Volume 28 Issue 4 | February - March 2023

Three Tours
Billed as a “two act opera” the Nathaniel Dett Chorale’s Harriet
Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom makes a three-city
tour (Toronto, St. Catharines and Kingston) on February 17, 18 and
24, respectively. While Tubman, the legendary Underground Railway
conductor, is the towering backdrop to the story, the storyline, based
on recent Tubman biographies, is more intimate – two sisters vowing
never to let slavery tear them apart.
Founded in 1998, and still under the direction of its founder,
Brainerd Blyden-Taylor, the Chorale was, and remains, Canada’s first
professional choral group dedicated to Afrocentric music of all styles,
with a mission “to build bridges of understanding, appreciation, and
acceptance … through the medium of music, seeking to dissolve the
barriers of stereotype, and to empower humans in general, and those
of African descent in particular.”
Tuskegee Golden Voices Choir
The Nagamo Project Concert Tour:
Toronto, London, St. John’s, Winnipeg,
Edmonton is the coast-to-coast-and-back
again path that Vancouver-based choir
Musica Intima and Andrew Balfour will
take, featuring music from their recording,
NAGAMO (reviewed on page 51).
Revolving around Elizabethan choral
music by Byrd, Tallis, and Gibbons,
NAGAMO features the unique musical
perspective of Balfour’s reimagining of these
motets into Cree and Ojibway.
“NAGAMO (Sings) reimagines history
Andrew Balfour
and the concept of nation to nation respect
and musical dialogue” Balfour says. “During the beginning of the 17th
century, several Chiefs and esteemed Indigenous leaders journeyed to
Europe in the hope of forging alliances. NAGAMO explores the fantastical
idea of what might have happened if the sharing of music, and
the respect of culture had contrived, and how a different history might
have played out.”
The Nagamo Project Concert is at Eglinton St. George’s
United Church in Toronto on March 4, 2023, with the Toronto Youth
Choir, and in London, March 7, at Western University, with choirs
from the Don Wright Faculty of Music.
KRISTEN-SAWATZKY
Welcome Tuskegee Golden Voices
“There are few choirs anywhere with a history as illustrious as the
Golden Voices,” writes Tom Mawhinney. “Booker T. Washington, a liberated
slave, founded Tuskegee University in 1881 in rural Alabama, about
40 kilometres east of Montgomery, eventually becoming the primary
spokesperson for the Black community in the United Stated for more
than two decades. He founded the Golden Voices choir in 1886; since
then, the choir has won acclaim at national and international levels,
and has sung command performances for Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt,
Kennedy and Carter. The songs the Golden Voices sing have a special
significance; many are the first choral arrangements, created between
1931 and 1955 by Tuskegee choir director William Levi Dawson, of songs
that were anchored in the years of slavery: songs like
‘Follow the Drinking Gourd’, ‘Deep River’, ‘I Want to be Ready’,
‘Wade in the Water’ and ‘Every Time I Feel the Spirit’.”
Crossing a big lake or two in the opposite direction to get here, what
promises to be a memorable Golden Voices Ontario tour starts on
March 8 in London and travels east from there to Toronto, Kingston,
and Ottawa, on March 9, 11, and 12.
David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com
STEVE REICH:
Now & Then
MARCH 25
GEORGE WESTON RECITAL HALL
Celebrate composer Steve Reich’s 86th
birthday. Program to include the iconic
Drumming, featuring NEXUS and TorQ
Percussion Quartet. NEXUS lauded by the
New York Times as “the most acclaimed
percussion group on earth” and TorQ,
described as “outstanding—no, make
that astonishing!” (Ottawa Citizen)
Presented in partnership with TO Live.
Visit soundstreams.ca for more details
10 | February & March, 2023 thewholenote.com