Steve Reich: a beacon of hipness in classical world
Posted: April 28, 2010
American composer Steve Reich has received many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Music, a Polar Music Prize and a Grammy, but one honour that speaks volumes is the high praise he has received in the Village Voice. When the trendy New York weekly declares someone "America's greatest living composer," you can be sure that the composer in question isn't just a remarkable musician, but also a pretty cool guy.
Clap (in sync) for Steve Reich
Posted: April 28, 2010
Steve Reich has broken down barriers between serious and popular music with the most powerful tool imaginable: by earning respect from everyone he has touched with his art.
A powerful night of Polish composers
Posted: February 12, 2010
A powerful night of Polish composers
Ken Winters. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Feb 1, 2010. pg. R.5
The concert organization Soundstreams Canada, animated by the enterprising Lawrence Cherney, on Saturday brought to Torontonians a lavish bouquet of unaccompanied choral pieces by three leading living Polish composers - pre-eminently the now-76 Krzysztof Penderecki (seven pieces), with single pieces by his exact contemporary Henryk Gorecki (he of the famous Symphony of Sorrowful Songs ) and the much younger (32) Norbert Palej.
Revisiting a Powerful Myth
Posted: June 01, 2009
By Ray Conlogue
For the Literary Review of Canada online.
The crusade of the children is certainly what Carl Jung would have called an archetype, a potent meme embodying one of the existential dilemmas of human consciousness. In this case, it would be the absurd but inextinguishable hope that our children will become the perfected humans that we have failed to be. Only through them can we reach heaven, or Jerusalem: that place where evil is conquered by youthful faith and not by the polluted hands of adults, which seem always to lead to the trenches of the First World War or the cells of Abu Ghraib.
Tomson Highway's libretto inspired by real life
Posted: April 26, 2009
In October 1990, celebrated Cree playwright Tomson Highway lay on a Toronto hospital bed beside his dying brother Rene and held him in his arms. As he fell asleep, he dreamed they were in a boat floating toward an island on a misty waterway.