“It’s a story that you could say has an old, overused plot that’s not relevant. It’s about an older man who believes he’s irresistible to women. This is a different take on that story, but he’s not going to take no for an answer. He wants to be able to conquer and have his conquests.”
When it comes to defining the line between North and South in Ontario, it very much depends on who you ask and where you are.
During a particularly compelling moment in the Art of Time Ensemble’s recent performance, Dance to the Abyss: Music From The Weimar Republic, the ensemble, now in its final season, performed Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher five times in a row. Utilizing a set of detailed instructions from a document titled Nazi Germany’s Dance Band Rules and Regulations, the ensemble uses each rendition to iteratively strip away the lifeblood and very essence of what makes that great 1931 song so paradigmatically part of the jazz of swing-era Harlem.
When I was a child in pre-amalgamation Toronto, any trip past Bloor Street on the Yonge line was “north” to me, with the magic moment being when the subway emerged from the tunnel and went above ground; for a magic moment you could pretend you were on a different kind of train bound for who knows where.
“It’s one show stopper after another, isn’t it? There’s not a bad number in it,” is what conductor Jane Glover, DBE, says when I ask how she explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah. We met and talked in December in the lobby of her hotel in downtown Toronto, one day after she’d conducted the first of five Messiah concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir in a near-full Roy Thomson Hall. Her new book, Mozart in Italy, had come out earlier in 2023, and Toronto was a cap on a busy, Atlantic crisscrossing year.
