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Volume 25 Issue 6 - March 2020

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FEATURED: Music & Health writer Vivien Fellegi explores music, blindness & the plasticity of perception; David Jaeger digs into Gustavo Gimeno's plans for new music in his upcoming first season as music director at TSO; pianist James Rhodes, here for an early March recital, speaks his mind in a Q&A with Paul Ennis; and Lydia Perovic talks music and more with rising Turkish-Canadian mezzo Beste Kalender. Also, among our columns, Peggy Baker Dance Projects headlines Wende Bartley's In with the New; Steve Wallace's Jazz Notes rushes in definitionally where many fear to tread; ... and more.

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an Ontario government agency The WholeNote VOLUME 25 NO 6 | MARCH 2020 Centre for Social Innovation 720 Bathurst St., Suite 503, Toronto ON M5S 2R4 PHONE 416-323-2232 | FAX 416-603-4791 Publisher/Editor in Chief | David Perlman publisher@thewholenote.com Chairman of the Board | Allan Pulker directors@thewholenote.com EDITORIAL Managing Editor | Paul Ennis editorial@thewholenote.com Recordings Editor | David Olds discoveries@thewholenote.com Digital Media Editor | Sara Constant editorial@thewholenote.com Social Media Editor | Danial Jazaeri dan@thewholenote.com Listings Editor | John Sharpe listings@thewholenote.com jazz@thewholenote.com SALES, MARKETING & MEMBERSHIP Concert & Event Advertising / Membership | Karen Ages members@thewholenote.com Advertising Art /Production Support / Operations Jack Buell | adart@thewholenote.com Classified Ads | classad@thewholenote.com Website/Systems Support | Kevin King systems@thewholenote.com Circulation/Subscriptions | Chris Malcolm circulation@thewholenote.com SUBSCRIPTIONS per year + HST (9 issues)* *international subscriptions: additional postage applies THANKS TO THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS Beat Columnists Wendalyn Bartley, Brian Chang, Paul Ennis, Jack MacQuarrie, Jennifer Parr, Colin Story, Steve Wallace, Matthew Whitfield Features MJ Buell, Paul Ennis, Vivien Fellegi, Robert Harris, David Jaeger, David Perlman, Lydia Perović CD Reviewers Stuart Broomer, Max Christie, Sam Dickinson, Daniel Foley, Raul da Gama, Janos Gardonyi, Richard Haskell, Tiina Kiik, Kati Kiilaspea, Roger Knox, Barry Livingston, Lesley Mitchell-Clarke, Nancy Nourse, David Olds, Ted Parkinson, Ivana Popovich, Allan Pulker, Terry Robbins, Michael Schwartz, Adam Scime, Michael Schulman, Andrew Scott, Sharna Searle, Adam Sherkin, Bruce Surtees, Andrew Timar, Ken Waxman, Matthew Whitfield Proofreading Karen Ages, Paul Ennis, Danial Jazaeri, David Perlman, John Sharpe Listings Team Ruth Atwood, Tilly Kooyman, John Sharpe, Gary Heard, Colin Story, Katie White Design Team Kevin King, Susan Sinclair Circulation Team Lori Sandra Aginian, Wende Bartley, Beth Bartley / Mark Clifford, Jack Buell, Sharon Clark, Manuel Couto, Paul Ennis, Robert Faulkner, Terry Gaeeni, James Harris, Micah Herzog, Jeff Hogben, Bob Jerome, Chris Malcolm, Luna Walker-Malcolm, Sheila McCoy, Lorna Nevison, Garry Page, Andrew Schaefer, Tom Sepp, Julia Tait, Dave Taylor un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario BEAT BY BEAT 22 In with the New | WENDALYN BARTLEY 25 Classical & Beyond | PAUL ENNIS 28 Early Music | MATTHEW WHITFIELD 32 Choral Scene | BRIAN CHANG 35 Music Theatre | JENNIFER PARR 38 Jazz Notes | STEVE WALLACE 40 Bandstand | JACK MACQUARRIE 65 Mainly Clubs, Mostly Jazz | COLIN STORY LISTINGS 50 A | Concerts in the GTA 61 B | Concerts Beyond the GTA 64 C | Music Theatre 65 D | In the Clubs (Mostly Jazz) 68 E | The ETCeteras 35 DISCOVERIES: RECORDINGS REVIEWED 72 Editor’s Corner | DAVID OLDS 74 Strings Attached | TERRY ROBBINS 76 Keyed In 80 Vocal 81 Classical and Beyond 82 Modern and Contemporary 85 Jazz and Improvised Music 88 Pot Pourri 89 Something in the Air | KEN WAXMAN 91 Old Wine, New Bottles | BRUCE SURTEES MORE 6 Contact Information 7 Upcoming dates and deadlines 69 Classified Ads SPECIAL SECTION IN THIS ISSUE | pg 43 SUMMER MUSIC EDUCATION Summer music-making for all ages and abilities – the big picture. UPCOMING SPECIAL SECTIONS IN MAY 2020 | THE CANARY PAGES All things choral in southern Ontario. 6 | March 2020 thewholenote.com

