In our latest episode of the equally feared and loved MT Questionnaire, rising young soprano Alexandra Smither shares her most intimate confessions, such as why she wishes she could whistle, and her affinity for the Hamster Dance.

Cellist Matt Haimovitz gets his kicks out of mixing it up, playing Arcade Fire at a pop-up concert one day, then restringing his instrument with gut strings to play period Beethoven the next. For tonight’s Toronto visit with the Ontario Philharmonic at Koerner Hall, he reaches into the heart of the repertoire with Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo.

After fleeing political oppression in South Africa, Violinist Daniel Hope reveals how Yehudi Menuhin took his family in, and changed his life forever.

While many festivals struggle for years establish themselves against dwindling attendance and funding, Stratford Summer Music seems somehow, to make it all look so easy.

The Alberta native who called Toronto home for many years has been leading a new and fascinating life as a composer for film and video games in Hollywood, while still pursuing her original passion for concert composition and playing the piano.

This isn’t drawn from the pages of Maclean’s or a Torontoist post of 2014, but a nearly 300-year-old line from The Beggar’s Opera, a musical by John Gay that took London by storm in 1728.

 

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

In October, Beckwith wrote to me: “After more than sixty years of composing, I find my music is seldom performed, but it happens that next month in Toronto there will be two first performances within the same 24-hour period.”

Over my shoulder, composer Andrew Ager walked past with a nonchalant sense of someone who had spent the last evening drinking calvados with a blonde starlet on a beachfront brasserie.