Features

When you head down to David Pecaut Square for this year’s Luminato festival you will notice something new — and altogether different. An immense blue ribbon will sweep overhead from one end of the square to the other. Along its course it will wind around the stage and make its way past a group of balletic windsocks.

After the square was renamed last year in memory of the co-founder of the festival, it was officially designated as the festival ub. Thus inspired, Luminato inaugurated a program of architectural installations in the square. The architect Jack Diamond, of Diamond Schmitt Architects, was selected to create this initial design, which is being called Windscape.

If you have a desire to sing, you’d be hard-pressed not to find a place for your voice these days. I’ve been studying community music in Toronto, and my sneak peek at The WholeNote’s 2012 Canary Pages confirmed my own sense of the many opportunities open to singers of all ages, abilities and interests. And that’s just what’s listed in these pages. If the Canary Pages are the tip of a singing iceberg, then there are likely hundreds of places to sing in Southern Ontario. And by all accounts, Ontarians are singing.

Here’s a riddle for you. By day they are lawyers, paramedics, marketing mavens, music students, teachers, bus drivers, office managers, dentists and various retirees. By night, they transform themselves into gypsies, peasants, soldiers, courtesans, nuns, prisoners, factory workers, heavenly angels and the demimondaine. Who are they? And the answer is, a typical opera chorus.

That they are indispensible to an opera is a given. “The chorus represents the community or society that the principal characters inhabit,” explains stage director Tom Diamond. And Opera Hamilton chorister Dorothy O’Halloran adds: “We are part of the on-going story. We react to the main characters. In fact, we collectively are a character in the opera.”

In our February 2011 issue, The WholeNote’s publisher David Perlman interviewed, for our cover story, the seven winners of the 2011 Toronto Sinfonietta Concerto Competition. These talented teenagers had a variety of musical backgrounds, but shared a common focus, drive and passion for performing classical music.

The national ballet of canada orchestra is coming out of the pit. As part of the National’s 60th anniversary season festivities, the orchestra will give a concert at Koerner Hall on April 3. While the orchestra loves the acoustics at the Four Seasons Centre, being in the pit is not the same as being on stage. The Koerner Hall concert in a prestigious recital hall is a very big deal. Says David Briskin, music director and principal conductor since 2006: “The concert celebrates the fact that the National Ballet has had a commitment to live music from the very beginning of its existence.”