FOR OPENERS | DAVID PERLMAN If All the World’s a Stage ... Two pm this past February 8 was a Saturday afternoon, and my concert companion and I had barely had time to settle into our Roy Thomson Hall balcony seats with our beer and popcorn before the lights, already dim, dipped even more, and a fractional moment of quiet rippled across the cheerful din of the place, the way a passing cloud wiping the face of the sun high above a summer lake evokes a moment’s hush. (You can always tell it’s February in Toronto when people like me distract themselves from a task at hand by starting to talk, out of nowhere, about the summer.) Where was I? Ah yes. February 8, about four minutes past 2pm, in the balcony level of Toronto’s most imposing cultural hall of mirrors. The momentary hush that descended on the room when the lights flickered is turning into a ripple of applause as our conductor for the day, Jack Everly, strides briskly onto the stage. If it’s less of a ripple of applause than one might reliably expect at that moment in the concert ritual, it’s certainly not because the crowd is smaller than usual – the place is, as far as I can tell from where I am sitting, pretty much its usual respectably crowded self. And it’s not because the audience is already settling morosely into an appropriate frame of mind for something portentous – there’s a palpable buzz and hum in the air. Mostly it’s less of a ripple than one might have expected, because the logistics of applause are complicated with a beer in one hand and popcorn in the other. Toronto Symphony Orchestra members already seated on stage do their usual decorous bit to salute the maestro as he enters – they tap their bows carefully on their instruments; stamp their feet in a refined (and of course rhythmic) way; there are smiles all round. Everly strides to the front of the stage, all affable business, picks up a microphone that just happens to be there, and invites us all to have a good time, cheer for our heroes if we feel like it, laugh or cry if we want to, and applaud or not as the mood strikes. And then, all business, he turns to the orchestra, all attention. The lights take a deeper dive, a deeper hush descends. He raises his baton … and the movie begins. Calling it a “movie” in these splendid surrounds is, I readily concede, not the most formal way of addressing it. Film With Orchestra is how it’s titled on the cover of the TSO program book I picked up on my way out of the hall (I had a hand free by then). Mind you, that’s not what it’s called inside the program. On subsequent closer inspection, on the page with the official production credits for the highly successful road show, it is styled A Symphonic Night at the Movies which neatly captures the middle-brow appeal of the thing: neither film as art nor “a flick at the bioscope,” as I would have called it as a nine-year-old child in 1962 (in another country) ten years after this particular movie was made. Whatever one calls it, film with orchestra has become, for a whole bunch of reasons, a hybrid genre that is much in vogue. The TSO, for example, does four of them a year in its own season. Three of them, this season (two Star Wars movies and Home Alone, which has become a perennial Christmas holiday offering), are branded showcases for the astonishing film score output of composer John Williams. The fourth generally digs into film classics: last year it was, if I remember, Casablanca. Today it is 1952’s Singin’ In the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. I understand the appeal. For movie fans it’s a chance to get under the hood of an aspect of movie-making normally hidden from view. For millions of people, for whom orchestral scores, consciously or unconsciously, are intrinsic to the way we are programmed daily as to what to feel and think, it’s a revelation to see how the all-too-familiar sounds are made: a bit like actually seeing milk come from a cow rather than from a carton on a shelf. I like to think there are favourable statistics out there concerning how many people who came primarily for the novelty value of seeing a favourite film in a new context discover the orchestra as something worth revisiting in its own right. As for die-hard fans of the orchestra, it’s a chance to spend time in the hall, indulging a passion, without any of the usual self-appointed distractions of having to instruct less couth patrons in the etiquette of cultural palaces – a chance to let our hair down, so to speak. So I was expecting to have fun, and would have, even without the popcorn and beer. What I wasn’t expecting was the way this particular film in this context has stayed with me for the past few weeks, taking on an aesthetic shape and colour: posing questions Upcoming Dates & Deadlines for our April 2020 edition Free Event Listings Deadline Midnight, Sunday March 8 Display Ad Reservations Deadline 6pm Sunday March 15 Advertising Materials Due 6pm Tuesday March 17 Classifieds Deadline 6pm Saturday March 21 Publication Date Tuesday March 24 (online) Friday March 27 (print) Volume 25 No 7 “APRIL 2020” will list events April1, 2020 to May 7, 2020 WholeNote Media Inc. accepts no responsibility or liability for claims made for any product or service reported on or advertised in this issue Printed in Canada Couto Printing & Publishing Services Circulation Statement FEBRUARY 2020 24,000 printed & distributed Canadian Publication Product Sales Agreement 1263846 ISSN 14888-8785 WHOLENOTE Publications Mail Agreement #40026682 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: WholeNote Media Inc. Centre for Social Innovation 503–720 Bathurst Street Toronto ON M5S 2R4 COPYRIGHT © 2020 WHOLENOTE MEDIA INC thewholenote.com thewholenote.com March 2020 | 7

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