It's combined June/July/August summer issue time with, we hope, enough between the covers to keep you dipping into it all through the coming lazy, hazy days. From Jazz Vans racing round "The Island" delivering pop-up brass breakouts at the roadside, to Bach flute ambushes strolling "The Grove, " to dozens of reasons to stay in the city. May yours be a summer where you find undiscovered musical treasures, and, better still, when, unexpectedly, the music finds you.
program will be repeated
program will be repeated at St. John the Evangelist in Hamilton on June 26. QUICK PICKS June 1: Bach’s cantata, Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes BWV76 will be performed by soloists from St. James Cathedral and the organist Ian Sadler. June 2: Christina Stelmacovich, mezzo, will sing a free concert at Metropolitan United Church. June 3: Show One Productions presents Tamara Gverdtsiteli singing Yiddish songs, with the Moscow Male Jewish Cappella at Roy Thomson Hall. June 4: Ermanno Mauro, tenor, will sing popular opera arias along with emerging singers coached by him at Columbus Centre. June 4: The Aradia Baroque Ensemble presents arias by Handel to be followed by Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King at The Music Gallery. June 4: The Etobicoke Centennial Choir presents opera arias and choruses by Mozart, Verdi and Offenbach. The soloists are Andrea Naccarato, soprano, Erin Ronniger, alto, Lance Kaizer, tenor, and Lawrence Shirkie, baritone, at Humber Valley United Church. June 5: Maeve Palmer, soprano, sings Five Poems by Tyler Versluis at Gallery 345. June 6: Melanie Conly, soprano, and Kathryn Tremills, piano, perform Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate as well as songs by Case, Holby, Gershwin, Gounod, Porter and Purcell at the Church of the Redeemer. June 7: The Toronto Concert Orchestra presents highlights from Rigoletto, La traviata, La bohème and other operas. The singers are Sara Papini, soprano, Eugenia Dermentzis, mezzo, Romulo Delgado and Riccardo Iannello, tenor, and Bradley Christensen, baritone at Casa Loma. June 8 and 9: Michael Donovan, baritone, will sing his own new songs at Gallery 345. June 12: Schubert’s Mass in G will be sung in a free concert with soloists Jennifer Krabbe, soprano, and Dennis Zimmer, bass at Humbercrest United Church. June 16: Charlotte Knight, soprano, is the singer in “It Shoulda Been Me: A Cabaret,” a program of songs by Sondheim, Billy Joel, Joe Iconis and others at Gallery 345. The show is also being performed in St. Catharines, June 10 and Guelph, June 18. June 17: Rachel Fenlon sings and plays the piano in a Schubert concert at Gallery 345. June 24: Inga Filippova, soprano, Stanislav Vitort, tenor, and Andrey Andreychik, baritone, sing opera at Lawrence Park Community Church. And beyond the GTA, June 1: Maryem Tollar, Brenna MacCrimmon, Jayne Brown and Sophia Grigoriadis, who comprise the group Turkwaz, perform “Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean” at the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society Music Room. Hans de Groot is a concertgoer and active listener who also sings and plays the recorder. He can be contacted at artofsong@thewholenote.com. Beat by Beat | Choral Scene Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular BRIAN CHANG As we voyage into the beauty of summer and the winding down of the regular 2015/2016 choral season, it has been my pleasure to write this column over the last year. One fascinating theme for me, as an active singer and performer, and as a regular attendee of concerts in the region, has been how often choral music finds itself at the crossroads of the secular and the sacred. From a Eurocentric perspective this comes as no surprise: much of what we revere as choral singers is deeply rooted in biblical and church liturgy - Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, countless requiems, oratorios based on stories and teachings from scripture. Less evident, from that perspective, is the extent to which choral music is inseparable from global spirituality. We are lucky to be in Toronto, a truly global village where we can interact with, learn from, and be humbled by the myriad diversity of the human voice, human spirituality and music. One great case in point is the Aga Khan Museum which has hosted a variety of fabulous musicians from across the world. Qawwali is a devotional, passionate music inspired by Sufi tradition and the California-based Fanna-Fi-Allah Sufi Qawwali Party will perform it at the museum, August 4. This youthful group will bring us sounds and words that have been part of South Asian culture for over 700 years, showing us the harmony of the sacred and secular at play. I hope their programming goes from strength to strength, and