Season opening concert with Orphei Drangar
October 24, 2008 (Comments (View))
On October 19 Soundstreams’ Season 08/09 opened with a fantastic concert by the Swedish male choir Orphei Drängar. We enjoyed an immense variety of pieces from various époques. The audience was guided smoothly through the centuries: from the 17th to the 21st century! With dynamic and precise musicality the Orphei Drängar exuded its warm sound. OD’s amazing sound quality includes the whole range from the tenderest pianissimo to the fullest breathtaking fortissimo.
While performing R. Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs the audience was magically touched by OD’s dramatic talent and sense of humor.
Popular pieces like a male choir version of Fever showed us their entertaining energy. We also experienced Maria Fontosh’s appealing soprano in harmonic contrast to the male voices. The piece by Anders Hillborg (with the unpronounceable title) made us experience the intensity of musical minimalism.
By hosting a pre-show talk, a reception and a workshop for the Toronto male choir community in addition to the concert, Soundstreams successfully managed to engage various communities: the Swedish and Scandinavian, the male choir and of course the broad community of music lovers and all the friends and supporters of our fresh and innovative programming!
We are proud that Toronto hosted the premiere concert of OD’s North America Tour. This was Robert’s Sund last tour after his 43 years with Orphei Drängar. Soundstreams is grateful and congratulates Robert Sund on his achievement to create the unique excellence of this choir!
We wish good luck and success to Orphei Drängar in the future!
Standing ovation for Orphei Drängar!
Soundstreams Launches into an Exciting New Season
October 21, 2008 (Comments (View))
Jacob Abrahamse as The Golden Child
Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann
There have been some very exciting developments going on around Soundstreams these days, not least of which is the launch of Salon 21 - a 21st century salon with events taking place at the Bata Shoe Museum throughout the year. We welcome our new Community Outreach Coordinator Leonie Hentschel who creates these great Outreach programs for our 26th season. We also want to congratulate our Marketing and Public Relations Manager Allison McColl on the birth of her first baby, and welcome Catherine Boudreau who will be taking over Allison’s position in the interim. A warm welcome also to Andrea Cheng-Baker who joins us as our Development Coordinator while Elizabeth Green (who can still be seen helping out at Soundstreams events) has moved on to return to full time study. The energy in the office is as dynamic as ever and we launched the season with a workshop for The Children's Crusade - R. Murray Schafer's new opera written for young performers.
The workshop was a steady two and a half weeks of rehearsals with the Canadian Children's Opera Company, the Toronto Consort, members of Toronto's professional choral community and over 20 volunteers from theatre and performance.
The great thing about having the opportunity to do a workshop of a piece as large as this one (there are over 100 performers in the work!) is that you get to experiment with how the scenes play out. The final day of rehearsal brought around 40 guests of Soundstreams and parents of the CCOC performers to see excerpts from the piece. This was a fantastic opportunity to see how the audience interacts with the performers, as they followed the scene up and down the length of Heritage Court at the CNE. Some audience members were right into the action, mingling with the performers and other hung back to take in all of the immense amount of detail and activity that have been carefully worked into the show.
While all of the performers are glad to know they have several more weeks to rehearse the piece in the spring before it debuts at Luminato in June 2009, it was a fantastic experience for everyone involved. There is a lot of enthusiasm to take the work to the next level in the spring and share it with Toronto audiences. We'll keep you posted!
Click here to view some amazing photos of the workshop by Cylla von Tiedemann!
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