Around Canada

By Richard Todd

OTTAWA – Pinchas Zukerman has made his mark in this city as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra. But recently the conductor picked up viola and violin to play a recital with pianist Yefim Bronfman.

By David Gordon Duke

VANCOUVER – Two chamber music societies, one favoring the venerable, the other with a penchant for the rising young, joined forces for a quintet-rich Brahms festival featuring the Jerusalem Quartet, pianist Inon Barnatan and friends.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - For sheer size and scope of ambition, the second piano concerto of Magnus Lindberg was among several works at the New Creations Festival that invited comparison with the greatest works in the genre.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - Three of Canada's best choral ensembles combined into a 60-voice "super choir" of supple flexibility to perform music of Latvian composer Uģis Prauliņš and counterparts from Finland, Poland, Norway and Canada.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO - Operatic arithmetic doesn’t always work in quite the same ways that normal math does. The sum of an ambitious production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at Canadian Opera Company is a hodge-podge, engaging in some respects, tedious in others.

By Holly Harris

WINNIPEG – For 23 years, the Winnipeg Symphony's annual New Music Festival has been a mid-winter rite in the frigid Manitoba clime. "This year we break out into new genres,” says music director Alexander Mickelthwate of the week-long fête entitled Beyond.

By Lev Bratishenko

MONTREAL - Studio de musique ancienne offered Venetian polychoral music as part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's "Splendors of Venice" exhibition. But Bourgie Hall, where they performed, is no Saint Mark's Basilica.

By David Gordon Duke

VANCOUVER - Part of the fun in hearing Yefim Bronfman do all five Beethoven piano concertos within the context of three Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concerts was in how this game of connections played out.

By Bill Rankin

CALGARY -- Calgary Opera has commissioned or co-produced four new main stage shows in the past decade, including Jake Heggie's Moby Dick. But it opened the 2013-14 season with some delicious nineteenth-century fun.

By John Terauds

TORONTO -- The Indonesian gamelan has long fascinated Western composers. And what they love, they must appropriate. The Esprit Orchestra explores how Lou Harrison and others have gone about it.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO -- Peter Oundjian, in his tenth season as music director of the TSO, led the local premiere of Gary Kulesha's Third Symphony and teamed with Emanuel Ax in Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2.

By David Gordon Duke

VANCOUVER -- For a city with Caledonian roots so strong it had a separate "Mac and Mc" section in early phone books, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra offered a stylish program of all-Scottish music by non-Scots composers under guest conductor Jun Märkl.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO -- "If you look at my discography, I don't think you'll find anything like it anywhere else," says Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin in a wide-ranging interview. "I've always had a taste for the unfamiliar."

By Bill Rankin

EDMONTON, Alberta -- Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian genuinely conveys the stories of the songs she sings with physical, emotional, and musical charisma, and she is never more captivating than when she is singing an ornamented vowel.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO -- Beyond Canada's borders, Opera Atelier isn't nearly as well-known as it ought to be. Its period-based production of Mozart's Abduction From the Seraglio, now playing, reflects the mom-and-pop operation's distinctive house style.

By Robert Markow

MONTREAL - The Orchestre Métropolitain has been blessed with a succession of outstanding music directors who brought the orchestra to higher planes of artistic excellence. The latest is none other than Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who remains loyal.

By Colin Eatock

Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey flew in on short notice to sub for ailing Ben Heppner and save the Canadian Opera Company season opener "Peter Grimes." But Benjamin Britten's 1945 masterpiece was not well served by the single-set community hall staging.

By Colin Eatock

The leading period ensemble in Toronto is the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, best known for its historically informed performances of Baroque repertoire. But the orchestra has been gradually pressing forward, embracing the Classical and even the early Romantic eras.

By Colin Eatock

There's certainly no lack of summer music festivals in Eastern Canada. They're big and small, urban and rural, wide-ranging or strictly classical in their programming. Here are half a dozen festivals you may not know about.

By Robert Markow

Nestled in picturesque, rural Quebec, is the small city of Joliette, home to Canada's largest classical summer music festival. The Lanaudière Festival has grown from a mere three concerts by the Montreal Symphony in 1977 to more than 30 events packed into a four-to-five week period in July and early August.