Tag Archives: church of the redeemer

A Prism of Sound

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Saturday night’s concert by the Cantabile Chamber Singers, with their conductor Cheryll J. Chung, at Church of the Redeemer; entitled A Prism of Sound, was the last of their 2023/24 season and, I think, the first time I’ve seen this particular choir.  It was an all Canadian programme.  The first part consisted of works by various choral composers like Matthew Emery and Peter Togni and it was all tonal works for unaccompanied choir on, basically, liturgical texts.  It was pleasant enough but, for me at least, after a while one Ave Verum Corpus sounds much like the rest.  I surprised myself by really quite liking Emery’s Sweetest Love which was quite complex and rather overturned my previous impressions of his music.  I also enjoyed Eleanor Daley’s setting of an extract from the Song of Solomon; Upon Your Heart.  But maybe that’s because the text has special resonance for me.  No complaints about the performance though.  They are a very good choir.

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Voices Across the Atlantic

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Last night’s Toronto Summer Music concert at the Church of the redeemer was headlined by Daniel Taylor, Charles Daniels and Steven Philcox but, somewhat to my surprise, also featured multiple fellows from both the art song and chamber music programmes.

The “headliners” kicked things off with Britten’s canticle Abraham and Isaac, based on one of the Chester Mystery Plays.  I thought I knew this piece but soon realised I was confusing it with the setting of Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young in the War Requiem!  It’s an interesting piece with a very medieval Catholic take on an Old Testament story.  It was performed here with the delicacy and attention to detail I’d expect from these performers.

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Voyage to Wien

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Voyage to Wien, presented by Sara Schabas and Daniel Norman at the Church of the Redeemer last night was a nicely constructed tribute in song to that city on the Danube.  Things kicked off wittily with Bernstein’s (well he did conduct the Vienna Phil) “I hate music” followed by nicely rendered accounts of varied songs by the Mahlers and Schubert before exploiting the performers connections with the church choir to bring members of the choir in for “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit” from Brahm’s German Requiem.

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Signal boosting

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Out of the Cold Benefit Concert For Toronto Homeless – January 27th at 8pm at the Church of the Redeemer.

Toronto musicians are getting together to play a concert to raise funds for and awareness of the homelessness crisis in our city.

Program: Chamber music, vocalists, and a grand finale led by David Bowser of a few opera favourites.

All proceeds to the Sistering and Fred Victor shelters.

The sistering: http://sistering.org/
Fred Victor: http://www.fredvictor.org/

Church of the Redeemer is easy to get to by transit: Museum or Bay subways. The church is at the corner of Bloor and Avenue Rd./University Ave. across from the ROM.

I don’t have any more details at this point but there’s a Facebook page