that more institutions like this emerge as our city’s cultural landscape continues to change. Reflecting on the past season, the year has been an extraordinary choral soundscape: 1000 performers in Luminato’s staging of Murray Schafer’s Apocalypsis; several opportunities to experience contemporary throat singing with Tanya Tagaq; fans coming together to sing choral tributes to David Bowie and Prince; a diverse series of Ismaili and other South Asian works by the Aga Khan Museum; an unusual Messiah under Sir Andrew Davis with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the TSO; and the voices of so many children, in the region’s children’s choirs and guests from around the world. Choral City isn’t just humming, it is belting a message of hope across the region! Gospel Music – Community in Action: Karen Burke, a York University professor specializing in music education and gospel music, is also the director of the Toronto Mass Choir. She’s incredibly in demand as a clinician and teacher. She talks about the music, but it is clear that people are the key to her approach and to her appeal as an educator and expert. The community that is built, the stories, the 30 | June 1, 2016 - September 7, 2016 thewholenote.com
personalities, and the love of them all coming together – this is the core of gospel music. An opportunity to talk to Burke immersed me in all the things I like about choral music – love, sharing music in ensemble and being part of something much greater than ourselves. One of the key abilities of a great conductor is to be able to build an ensemble of people, not just singers. As a professor, Burke takes a unique approach. “Our first class is about making memories. How do you intentionally learn the names of your children so they feel like people and not Karen Burke just voices?” She tells a story that shows how deeply she cares about the singers she works with, and how she is changed by those experiences. In this way, grief becomes joy, and fear can become wonder – for everyone involved – and it all comes out in the music. I reveal to her my own ignorance of the place of gospel music in Canadian history, and it prompts our conversation. Burke situates gospel music in its Toronto context citing the work of colleagues who have studied the growth and experience of gospel music, in the region and in how it has shaped the very fabric of choral history. “It is part and parcel of our history here; our choral history, our musical culture,” she says. “And then it’s only a few steps away from remembering how much gospel music is part of our mainstream and what it has done in terms of making our ears more familiar to the different harmonies we hear. And especially how it is has influenced popular music. That is why, working with young people, it is so readily accessible and why they love it. So many [mainstream] harmonies and performances are taken directly from gospel music. So it’s an easier sell to people we want to reach as we try to keep choral music alive.” She’s absolutely right. So much popular music has been directly influenced by gospel music. It is a musical vernacular that everyone is familiar with, even if they don’t know what it is. Examples include: Lisa Fischer and the backing vocals in Gimme Shelter with the Rolling Stones; NSync’s bridge in This I Promise You; Beyoncé’s chorus in Halo; the end of Lady Gaga’s Born this Way; the Book of Mormon’s Hasa Diga Eebowai; and pretty much anything ever done by Motown. We know the sounds, the harmonies, the bridges into a full-step key change, the call and response, the dominant harmonies – gospel has been part of music for a very long time. This is indeed our music. Is it any wonder that Burke can get youth engaged in choral music and singing at the top of their lungs? This is accessible music and it is also youthful music with a deep local history. She also talks about how the rote nature of most gospel music requires musicians to use their skills in a different way instead of relying too heavily on sheet music: “What’s on paper is only three quarters of what you need…there’s this phenomenal thing called listening. It’s an incredible tool.” She finds herself constantly surprised by the hesitancy of choristers who don’t think they can sing without music, and then “their eyes come up out of the folders, out of the music, and the sound is just there.” It’s transformative not only for choristers but their directors as well. Every time one performs gospel, she says, the energy, the feeling, the personality will be different (in contrast to much Eurocentric choral music where we seek to evoke the original intention of the composers as exactly as possible. Gospel music often demands of us to thewholenote.com June 1, 2016 - September 7, 2016 | 31
