Live Performances During Covid-19 — Part 3

Ken Stephen Large Stage Live!

Welcome to my third installment of musical performances during the era of lockdown and social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

All the items I’ve shared so far in this series have been single performances.  For this review, I’m bringing you an entire concert, just a few minutes shy of an hour long.

On Saturday, May 30, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir was scheduled to round out its season with a concert devoted to great poets in music — a concert which I had fully planned to attend.

With a little bit of luck and a great deal of ingenuity, planning, effort, and coordination, the Choir has managed instead to present an online virtual concert built around the same theme.  It originally aired at the same time that the live concert was scheduled to take place, and is now available online.

To pull this effort together, the Choir has brought together audio recorded performances from five other choirs, tossed in a previous video performance and a new social-distancing recording of their own, and tied the entire evening together with readings of great poetry and theatre by renowned Canadian actors Tom McCamus and Lucy Peacock and commentary by the choir’s interim conductor, David Fallis.

The theme which tied the whole diverse programme together was the idea of the power of words and music — power to move, power to heal, power to exhort, and power to reconcile.

This remarkable concert featured recordings by the Somnium Ensemble of Finland, the Utah Chamber Artists and the Antioch Chamber Ensemble from the United States, the Cambridge Singers and Cambridge Chorale from the United Kingdom, and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir from Canada.

Read the full review here.