That sentiment became amply clear in the company of former music director, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, on Thursday night at Roy Thomson Hall.

He died on Sunday, aged 85, of complications from a struggle with cancer.

Mahler (1860-1911) was famous in his day as an opera conductor and secured the respect of Germanic Europe in his mid-20s by conducting a Wagner Ring Cycle and completing an unfinished opera of Carl Maria von Weber, Die drei Pintos.

It seems right to celebrate the imminent arrival of our 150,000th visitor with a completely redesigned website.

The Canada Council has awarded three of their most prestigious music-related awards yesterday, each with a cash prize of between $7,500 and $50,000.

I’ve been luxuriating in the heavy cream sauce of pianist Stephen Hough’s new French Album, hot off the press from Hyperion. My first sighting of turning leaves at the end of a particularly nice last weekend of summer made me want to listen to Hough playing Francis Poulenc’s Mélancolie a couple more times.

 

The viola organista looks like a harpsichord. But rather than hitting the strings with a hammer, or plucking them with a plectrum (as is the case with a harpsichord), the viola organista’s keys actuate a mechanism that bows the strings with a series of wheels turned via a pedal-operated crankshaft.

Our guide is Thomson’s Richard Neale, a retired oboe player from the Orchestra of Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, who, with the help of his “spectral players,” a.k.a. Tafelmusik, survey the pan-European collection of composers and styles that comprised musical life in Britain’s capital.

A confluence of blog posts and articles last week about free music sharing led to a fresh volley of arguments for and against the now-ubiquitous practice.