Last night’s Toronto Summer Music concert at Koerner Hall featured two works played by the TSM Festival Orchestra conducted by Nicolas Ellis . The first was Keiko Devaux’ Arras. It’s a sort of tone poem for chamber orchestra. The base material is drawn from Keiko’s family’s musical and other heritage; agriculture, weaving, plainsong, Buddhist chant, chansons, Japanese-American pop and so on. Samples are rewoven, looped, distorted etc and mixed to form a “tapestry” (hence the title). The effect is quite hypnotic and rather soothing though there’s not much to get a “handle” on, which may be the point.
Nuits blanches is the title of a new CD from Karina Gauvin and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra. It’s largely a subset of the material they performed at Koerner Hall in November and I don’t see much point in repeating 
Thursday 23rd at 8pm, Karina Gauvin is performing with Tafelmusik at Koerner Hall in a concert called The Baroque Diva. Details are 
Hot on the heels of the RCM, the Toronto Symphony has announced its 2017/18 season, whih will be Peter Oundjian’s last as Music Director. There’s lots of sesquicentennial stuff of course but here’s a summary of the interesting vocal stuff (rock and roll and other children’s music omitted).
This review first appeared in the print edition of 
operaramblings 