MONDAY
- New Music 101, Part I at the Elizabeth Beeton Auditorium, Toronto Reference Library, 7 p.m.
The Toronto Reference Library (the big one, on Yonge St, one block north of Bloor St) and the Toronto New Music Alliance launch the first of four consecutive Monday concert lectures — all free — about new music.
I hosted the inaugural New Music 101 series last spring, and found it a friendly, open and stimulating way to explore the multitude of types of music and the colourful types who make it happen in this city.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
This year’s host is Globe and Mail music critic Robert Everett Green.
Tonight’s program focuses on a collaboration between the Toy Piano Composers and Arraymusic featured in a concert next Saturday, as well as accordion music written by Andrew Staniland for New Music Concerts.
This is an incredible, no-risk way to find out more about Toronto’s rich and diverse new music community.
For details on the whole New Music 101 series, click here.
For more on Saturday’s concert by the Array Ensemble at the Music Gallery, click here.
Here is a preview of one of tonight’s live performances, featuring accordionists Joe Macerollo and Ina Henning playing Stanliand’s 2010 five-piece cycle, Pentagrams:
WEDNESDAY TO SATURDAY
- Toronto Dance Theatre’s Rivers, based on the music of Ann Southam, played by Christina Petrowska Quilico, at the Fleck Theatre, Harbourfront, 8 p.m. (also a 2 p.m. matinée on Sat.)
The late Ann Southam’s music is reunited with Toronto Dance Theatre, with which she had numerous collaborations. Christopher House has built a new piece, Rivers, around Southam’s work of the same name.
The promotional bumf says that, “House’s choreography creates a fluid and unrpedictable counterpoint to this sublime music, reflecting its rushing cascades, luxuriant eddies and quiet islands of calm.”
The list of collaborators, including designer Michael Levine, is impressive.
Toronto’s Christina Petrowska Quilico plays the piano live during each of the five performances.
For more information, click here.
Here is Quilico playing “Slow River No. 2” and “Fast River No. 2” at the Arts and Letters Club 18 months ago:
THURSDAY & CONTINUING
- Canadian Opera Company double-bill opens at the Four Seasons Centre, 7:30 p.m.
With seasoned soprano-turned director Catherine Malfitano directing, and the great Sir Andrew Davis leading things in the orchestra pit, this clever pairing of Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (from whence comes the aria “O mio babbino caro”) and Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy is very promising.
For all the details, and tickets, click here.
FRIDAY, SATURDAY & SUNDAY
- Toronto Consort presents the original Carmina Burana at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, 8 p.m. (3:30 on Sun.)
The city’s veteran early-music specialists close their season with a selection of the original Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuern), a collection of songs about life, love and drinking from Medieval times that were famously adapted by Carl Orff in the 1930s.
Stripped of the Nazi-era bombast, these songs have a special, sensuous, sensual charm.
For details and tickets, click here.
To give you a better idea of what the originals sound like, here is the New London Consort, under Philip Pickett, performing “Aristippus.”
Here’s the translation — enough to make anyone question human progress over the past 800 years:
“Aristippus, though it’ s late in the day,
I’m trying to follow
Your advice.
What can I do in Rome?
I don’t know how to lie.
It’s flattery that wins
The favour of people in power.
If I tell corrosive home truths
I’Il never be Verres’ dearest friend.
The reward of virtue
Goes to the actor
Who, with sweet lies,
Flatters vice. ”
“Diogenes, what are your aims?
Do you want honours, a state pension?
You must have a manifesto.
The leaders of the church
Will take a dislike to you
Unless you involve yourself
In their vices.
But you’ll be a dear friend
If you sanction priests’ human failings.
The Holy Fathers
Love best
Accomplices in their sins
And ministers of evil!”
“I haven’t learnt
To applaud the failings of important people,
To cover my real feelings
And beg for favours.
I’ve always told
The simple truth.
It hurts me to see anyone get a good reputation
Which he doesn’t deserve.
I shall not absolve
An unrepentant sinner.”
“Deportation is your fate
If you can’t lie!
The ‘simple truth’
Has sent hundreds into exile.
Cultivate our cardinals
With soft flattering phrases;
If you want to enjoy the benefits
Of their patronage
Don’t annoy them
With tirades on sin.”
“According to your advice, then,
I must keep quiet
Or mouth pleasing flatteries
Into the sensitive ears
Of important people.
Thus you wish me to please them.
To flatter or to keep my mouth shut¬
There’ s no middle course.
So I must share
The blame incurred by others –
As though I actually approve of what they’ve done.”
“There’ s no need to be afraid
Of guilt:
If you want to share
The advantages of power
You have to share its vices too.
Gehazi’s accomplices are delighted
That they all resemble one another so exactly
Through living on terms of perfect equality:
They’re Protean in their promises,
Imitators of Orpheus,
The Princes of the Church.”
“Get thee behind me Satan,
With your falsehoods!
I abjure
Whatever you counsel
As the instrument of deception
And the speech of fIattery,
And l’Il use no soft words
To condone sin.
l’ve been careful not to merit the name of flatterers
Whose carefully constructed treachery
l’ve always shunned.”
“In that case, live moderately
And content yourself with moderation.
A Cynic has no material needs.
If you want to be a Cynic,
Say farewell to such anxieties
And go your way.
Don’t put yourself in a position
Where you have to applaud vice.
If you want to be accepted
In the coteries of power
You’ll have to be as corrupt as the next man.”
SUNDAY
- The Aldeburgh Connection celebrates the “country house weekend” at Walter Hall, 2:30 p.m.
What could be more fun than a weekend in the English countryside, done in witty words and music, the Aldeburgh Connection way.
The songs on this programme are by master atmosphere-spinners John Ireland, Frank Bridge and his pupil Benjamin Britten, William Walton and Peter Warlock.
The singers are soprano Lucia Cesaroni, mezzo Krisztina Szabó and baritone Peter Barrett.
Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata share piano-accompaniment and reading duties, as they couch the music in the sharply drawn characters visiting Lady Ottoline Morrell in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Chrome Yellow.
Tickets are available by phone at 416-735-7982 or here.
February’s 30th Anniversary gala concert by the Aldeburgh Connection at Koerner Hall is available for streaming at CBC’s Concerts on Demand here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
