Volume 29 Issue 2 | October & November 2023

BRIEFS Choral Music

BRIEFS Choral Music Upcoming The post-COVID resurgence of public singing is breathtaking. You can search for ALL the detailed choral concerts using the “Just Ask” listings search feature, online at thewholenote.com OCT 14 | Schola Magdalena. This six voice ensemble for women’s voices, led by Stephanie Martin, will sing works by Hildegard of Bingen, Colin Eatock, and Anthony St. Pierre. (Toronto) Oct 14 | The Ninth London Symphonia Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 in d Op.125 “Choral” and Balfour’s Ambe. (London) OCT 15 | Haydn’s The Creation Blessed Trinity Church/Toronto Oratorio Society. (North York) OCT 20 | Nosferatu Amadeus Choir of Greater Toronto. Nosferatu. A screening of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu with live choral performance (North York) OCT 20 | Music to Inspire Exultate Chamber Singers. “Come in, all you twolegged creatures, there is good life here”. (Toronto) OCT 21 | Singsation: Melodies of Home Toronto Mendelssohn Choir Feel like singing? An SATB reading of music from around the world that brings comfort and peace, led by Shireen Abu-Khader (Toronto) OCT 21 | A Rare Byrd (Kaffeemusik) Toronto Chamber Choir. Sacred and secular music by William Bryd and his contemporaries, including a “comon drunckard and notorius swearer & blasphemer” (Toronto) OCT 21 | Mozart Requiem & Estacio The Houses Stand Not Far Apart Grand Philharmonic Choir, with musicians of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. (Kitchener) OCT 25 | Choral Concert Don Wright Faculty of Music presents Les Choristes & Western University Singers (London) OCT 26 & 27 | Carmina Burana Toronto Mendelssohn Choir,soloists, Toronto Children’s Chorus and members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and a cast of thousands! (Toronto) OCT 28 | I Will Hold You Orpheus Choir of Toronto A celebration and reflection on what it means to live in a cosmopolitan city in a globalised world. (Toronto) OCT 29 | Ukraine - Glorious and Free Canadian Bandurist Capella/Vesnivka Choir Inspiring contemporary and historical patriotic songs, sung to a backdrop featuring images of the war in Ukraine today. (Toronto). OCT 29 | Alzheimer’s Stories Pax Christi Chorale “Find those you love in the dark and light. Help them through the days and nights. Keep faith. They sense what they cannot show. Love and music are the last things to go. Sing anything.” (Toronto) NOV 8, 9 & 11 | Fauré’s Requiem Toronto Symphony Orchestra with The Amadeus Choir, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. (Toronto) NOV 15 | Choir! Choir! Choir! .Burlington Performing Arts Centre The audience turns into a beautiful choir for one night! Singing, comedy, and community-building. (Burlington) NOV 17 | Choral Kaleidoscope Tafelmusik. Choir director Ivars Taurins has curated some of his favourites in this soundscape of 17th and 18th-century European choral music. (Toronto) NOV 18 | Annelies Grand Philharmonic Chamber Singers Based on the life and diary of Anne Frank, who died in the Nazi Holocaust, who became a symbol of hope and goodness in very dark times. (Kitchener) NOV 18 | Masterworks: Verdi Requiem Mississauga Symphony Orchestra, Mississauga Festival Choir. (Mississauga) NOV 25 | Achill Celebrates 40! Achill Choral Society (Orangeville) also DEC 2 (Alliston) NOV 25 | Yuletide Cheer Peterborough Singers. An annual celebration –the best things about this special time of year. (Peterborough) NOV 25 | The Power of Music Jubilate Singers A concert of music about music! (Toronto) NOV 26 | The Men of the Deeps: Christmas in the Mine Burlington Performing Arts Centre A choir of working and retired coal miners from the island of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia organised in 1966. (Burlington) Also DEC 1 at Flato Markham Theatre (Markham) NOV 30 | The Tallis Scholars: 50th Anniversary Tour Flato Markham Theatre. The British ensemble creates purity and clarity of sound which best serves the Renaissance repertoire, allowing every detail of the musical lines to be heard. (Markham) “It’s beginning to look a lot like …” December! In our print listings, at least 15 choral concerts between Dec 1-7 already offer “seasonal” or “holiday” fare! Stay tuned for more at thewholenote.com MAINLY CLUBS CATASTROPHIC TRIFLES & MUSICAL REMEDIES COLIN STORY Picture the scene: you are flannel-clad at an orchard, attempting to engage in Instagrammable autumnal fun, having spent well over 0 CAD on gas, Onroute snacks and admission for your family (and your son’s strange friend), and you stand there suffering the indignity of realizing you must pay a further for your roleplay harvesting of subpar baking apples which (you can already picture it) will die a slow, ignoble death in your garage, eaten by no one but insect interlopers and, possibly, an intrepid raccoon. The feeling: despondency, somehow trifling and catastrophic at the same time. The remedy: therapy, probably. But maybe as the hankering for outdoor activity abates, seeing some indoor live music couldn’t hurt. Jesse Ryan ROBIN SASSI Hugh’s new room: On Sunday, October 15, saxophonist and bandleader Jesse Ryan takes the stage at Hugh’s Room Live, as the venerable venue settles into its new location at 296 Broadview. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated at both Toronto’s Humber College and at Berklee in Boston, Ryan’s music investigates the links between jazz and Afro-Caribbean music. (This link is foundational in the language of jazz, particularly in its rhythms; the pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who began touring professionally around 1904, contended that the “Spanish tinge” – the tresillo and habanera rhythms that made their way to the port city of New Orleans from Cuba – were essential to distinguishing jazz from other kinds of music.) The Juno Award-nominated Ryan possesses an agile, accomplished voice on his instrument, which fits naturally into his compositional language. Joining Ryan on this date is another of Canada’s rising star jazz musicians, the vocalist Joanna Majoko, who brings an incredible sophistication and self-assuredness to her vocal performances, on her own original songs as well as her arrangements of standards. 28 | October & November 2023 thewholenote.com

