentary, Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words. Zappa’s widow Gail (d. 2015) and son Ahmet (who runs the extensive Frank Zappa estate through the Zappa Trust as co-Trustee) were executive producers of the 2016 film. Ahmet Zappa is also a producer of the new film, which is more about the man than the previous more music-oriented doc. A conservative libertarian who had no use for drugs, Zappa was not how he appeared to be. Nonetheless, given the extent of the Zappa archives, there is much treasure to be found here. Early in the film the man himself takes us on an archival tour – a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling 8mm movies, audio and videotape of recording sessions, even jam sessions by the likes of Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) and Eric Clapton (neither of which we hear – perhaps they’re being saved for future release).

Zappa’s early home life was completely without music. His father worked at a gas chemical factory, so his toys were gas masks and his interests concentrated on chemistry – he made gunpowder at the age of six. As a young teenager he read a magazine story about how Sam Goody’s (a major record seller in the 1950s) was able to sell records by Edgard Varèse that were considered too strange for most people to buy. Zappa bought The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse and it changed his life. “I just liked it [the way percussion was playing an integrated melodic part] and couldn’t understand why other people just didn't like it,” he said. There’s an 8mm snippet of him playing Varèse on the harmonica. He had no interest in Mozart or Beethoven, “only in the man who could make music which was that strange.” Hearing Ionisation led Zappa to write orchestral music. Much later, he took to playing Varèse’s Octandre as an encore “because after hearing it, the audience wouldn’t possibly hear another number.”

He taught himself to play blues guitar in high school by listening – sometimes staying up until 3am – to the music of Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Guitar Slim, Elmore James, Lowell Fulson and Johnny “Guitar” Watson (with whom he later played). In his mid-teens he was a member of a racially mixed band, The Blackouts, which at the time was considered too radical for the small California town where he lived.