The central pieces of tonight’s program—Brahms’s Liebeslieder Wälzer and Palmeri’s Misatango—are both inspired by dance forms associated with romantic love. However, the broader focus of tonight’s concert is love in all its manifestations, whether that is love for a place, a person, a dance form, or a community. At the same time, as we open this special anniversary season, tonight’s concert is a celebration of love for music, and the musical community of Toronto that has sustained TMChoir for the past 130 years.

The program opens with two pieces by Brahms, beginning with his much-loved 1868 Liebeslieder Waltzes, op. 52. This collection of songs draws on German poet and philosopher Georg Friedrich Daumer’s Polydora collection of folk songs and love poems. In addition to being about romantic love, the Liebeslieder are also about admiration between composers, influenced as they likely were by Franz Schubert’s numerous compositions based on German dance, including the waltz and Ländler. Composed between 1859-1863, Brahms’ Drei Quartetten, op. 31 also draws on dance-like rhythms, as well as love poems and folk songs. The first movement sets a love poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, while the second two movements set poems by Josef Wenzig that are based on Moravian and Bohemian folk songs. Goethe compares love to a dance, while Wenzig’s collections of folk songs hint more at love’s complexity and darker feelings of loss, doubt, and rejection.

Tonight’s concert also features two pieces by Aaron Manswell, TMChoir’s 2024/25 Composer-In-Residence. Mr. Manswell is the first African-Canadian to hold this position, and his musical influences from gospel and R&B are broadening the choir’s musical influences and repertoire. Manswell’s Poverty, a gospel anthem which is being premiered tonight, sets text from The Gospel of Matthew (11:28, “Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”) and strives to, in Manswell’s own words, “bring awareness to the many different forms of poverty.” In addition to the significant forms of material and economic lack that we might most readily associate with the term, Manswell also focuses on social and mental poverty and the endemic loneliness facing our contemporary society. The concluding words of the piece, “do you have a little time to spare? I need someone I can count on to be there” serve as an important reminder of the importance of taking care of and loving one another in an increasingly impoverished world. This message is further reinforced by Manswell’s Stick With Love, which draws on a famed quote by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., ruminating on justice and freedom as essential aspects of love.

In Misa a Buenos Aires, which is perhaps better-known by its affectionate nickname of Misatango, Argentinian composer Martín Palmeri has written a love letter to his city. Palmeri fuses together two central aspects of Buenos Aires’ cultural history, blending the text of the Catholic mass (notably, while freedom of religion is enshrined in Argentina’s constitution, the country is 75% Roman Catholic) with tango, the country’s national music and dance. Although Misatango was composed between 1995 and 1996, it was little-known before its performance at the Vatican at the 2013 International Festival of Music and Sacred Art. The piece was performed to honour the then newly-elected Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who was a regular tango dancer in his youth.

As both a musical and dance form, tango originated towards the end of the nineteenth century in impoverished and multiethnic neighborhoods in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay. Musically, it has always featured a small string section, piano, and bandoneon alongside its African, Cuban, and European dance influences. While tango is now associated with ballroom dancing and justly admired for its musical and choreographic complexity, when it first began to spread beyond Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the 1900s and 1910s, it was considered to be in poor taste and excessively sexual, and was rejected by middle and upper-class communities in Argentina. It was only after tango’s success in Europe in the 1920s that it began to be re-assessed in its home countries and celebrated as Argentina’s national dance and music. Nuevo tango experimented with and expanded what tango music could be. Founded in the 1950s

by Argentinean composer and arranger Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), nuevo tango music sought to honour and also expand tango’s musical origins. Piazzolla was interested in incorporating further aspects of classical and jazz musics into tango composition, and experimenting with musical harmonies and dissonance. Musically, nuevo tango—and with it, Misatango—incorporates multiple musical adaptations and concepts, evolving across time, without ever losing its sense of itself or its origins. In this sense, as a musical genre, it is perhaps an ideal metaphor of long-term love.