Jocelyn Gould Anthony Fung HAL-MASONBERG The Jazz Room: On Saturday, November 4, the guitarist and vocalist Jocelyn Gould celebrates the release of her new album, Sonic Bouquet, with a show at The Jazz Room in Waterloo. Gould is an excellent guitarist who plays with the robust swing, archtop tone and blues-inflected bebop language of luminaries like Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. Gould will be bringing a stellar band with her, including pianist Will Bonness, drummer Mark Kelso and bassist Mike Downes. (Her new album features fellow guitarist Randy Napoleon, drummer Quincy Davis, bassist Rodney Whitaker and Canadian clarinetist Virginia MacDonald.) Jazz Bistro: On Thursday, November 23, the release of another new album will be celebrated, this time at Jazz Bistro. The LA-based, Ontario-born drummer Anthony Fung’s new album, FO(U)RTH, features pianist Michael Ragonese, bassist Luca Alemanno, and the esteemed saxophonist Mark Turner, whose work (with the likes of Kurt Rosenwinkel, Tom Harrell, Billy Hart and countless others) will likely need no introduction. At Jazz Bistro, Fung is joined by his long-time Toronto collaborator, the bassist Julian Anderson-Bowes, as well as the aforementioned clarinetist Virginia MacDonald. Fung is a confident drummer who plays in a modern, straight-ahead style. His playing effectively manages to be exciting, propulsive and also eminently supportive of the phrase at hand, whether that phrase is generated by a bandmate or by Fung’s own sense of drumset melodicism. Burdock: Through the pandemic, for all of the obvious reasons, Burdock took a long break from presenting shows in its Music Hall, a venue that had become a mainstay for indie artists, jazz musicians, rock bands and a host of other musical projects, all of which found a home on Burdock’s beautifully maintained stage. Now, after a lengthy hiatus, and under the leadership of new Music Hall programmer Deanna Petcoff, live shows at Burdock are back, with a number of interesting offerings currently in the books for the coming months. So, if it’s been a little while since you’ve seen a show at Burdock – or if you’ve never been – stop by, have one of their excellent beers (or the non-alcoholic kombucha on tap), and enjoy. Colin Story is a jazz guitarist, writer and teacher based in Toronto. He can be reached at www.colinstory.com, on Instagram and on Twitter. LA TROMPETTE Française Sunday, October 29, 2023 - 3:00 PM Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto Jean-Michel Malouf Conductor Robert Weymouth Trumpet Soloist Tickets: visit hssb.ca Phone: 1.800.708.6754 thewholenote.com October & November 2023 | 29