The Show Will Go On, Someday
Last Monday, if you’d told me that we’d be postponing concerts by the end of the week, I wouldn’t have believed you. It felt like the pandemic was something happening elsewhere, not here. It didn’t really seem real for us. But as the week progressed, each hour brought new news. First the JUNOs (heartbreaking as…
Postponing Accent with the SSO
I’m very sad to announce that we need to postpone our March 21st concert with Accent. Over the last few days, I have been working very closely with orchestras across the country, our venues, our funders, and with the SSO Board President Dr Anne Doig (former President of the Canadian Medical Association), and keeping a…
Mozart’s Symphony No. 29
Accustomed as we are to the central importance attached to the later Symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, their earlier works often seem to be uncomfortably light in weight for two such masters to have created. The music may be as inventive, as beautifully crafted as the more famous later works, but that magical sense of…
Beethoven’s Septet
Although it provided an early boost to his popularity at a time he most needed it, Beethoven grew to resent the success that his Septet generated following its public premiere in Vienna, April 2, 1800. He had worked hard for the concert, his first benefit concert – organizing, promoting, conducting, and playing piano in a…
Beethoven’s Serenade
We tend to think of Beethoven as a very serious, determined, God-like figure: Johann Anton Stieler’s famous portrait of the composer furiously at work on the Missa solemnis; grey mane tousled; a stern, focused expression on his face, encapsulates this widely-held view of the man. Yet there’s another side to him: one that’s impish, playful,…
Even more on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony
As the piece begins, we are little more than eavesdroppers. The music of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony seems already to be in progress; we have simply stumbled within earshot. What we hear, as if from a distance, is an insouciant tune — hardly even a tune, more a fragment of a tune — hummed casually…
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony
Even by nineteenth-century standards, the historic concert on December 22, 1808, was something of an endurance test. That night, Beethoven conducted the premieres of both his Fifth and Pastoral symphonies, played his Fourth Piano Concerto (conducting from the keyboard); and rounded out the program with the Gloria and the Sanctus from the Mass in C;…
Rebecca Dale
Saturday, March 7th will feature a North American premiere of Rebecca Dale’s reflective Materna Requiem. If you’re thinking that you don’t know the music of Rebecca Dale, we’re telling you this is a must hear! Rebecca Dale is a British composer of screen and concert music. Born in 1985, Rebecca started composing from a very young age, completing…