With even minimal care, the maple’s chances of survival are very good. The Piano Concerto‘s fate is not so easy to predict.

Sans church pews and reverence, Soundstreams third annual Electric Messiah continues to guide an old tradition with new ideas.

Toronto composer Caitlin Smith is merging the two in a timely take on love of truth and fidelity to the ideals of an open society in her first opera, When This War Ends (Or, Some Questions You May Have Regarding Our Recently-Concluded Engagement in the Graveyard of Empires), a journey into the dark heart of the decade-long war in Afghanistan.

The Annex Theatre is an intimate venue not usually associated with contemporary music, but it offered Spectrum Music, founded in 2010, unique opportunities to experiment with lighting, staging, and sound.

The first half of the program featured original piano-guitar arrangements by Kradjian and Goryachev of well-known 20^th century Spanish music. It was a rare treat to hear the music performed by the arrangers themselves, both of whom are masters of their instruments and musical traditions beyond the Western idiom.

Most of the time, we listen to an opera or an art song as a whole. But that whole is really a sum of parts with complex – and sometimes contradictory – relationships.

It is most natural (and perhaps necessary) to begin a concert of Dutch contemporary music with a piece by Louis Andriessen, who initially rocked the foundations of the conservative post-war classical music scene in the Netherlands. His music- almost anti-Classical with its incessant rhythmic repetition, loud dynamics and penchant for saxophone, amplified singing and rock instrumentation, is considered the patriarchal source of most Dutch contemporary music today.

Carnival of the Dinosaurs gets its premiere on Sunday afternoon at the Isabel Bader Theatre on Charles St at the hands of the NYCO Symphony Orchestra and music director David Bowser.

What does it take to pull together an improvising string quartet? From what I’ve learned sitting in on the rehearsals for Ron Davis’s three Symphronica concerts at Lula Lounge — the first of which took place Sunday evening — it takes a combination of serious musicianship, affinity for different musical traditions, and an open collaborative spirit.

In preparing for tonight’s first local performance of this 2007 work commissioned by the National Arts Centre Orchestra, I ran across Kulesha’s blog, which is a goldmine of insights into the musical creative process, the art of making music, the act of listening and a whole web of related issues.