Around Canada

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.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO – A festive tribute to Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra's artistic director and concertmaster Jeanne Lamon included a postmodern melange of new variations on Purcell themes and a medley of Lamon's favorites.

By Holly Harris

WINNIPEG – The Winnipeg Symphony is the only Canadian orchestra invited to the final Spring for Music this week at the New York venue. The program includes an appearance by percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.

By Colin Eatock

TORONTO – The Canadian Opera Company is delving into lesser-known repertoire, including Donizetti's Roberto Devereux, which is onstage in a production that replaces bel canto subtlety with verismo-like intensity.

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.