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Peggy Baker has a firm principle concerning her choreographic relationship with music. She will not allow tape if the piece was meant to be performed live. If she commissions work from a composer who is a devotee of electronica, that is a different story. “Music is the fastest way to connect to your own physicality,” she states, “and it is magical when live music vibrates through your body.”

In Baker’s new dance show, he:she, which opens at the Betty Oliphant Theatre on March 29, the worlds of acoustic and electronic music come together in compositions by Chan Ka Nin, Heather Schmidt and Alain Thibault. Joining the six dancers will be clarinetist Max Christie, cellist Shauna Rolston, and composer/pianist John Kameel Farah. The latter will provide the improvised score for the world premiere of Aleatoric Duet No. 2.

Not surprisingly, Baker has had a connection with live music her whole life. When she was in training, her dance classes had live accompaniment. Two husbands, Michael J. Baker and Ahmed Hassan, were composers and musicians. When she performed with the White Oak Dance Project, founded by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and choreographer Mark Morris, a chamber orchestra toured with the company.

Baker returned from her years in New York with a gift. As a testament to her enormous talent, Morris had given her his solo Ten Suggestions, set to Bagatelles, Op. 5 by Alexander Tcherepnin. To perform the work, she needed a pianist, and that is how Baker met Andrew Burashko. What followed has been many fruitful years of collaboration between live music and dance. Says Baker: “Andrew said that if we were going to work together, we had to choose important music, and I made dances to Brahms, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Philip Glass. Andrew introduced me to a fantastic world of music.”

Back in 1941, before Lawrence Cherney was even born, in the pages of a book titled One World, a failed candidate for the presidency of the United States gave the artistic director of Soundstreams a guiding theme for much of his career.

In fact, Wendell Willkie might almost have written the very words of the Peterborough-born oboist and English horn player’s welcome to his audience for November’s “Reimagining Flamenco” presentation in the newly refurbished Jeanne Lamon Hall at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre:

 “... Never have the world’s cultural heritages been so accessible to all, so available to be explored, appreciated and transformed,” Cherney wrote in the Soundstreams program. “No culture or heritage can survive in a vacuum, preserved in a museum in splendid isolation. Cultures interact, resonate with their surroundings. They’re in a constant state of evolution and revolution in direct relation to the ebb and flow of those surroundings.”

{The following is excerpted and adapted from a text delivered by Robert Aitken at the Symposium “Lutoslawski – Music and Legacy” held on October 26, 2013 at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University in collaboration with The Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Krakow and The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in Canada, to commemorate the centennial of composer Witold Lutoslawski’s birth.}

There are many things in life which come to be obvious. As the years go by you forget when you learned them and think that you always knew them. They become truisms that you expect everyone to know — a kind of self-evident knowledge. Was there actually a time in my life when I did not understand that Poland was truly a leader in contemporary music? I just knew it and continued to believe so for many years up to the present. So when I was invited to give this reminiscence on Witold Lutoslawski I was pleased to rethink this important part of my past to ascertain just when and what it was that brought about my great interest in Polish music and led ultimately to inviting Lutoslawski to Toronto.

Music was what brought them together when, as eager young members of the gifted program at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto in the early 1980s, Richard Herriott and Winona Zelenka found themselves part of a hand-picked cadre of budding musicians. And music is what reunites them, after years apart and careers on opposite sides of the pond.

Zelenka is well known to readers of The WholeNote as a chamber and orchestral musician. Herriott is less so, although some will remember his November 6, 2011 appearance at Walter Hall in a moving tribute concert to the memory of Antonin Kubalek.

Both will be performing in the intimate surroundings of St. Stephen in-the-Fields Anglican Church on November 29 in a program featuring Benjamin Britten’s Cello Sonata (beloved by Zelenka), folk song settings by Vaughan Williams and the Canadian premiere of Herriott’s Rock Piano Concerto without Orchestra, subtitled “An Electric Organ, a Ladder and a Persian Rug.”

Koerner Hall is celebrating its fifth anniversary this season. During these years, the beautiful recital hall has become an integral part of Toronto’s cultural life. The man who oversaw the launch of the hall, and who is responsible for its programming, is Mervon Mehta, the Royal Conservatory’s executive director of performing arts.

Mehta, 53, comes from music royalty. He’s the son of famed conductor Zubin Mehta and soprano/voice teacher Carmen Lasky Mehta. Grandfather/conductor/violinist Mehli Mehta was the founder of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, uncle Zarin Mehta was executive director of the Montreal Symphony, Ravinia Festival and the New York Philharmonic, while cousin Bejun Mehta is an internationally acclaimed countertenor. There are also many Mehta cousins scattered around the world who are engaged in music activity of some sort. Mervon Mehta himself is a man of many talents, first as an actor and later as an arts administrator.

Mehta sat down with Paula Citron for a wide-ranging and candid interview that lasted for over two hours. The following Q&A reflects the who, what and where of Mervon Mehta.

You certainly had a peripatetic early life that included Vienna, Liverpool, Saskatoon and Philadelphia, before finally settling in Montreal where you grew up. Why all the travelling? My parents met as music students at Vienna’s Hochschule. We left when I was six months old. My dad was appointed assistant conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic after winning an international conducting competition there. Because my parents had no job prospects and no money when that appointment ended, we went to live with my mother’s parents in Saskatoon. When it was clear that Saskatoon wasn’t going to jumpstart a career, we moved to Philadelphia to be with my father’s parents. We slept on their couch. My grandfather was a member of the Curtis String Quartet and taught at the University of the Arts. My dad got a lucky break when he was called to replace a conductor at the Montreal Symphony, which led directly to his becoming the music director of the MSO. Maybe the board thought that an Indian conductor was exotic and sexy.