| Four expectant fathers were in a Minneapolis hospital waiting room while their wives were in labor. The nurse arrived and proudly announced to the first man, "Congratulations, sir. You're the father of twins!" "What a coincidence! I work for the ... Read more of How many babies? at Free Jokes.ca |  InformationalPrivacy |
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 There will be no further updates on this blogI have moved my musical musings to after-hours and their own, separate space on the Web: www.musicaltoronto.org As papered-over shop windows all over the world say, thank you ever so much for your patronage. I will let you go with a last Waltz (find out more about the what and the who at the new location):
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 Ottawa's Opera Lyra cancels balance of season to try and fix its financesThis press release just arrived from Opera Lyra in Ottawa: Opera Lyra Ottawa (OLO) announced today that, despite presenting two artistically acclaimed productions earlier this fall, it has cancelled the two remaining productions of its 2011-2012 season due to a lack of financial resources. The company said it is reorganizing its operations to emerge in a stronger financial position next season. Opera Lyra will return for its 28th season with a main stage presentation of La Boh
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 Mainstream arts criticism is dying, but rather than sound the alarm, it's time to get creativeMichael Kaiser, president of Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center, has written in the Huffington Post about the slow but steady extinction of professional arts criticism in mainstream media. He is deeply worried. His final paragraph: No one critic should be deemed the arbiter of good taste in any market and it is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art. But great art must not be measured by a popularity contest. Otherwise the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best. As a recent former critic who...
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 You don't have to listen to better music -- just lie about it on FacebookSocial media isn't really about a new way of communicating, it's a new way of expressing all the weird little quirks that make us human. Today's AHA! moment came from a story that illustrates a couple of ways people are circumventing Facebook's penchant for spreading our personal news and preferences all over the place. Guilty pleasures suddenly become public pleasures. Wouldn't I be embarassed if my friends discovered I listen to Il Divo, or Leroy Anderson, when I should be savouring the complex pleasures of Elliott Carter? Wouldn't you know it, there's now a service available that will mask your...
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 Some instruments don't take well to certain key signaturesI've learned from painful experience in my occasional forays into composing or arranging music for my church job that some keys simply don't suit some instruments (my orchestration basics are lost far back in the mists of time, and I'm almost always too lazy or frazzled to go back to my reference materials, which I've kept since university). That means having to apologise to grimacing players at the one-and-only pre-performance rehearsal. It never ocurred to me to do this, which Gretchen Michelle Helbig posted on Facebook:
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 Philippe Jaroussky takes us on a thrilling vocal ride at Koerner HallMy review of Philippe Jaroussky's Toronto d
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 Nezet-Seguin's take on Bruckner's Fourth Symphony could use a little bit more airI've reviewed conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin's recording of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 with the Orchestre Metropolitain du Grand Montreal for today's Star. You can read it here.
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 Ying Quartet makes an eloquent, moving case for Anton Arensky's underappreciated chamber musicThe American Ying Quartet -- violinist Ayano Ninomiya along with Janet (violin), Phillip (viola) and David (cello) Ying -- has just released a gorgeous album of chamber music by Russian composer Anton Arensky (1861-1906). It is late-Romantic music at its most vivid, intelligently and expressively interpreted. The disc is also an eloquent argument in favour of programming Arensky's music more often. (Toronto's Gryphon Trio has programmed Arensky's gorgeous and relatively well-known Piano Trio in D-minor for its Nov. 17 Music Toronto recital.) The Yings' album doesn't really have a title, but it could have been called The Arensky Variations, because...
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 'Breathe and express' captures the core of every form of human expressionIt wasn't just the usual zombie ride to work on the subway for me this morning. Standing next to me from Bloor to King stations was a young man, probably in his early 20s, who was giving a friend an expertly detailed critique of a ballet choreographed by the late master, Sir Kenneth Macmillan. This man didn't look or carry himself like a dancer, but he spoke as if he had intimate knowledge of the artform. At one point, he spoke of "breathe and express," as a way for dancers to pace their performances, as well as give them a...
