Details

 

 

Address: 302-579 Richmond St W, Toronto

Phone: Box Office: 416-408-0208

Email: info@soundstreams.ca

Web: www.soundstreams.ca and www.soundmakers.ca

Facebook | Twitter

________________________________________

Photo Gallery

________________________________________

The Folks Behind It All

 

Lawrence Cherney | Artistic Director

________________________________________

About

Led by Artistic Director Lawrence Cherney and Executive Director Susan Worthington, Soundstreams is a Toronto-based music presenter that commissions, develops, and showcases the work of contemporary Canadian composers and their international counterparts.

These innovative collaborations are performed by the finest artists from Canada and around the world, and are presented in an annual concert series, our monthly Salon 21 series at The Gardiner Museum, in national and international tours, and through a variety of education and outreach activities. To mark its 30th anniversary season in 2012/13, Soundstreams launched SoundMakers, an innovative website and smartphone app that invites music lovers to explore and create with Soundstreams’ commissioned works.

Over the past three decades, Soundstreams commissions have added more than 150 works to the musical repertoire worldwide, reflecting a diverse variety of genres and cultural traditions. Projects have included festivals and conferences such as the Northern Encounters festival, University Voices, and Cool Drummings percussion festival and conference, as well as new productions such as Thomson Highway and Melissa Hui’s Cree opera Pimooteewin: The Journey, R. Murray Schafer’s Dora Award-winning site-specific opera The Children’s Crusade, and Brian Current’s opera Airline Icarus.

________________________________________

Events

2014/2015 CONCERT SERIES

 

Vespers

November 25, 2014, at 8:00 pm, Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre

Nearly four centuries separate Claudio Monteverdi’s monumental Renaissance masterpiece Vespro della Beata Vergine from Gilles Tremblay’s Les Vêpres de la Vierge, commissioned to celebrate the 850th anniversary of France’s Notre-Dame de Sylvanès Abbey in 1986. Yet despite the striking juxtaposition of period and instrumentation, these two magnificent choral works—both taking their titles from Vespers, the Catholic Church’s sunset prayer service, and both evoking the medieval world—express the same profound spirituality. Soprano Shannon Mercer joins Choir 21 and chamber orchestra conducted by the Toronto Consort’s David Fallis in this transcendent evening of choral music.

 

The Whisper Opera

February 26 to March 1, 2015, The Theatre Centre

Feb 26 at 8pm, Feb 27 at 7pm & 10pm, Feb 28 at 2pm & 7pm and Mar 1 at 2pm

Using a libretto compiled from search-engine responses to such prompts as “When I think of you, I think of…,” Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang explores the tension between our private and online selves in a work that demands the most intimate live performance possible. Reprising their successes at Lincoln Center and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, soprano Tony Arnold and Chicago’s International Contemporary Ensemble—hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most adventurous and accomplished groups in new music”—make their Canadian debuts in an opera so quiet, so delicate, that it can be experienced by just 52 people at a time.

 

Song for Athene

April 16, 2015, at 8:00 pm, Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre

Performed at the funeral of Princess Diana, Song for Athene is perhaps the best-known work by one of contemporary music’s most popular composers. Britain’s John Tavener, who died in November 2013, twice visited Toronto as the guest of Soundstreams, which commissioned and premiered his 2005 Invocations and Last Word. Now, to commemorate his passing, Choir 21 and the Toronto Children’s Chorus collaborate in a program of highlights that also includes selections by his late compatriot Jonathan Harvey and Canada’s Christos Hatzis—composers with whom Tavener shared his passion for the universal power of spiritual expression through music.

 

Encuentros

May 24, 2015, at 3:00 pm, Koerner Hall, TELUS Centre

Presented in partnership with the Royal Conservatory’s 21C Music Festival

Sultry and sensual, the music of Latin cultures urges countless couples toward dance floors around the world—and continues to exert a potent influence on other genres. Tango, flamenco, bossa nova, fandango, klezmer, afro-samba, and jazz are among the styles featured in an evening of musical “encounters” featuring internationally acclaimed guitar virtuosos Grisha Goryachev and Fabio Zanon. The all-star lineup also includes Argentinian bandoneon player Hector del Curto and Juno Award-winning pianist and composer Serouj Kradjian. Co-produced with the Royal Conservatory as part of its 21C Music Festival, and including the world premiere of a new piece for two guitars by Canadian composer Andrew Staniland, this colourful event also pays tribute to Toronto’s hosting of the 2015 Pan American Games.