Arthur Kaptainis, Classical Voice North America November 5, 2021 TORONTO — Any performance of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem counts as an occasion, but the concert given on Nov. 2 by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir was special in a few ways. It represented both the return of this venerable society (founded in 1894) to live public performing after an enforced...
Ken Stephen, Large Stage Live November 4, 2021 With the coming of November, the first performing arts season in nearly two years is getting under way. Arts organizations are finally planning live audience performances, and audiences are buying tickets and preparing to return to a whole world of beauty, excitement, and involvement that had seemed lost...
Program notes written by musicologist and PhD student Rena Roussin. Nathaniel Dett’s The Chariot Jubilee (1919) and Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (1868) were written just over fifty years apart and yet one could be forgiven for initially thinking, as I did, that the two pieces have little in common. While both pieces were written...
Dave Richards, Toronto Concert Reviews. The concert, billed as Romantics and New Romantics was not the usual fare of well-known popular tunes meant to please an undiscerning audience. Indeed, it was an hour and a half packed with choral gems from the 19th to 21st centuries. Not that for choral lovers there wasn’t a mix of new and familiar, this was a concert meant to touch the heartstrings of both the uninitiated and the seasoned concert goers. It did just that. (Guest conductor John William Trotter) is known for innovative approaches to presentation and Saturday’s concert was evidence. He demonstrated in this concert not only his ability to elicit fine musical expression from the choir, but also his ease in communicating with the audience.
Jenna Simeonov, Schmopera. The TMC sounded spectacular under the direction of Noel Edison, as did the solo singing by Braun and Wall - Wall in particular filled the Hall with her stunning soprano.
Arthur Kaptainis, ludwig van Toronto. (The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir) of about 130 as prepared by Noel Edison furnished what a devout listener might call a firm foundation, confidently projected yet carefully balanced. The Mendelssohnians are about three-fifths female, and generally sound it, but there was no difficulty in hearing the gentlemen in Brahms’s fugues, which came across as urgent and stirring rather than academic. Words were admirably clear.
The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, under the direction of Artistic Director Noel Edison, will present four subscription concerts during 2017/18 and will perform a number of great orchestral choral works with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as they mark Peter Oundjian’s final season. The TMC is making two important changes for this season. Three of the concerts will now be performed on two nights. And, new subscription pricing means the more concerts patrons purchase, the more they save.
The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is joined by the Minster Singers (of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church) and organist William Maddox for this concert and webcast of choral anthems and an audience hymn sing on Saturday, March 4.
Michael Johnson, concertonet. This program by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir was doubly unusual in that it presented a number of short choral works that rarely get the “big choir” treatment, plus the evening’s guest soloist was a pianist, in this case André Laplante, whose deeply thoughtful performance of six pieces helped fullfil the evening’s title German Romantics.