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 Minsoo Sohn's recording of Goldberg Variations is as clear and sparkling as a Swarowski store windowLike any commodity, the less you have, the more precious it becomes. Since the music critic's job at the Star went the way of VHS, I've had little time to listen -- I mean listen, not hear -- to music, making the moments when I can have both particularly precious. Koren-born Canadian pianist Minsoo Sohn's new recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations has been one that I keep returning to and, with each listen since the CD arrived in late August, I come to appreciate some new facet of what he has done here. There's been a mini rush of...
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 Chamber-sized performance of Kindertotenlieder hits emotional and musical core of Mahler's intentionsLast night, one week after singing his last performance as Orestes in the Canadian opera Company production of Gluck's Iphig
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 Concert review: Gergiev and Mariinsky Orchestra thrill, entertain and provoke at Roy Thomson HallHere is the review I've filed for tomorrow's Star: It's nice to have a 229-year history, but the question for Russia's Mariinsky Orchestra always remains, what can you do for us tonight? Thrill, entertain and provoke was the answer for an enthusiastic audience at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday evening. The program represented a deep, sharp sliver of modern history made up of three Russian pieces premiered between 1910 and 1926. The orchestra, led by jet-setting longtime music director, Valery Gergiev, was brilliant. The piano soloist, veteran Russian powerhouse Alexander Toradze, was unorthodox. Even in a city as richly blessed...
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 I've been hugely enjoying Janina Fialkowska's new Liszt Recital album from ATMA Classique, which is a treat from beginning to end. This is one of the year's definitive tributes to Franz Liszt, whose 200th birth anniversary falls on Oct. 22. The disc's programme is a mix of fireworks and fireside, with the extravagant Valse-caprice No. 6 and Valse de Faust (a memory of Gounod's opera) bookending Liszt's respectful transcriptions of six Chopin songs, Gretchen (a transcription of the middle movement of his Faust-Symphonie) and B
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 Filmmaker Michael Lawrence tells me a field of wheat played Bach for Steve JobsMusic-loving American filmmaker Michael Lawrence sent me a note this afternoon about a tribute to Steve Jobs he has put together, in which Jobs calls the computer the greatest tool ever devised by humans, "a bicycle for our minds." Here is Lawrence's note to me, followed by the video. Like so many people around the world, I have been thinking of Steve Jobs since his passing. The outpouring has been almost surreal. I could not have made BACH & friends without his computers and software. In 1989, I filmed an interview with Steve for my Library of Congress film and...
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 I apologise for the poor quality of the image, of Sun of Composers, a 1799 engraving by Augustus Kollmann published in the German Musical Times (Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung). It shows J.S. Bach at the centre, surrounded by Haydn, Handel and Graun in a holy trinity. Radiating out in primary and secondary leaves are the lessers, which include Gluck, Mozart, Pleyel and Telemann. Next to Mozart is Leopold Kozeluch (a Germanized form of Kozeluh), someone I had never heard of. It's a beautiful lesson in how the rankings of today will likely mean nothing at all a century (or two) from...
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 On his birthday, Glenn Gould offers wise words on the tension between curators and inventorsThis being the day Glenn Gould would have turned 79, I sat down to sample another one of the 10 DVDs that Sony Classical has released in the new boxed set, Glenn Gould on Television: The Complete CBC Broadcasts. I chose "Music for a Sunday Afternoon," for obvious reasons, plus wanting to hear him play Mozart (Sonata No. 13 in B-flat) and Beethoven (Sonata No. 17 in D minor -- the Tempest). I can't warm up to his interpretations, but I loved his 4-minute introduction, where he explains how he can't possibly say anything original about Beethoven in such a...
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 My farewell piece in the Star focused on passing love of music on to childrenBecause it's buried online, I thought I'd post my farewell article as a critic, which appeared in print, in the Star on Aug. 20: For six years, people not involved in the business would look awestruck when I told them I was a music critic. "You mean you go to concerts for free?" was a typical reaction. "I'm working when I go to a concert," was my prepared reply. But I could tell from the looks on their faces that they didn't think work had anything to do with it. I think these people were on to something. Many have...
