A rainy day and the end of the concert season are the perfect excuse to try something a little different — like one of these three concerts/events for the last Sunday of a soggy Toronto spring:
- Benjamin Britten’s Holy Sonnets of John Donne at St Thomas’s Anglican Church, Huron St. at 6:30 p.m.
Britten set these nine deep, melancholy poems for his partner, tenor Peter Pears in 1945, at the end of World War II, following a tour of German concentration camps with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. It seems as if every ghost of a horror Britten witnessed burned its way through into these powerful songs.
In case you’re not familiar, here they are, sung at a 2002 concert in LaJolla, Calif by soprano Jennifer Bates. The pianist is Caren Levine:
Soprano Merry-Anne Stuart is the soloist this evening, accompanied by Jeanne Yuen at the piano. The 25-minute cycle is, after a few minutes’ break, followed by Evensong, which includes this salve of a motet tonight, the magical setting of Ubi Caritas by Maurice Duruflé.
Here is is sung by the Cambridge Singers:
- Little Oak Animal at the Array Space, 155 Walnut Ave., at 9 p.m.
To launch the Somewhere There Summer Series at the Array Space, Toronto visual artist Robert Cruickshank has a fascinating collaboration going with sound artist Dafydd Hughes, as Little Oak Animal. Hughes creates and mixes sounds — many taken from the ambient sounds of the city’s streets — on his laptop as Cruickshank creates and mixes projected images from slides and Super-8 film.
Here a sample of their work:
- Classical Social at Fionn MacCool’s Pub, 181 University Ave., 8 p.m.
The mix of drinks, snacks, conversation and classical music has turned into a Sunday-night fixture at University and Adelaide. This will be 18th such Sunday night convivial — no better place to spill some hot wing dipping sauce on a classical musician. You can find their Facebook site here.
John Terauds