Concert Report: El-Khoury, Kalender; art song close up and personal

March 27, 2020

How They So Softly Rest

by Brian Chang

There’s never before been a time like this for the arts community. And we’re all in disarray. I’m feeling disconnected from my musical community, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the wider connected cultural family of the Toronto live classical music…

March 27, 2020

Bitten by the Book Bug: Baritone Brett Polegato

by Lydia Perović

I had heard through the musician grapevine that baritone Brett Polegato owns a remarkable library, but putting in a request to poke around someone’s house and then write about it is not the easiest of asks. This March, however, after…

March 26, 2020

The End of the CBC ... Again? The case for culture in plague-saturated times

by Robert Harris

At the end of February, Tony Burman, former head of CBC News, in his column in The Toronto Star, more or less approvingly quoted the conclusions of two Canadian media professors, Chris Waddell and David Taras, from their recent book,…

March 26, 2020

Concert report: Tapestry’s Songbook X Livestream ushers in digital musicking

by Sophie Bisson

Editor’s note: Since the concert covered here, where a reduced team of Tapestry artists and production staff put together a livestream performance, more stringent physical distancing precautions have been recommended by community and government groups. We currently do not recommend…

March 20, 2020

COVID-19: Financial and support resources for artists

by The WholeNote Staff

In light of recent cancellations, closures, and quarantines around the world due to the ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many folks are facing suddenly precarious financial and social circumstances. Arts organizations, freelancers, arts workers and other gig/temporary workers constitute a…

March 13, 2020

Listen up: for its 2020 Forum, the CNMN sharpens its focus

by Wendalyn Bartley

In November 2005, the non-profit Canadian New Music Network (CNMN) / Réseau canadien pour les musiques nouvelles (RCMN) was founded with a mandate to foster community-building, networking and to broaden awareness of new music activity. It’s an organization that is…

March 13, 2020

Music and the Movies: The Whistlers

by Paul Ennis

The Whistlers, the new film by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest; Police, Adjective), is a lighter-than-air pastiche, a diversion filled with film noir tropes and other cinematic homages, all buoyed by a soundtrack that ranges from Iggy…

March 03, 2020

Heading into Space: for year two, the Women From Space festival widens its scope

by Ken Waxman

For the second year in the row, a group of committed exploratory musicians are celebrating during the weekend around International Women’s Day, March 5 to 8, with Women From Space: a four-day festival at two Toronto venues, Burdock and 918…

The Cruellest Month: A Portrait of April 2020 as It Might Have Been

27 Mar 2020 - Paul Ennis

Classical and Beyond

Emergent and Evolutionary: The Challenge to Let Go

27 Mar 2020 - Wendalyn Bartley

New Music

Triple Threat, Double Whammy

27 Mar 2020 - Jennifer Parr

Music Theatre

Music in Times of Trouble

27 Mar 2020 - Matthew Whitfield

Early Period