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 I say goodbye to all this with an ode to my great, old, pain-in-the-ass piano teacher, Vesta MosherMe and Vesta Mosher last weekend I'm back from an intense summer trip -- my high school graduating class organized a 30th anniversary reunion. The visit was also an excuse to drop in on the one person who has done more to influence how I listen to and how I make music today: Vesta Mosher, my old piano teacher from high school. Through her persistence and cajoling and, yes, grumpy threats, she somehow caught my teenage imagination and opened my sensibilities to the million-and-one ways in which an interpreter can approach a piece of music. Many teachers give lessons prescriptively,...
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 Old paper opens a window onto Toronto's rich performing arts life during the depths of the Great DepressionI came home from my trip to find a yellowed piece of newspaper on the balcony. Someone had torn out the movie and concert ads for late January. The big movie is Mae West's She Done Him Wrong, which was released in 1933. Two performances in one venue on Jan. 27th means that it was 1934, when this would have been a Saturday. (Sunday was the city's big day off, when, I'm told, Eaton's department store would pull drapes across its window displays so that people walking home from church on Sunday would not be tempted to think of worldly...
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 Max Reger's suites for solo cello are worthy of being placed alongside J.S. Bach'sI'm off for the next 10 days, and don't expect to be posting, unless I'm so bowled over by something that I have to share it. But I can't leave without putting in a plug for some unduly neglected works. +++ Photo: Mark Thompson The unaccompanied cello suites by J.S. Bach have not only inspired performers and listeners, they have also inspired composers. German composer Max Reger (1873-1916) is a case in point. He wrote three suites for unaccompanied cello (at the same time as a three-suite set for solo viola) just before World War I. I've tried living with...
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 Reality dictates that only the fittest spinners of desire will survive in the realm of ArtThere's been a flare-up of of the old I'm-an-artist vs Selling-out-to-the-Man debate in the classical world in the last few weeks, ignited by highly respected violinist Gidon Kremer. Many people reading these letters have voiced support for the position of the artists. The veneration of Art has been the norm since the rise of the artist as an independent entity in the post-Goethe world. While I appreciate and can even sympathise with this position, I think it's wishful thinking. I'll try to explain what I mean with a minimum of words. In a world where everything is a commodity --...
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 Three concerts from this year's BBC Proms coming to a Cineplex theatre near youThe first of three concerts from this year's BBC Proms will air in high-definition as an encore at 2:30 p.m., at most of the Cineplex theatres that usually carry operas from the Met. This is serious music, very nicely performed. Check out the details here. Remember, also, that BBC's Radio 3 is streaming many of the concerts live on the web, and archives them for a week, if you can't listen live. All the details are here.
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 Just because a musical instrument is compact doesn't mean that it is simplePrejudice lurks everywhere. I spent a couple of hours with Toronto clarinettist Kornel Wolak yesterday and, once we got the business part of our meeting out of the way, I peppered him with questions about his instrument. I quickly realised that the orchestral world is like a microcosm of the city: We acknowledge and respect our neighbours, but we don't necessarily spend time to understand where they come from and what their everyday challenges might be. I played clarinet (B-flat and bass) in high school, but I barely got past figuring out fingering and making a semblance of an acceptable...
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 Michael Head's The Estuary 'The most perfect depiction of a river I've ever heard,' says Thomas AllenLast night, Sir Thomas Allen described "The Estuary," one of six song setting of poems by Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) by Michael Head (1900-1976) as 'The most perfect depiction of a river I've ever heard." I had never heard the song, published in 1945, before, and found the interpretation enchanting. When I got home last night, I did a bit of research and discovered that there's only one recording of it in existence in current CD catalogues: a 2002 EMI CD (no. 208285) with Jonathan Lemalu and pianist Roger Vignoles. There isn't a hint of it on YouTube or anywhere else...
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 Colin Firth's eloquent tribute to Maureen Forrester captures great Canadian's love of lifeEveryone who attended the tribute concert to Maureen Forrester in Stratford yesterday received a lavish coffee table-worthy programme filled with background, anecdotes, written tributes and pictures commemorating a particularly generous life. I didn't have a chance to look at it until I got home last night. Among the many beautiful tributes inside is one from Colin Firth. I hope no one minds that I'm going to reproduce it here, in its entirety: Maureen's son, Daniel, and I were roommates while studying acting at the Drama Centre in London in the early 1980s. When he first came to stay at my...
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