The 2025 edition of the 21C festival of contemporary music at the Royal Conservatory of Music basically runs from January 18th to 25th next year with an outlier in May.  As usual it’s heavy on premières; World, North American and Canadian and there’s an intriguing mix of genres.

On the opening Saturday there’s a concert in Mazzoleni by Michelle Cann and the Imani Winds.  That’s followed at 10pm by a late night show by the GGS New Music Ensemble and Brian Current. This one is always a blast and this time features music by Kalaisan Kalaichelvan, Alice Ho and Luca Francesconi.

Probably the big deal of the festival is three performances on the 21st to 23rd of Bernard Foccroulle’s The Journal of Hélène Berr; a setting of a journal written between 1942 and 1944 by a Parisian Jewish student who was deported to Auschwitz in March 1944 and died in April 1945, a few days before the liberation, in Bergen-Belsen.  It will be performed in Mazzoleni Hall by soprano Elena Howard-Scott, pianist Jialiang Zhu, and the Rebanks Family Fellowship Quartet.

Not sure how I feel about this one but it’s a major event too…  It’s the première of new song cycle by Aaron Davis & Margaret Atwood called Zombie Blizzard based on Atwood’s 2020 book of poetry, Dearly.  The performers are Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, the Hannaford Street Silver Band (!), and the Aaron Davis Trio.  The concert, in Koerner Hall on the 24th, includes additional music by Davis and Robert Fleming.

There’s a not quite final concert in Temerty Theatre on the 25th featuring Continuum Contemporary Music in pieces by Kaija Saariaho, Anna Höstman, Kotoka Suzuki, Ana Sokolović, Jocelyn Morlock and Carolyn Chen.

Then it’s fast forward to May 3rd for a concert in Koerner by Bruce Hornsby and the genre bending ensemble yMusic playing a selection of works by Hornsby.