Around Canada

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - The admired Canadian baroque orchestra has come around to thinking that modernity isn’t all bad. J.S. Bach: The Circle of Creation is its third multimedia blend of a well-honed HIP ethos with cutting-edge technology.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - It was in the early 1990s that director Robert Lepage and designer Michael Levine twinned Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung with a boldness that has aged well – or perhaps it’s better to say that it hasn't aged at all.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - A packed house heard the orchestra give a concert featuring such musicians of Armenian descent as violinist Sergey Khachatryan, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, and music director Peter Oundjian.

By Robert Markow

MONTREAL - The Canadian music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra could have told the Orchestre Métropolitain he no longer had time for them. Yet he returns each season to conduct, and the results are remarkable.

By David Gordon Duke

VANCOUVER - How would you feel if you were brought out of 168 years of retirement? This locally owned Broadwood piano lent an authentic sound to an all-Beethoven weekend with pianist Robert Levin and cellist Steven Isserlis.

By Holly Harris

WINNIPEG - For 24 years, the contemporary music series GroundSwell has offered a steady diet of cutting-edge artists. The latest, adventurous Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan, offered solo concerts including two of her own commissions.

By David Gordon Duke

VANCOUVER - In a small space called the Orpheum Annex, Nicole Lizée's "This Will Not Be Televised" anchored a concert entitled "Displaced Emotion," part of the Vancouver Symphony's continuing nod to the new.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - Although five works by Canadian and Chinese composers including Fuhong Shi were premieres, a New Music Concerts event Feb. 14 seemed a throwback to high modernism and post-war avant-garde tricks of the trade.

By Richard Todd

OTTAWA - The Salzburg Marionette Theatre has toured North America with a playful show built around Schumann’s Papillons and Debussy’s Boîte à joujoux. Remarkably life-like puppets teamed with pianist Orion Weiss. Paris is next.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO – Danish composer Carl Nielsen is still on the fringes of the canon, but his music has a chance to find a wider audience this concert season, with a mini Nielsen-fest in Toronto, and more to come in the U.S. and Europe.

By Bill Rankin

EDMONTON, Alberta - An eight-stop tour by the Quebec chamber orchestra has an early romantic flavor, with an arrangement of Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor (Death and the Maiden), plus Mendelssohn and Schumann.

By David Gordon Duke

BRITISH COLUMBIA - Two cities honored Remembrance Day weekend with Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. In Vancouver, a great tradition is upheld. In Victoria, under conductor Tania Miller, a first endeavor has shining worth.

By Konstantin Bozhinov

VANCOUVER — In its world premiere by Vancouver Opera, Neil Weisensel and Shane Koyczan's opera comes across as a brilliant depiction of librettist Koyczan's experience as an overweight teen taunted and beaten up by peers.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - There aren’t many orchestras with an exclusive commitment to new music like Esprit, led by Alex Pauk. Ives' 1906 Central Park in the Dark, on a recent bill, may be the oldest work the group has ever performed.

By Earl Arthur Love

MONTREAL – With a superb cast including Ukrainian soprano Tatiana Melnychenko in the mercilessly difficult role of Abigaille, Verdi's 'Nabucco' offered a powerful beginning to the opera season despite anachronisms and tired paint.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO – Kicking off a European tour for the city back home, maestro Peter Oundjian and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed a festival concert for Toronto Summer Music, now in its ninth season. Next stop, Vienna.

By Earl Arthur Love

JOLIETTE, QUEBEC - In a bucolic setting some call "Tanglewood North," the small but first-rate Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi kicked off a final summer festival week of three visiting orchestras.

By David Gordon Duke

VANCOUVER – The music of Handel has occupied a key place in the summer offerings of Early Music Vancouver for a number of seasons. This year's festival keystone was Handel's first oratorio, Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno of 1707.

By Richard Todd

OTTAWA - Cellist Julian Armour first founded Chamberfest, then Music and Beyond, making Canada's capital a top destination for music lovers in North America. Why such festive abundance? Therein lies a tale.

By Robert Markow

MONTREAL – Australian-British Jayson Gillham won the 2014 Montreal International, a disturbing tourney in which most contestants seemed to regard the piano as an adversary to be attacked, beaten, and conquered.