Volume 29 Issue 4 | February & March 2024

CHORAL SCENE
Vocal music
and community
building
DAVID PERLMAN
Canadian Bandurist Capella, with Antonina Laskarzhevska, Dec, 2023
For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, the “Just Ask”
feature under the Listings tab on our website is a
handy way of filtering our daily event listings to show
only the types of music that you are interested in. For
example, select “choral” for the February 1 to April 7 date
range covered in this issue’s listings, and you get details of
72 events – far and away the largest single category we list.
It’s not surprising really. Other than banging on things with spoons,
the human voice is the instrument most people are born able to use
and to hear from infancy. (Banging on things with spoons follows in a
distant second place.)
The “choral” category as we define it in our listings typically covers
a wide range of occasions featuring group singing — from vocal quartets,
quintets, and chamber ensembles, to mass choirs; and from
recreational, to congregational, to glorious art. The Roundup that
follows gives a hint of this variety: details for anything that catches
your eye can be found in the daily listings. (Easier to find once you
know where you are heading.)
Appropriately enough, the title for this issue’s Choral Scene is a
phrase, from the presenter’s website, describing the focus of the very
first event in the roundup: the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir’s Exchange
–an annual day of choral community workshops. It’s a phrase that
captures the contribution that group singing in all its forms can make
to community wellbeing.
Live choral music activity was the first victim of COVID-19 and the
last to return. But it does so with a heightened sense of purpose – as
an antidote to the isolation, terrifying or tempting as the case may
be, of the COVID years. Of all the forms of music that we cover in
The WholeNote, the presence of occasions for group singing in all its
forms tells the story of the role music can play in community life.
Feb 11 Oriana Singers. Winter Frost, Snow and Ice.
Feb 13 University of Toronto Faculty of Music. Chamber Choir,
MacMillan Singers, Soprano-Alto Chorus, and Tenor-Bass Chorus.
Feb 13 Don Wright Faculty of Music. Choral Concert Lunchtime
Series: Chorale.
Feb 14 Don Wright Faculty of Music. Choral Concert Lunchtime Series:
Western University Singers.
Feb 14 St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church. Ash Wednesday.
Feb 15 Don Wright Faculty of Music. Choral Concert Lunchtime Series
: Les Choristes.
Feb 16 St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church. 150th Anniversary
Dedication Mass.
ROUNDUP Detailed listings begin on page 34
Feb 03 Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. Exchange: A Day of Choral
Community Workshops.
Feb 03 Soundstreams. Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.
Feb 04 St. Olave’s Anglican Church. Isaac Watts 350.
Feb 07 Royal Conservatory of Music. Vocal Concerts Series:
Los Angeles Master Chorale, staged by Peter Sellars: Music to
Accompany a Departure.
Feb 09 Toronto Consort. Songs of the Palace. (also Feb 10)
Feb 09 Chorus York. 4th Annual Fundraiser: Romantic Melodies.
Feb 10 Elora Singers. Soup and Song: Fauré’s Requiem.
Feb 10 University of Toronto Faculty of Music. Faculty of Music Gospel
Choir: A Celebration of Black History Through Music.
22 | February & March 2024 thewholenote.com