Soundstreams: Offering a Way In

This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en: Français (French)

Soundstreams founding Artistic Director Lawrence Cherney admits the ensemble’s current season has its share of “big themes,” but he’s equally excited about the music by which they’ve been inspired. The Toronto-based company is presenting a series of ambitious spring concerts that mix big ideas and deep musicality.

Soundstreams was founded in 1982 with a mandate “to strengthen public engagement with new Canadian music and music theatre/opera through commissioning, developing, producing, and disseminating that music.” Throughout its history, the organization has introduced audiences to a variety of new voices, showcasing Canadian composers and performers within innovative and often inspiring contexts. Much of that context springs from intelligent selections and what Cherney terms “thematic programming that often brings in references to things and events outside of music.”

Soundstreams performing Mass for the Endangered
Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

The group’s season-opening concert in November, Mass for the Endangered, explored environmental issues and themes. This coming May, In Terra Pax revolves around what Cherney calls “an important and a very timely subject: war and peace—and, of course, it is connected to what’s going on in Ukraine. Music can reflect on what’s going on in our world in ways that almost no other discipline can.”

Complementing these concerts are events Cherney describes as “purely musical—we’ve always been quite eclectic.”

Arvo Pärt (2011). Photo: Eric Marinitsch

Blending the thematic and the musical are two February concerts, each of which mark the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt. The composer, who emigrated from his native Estonia in 1980, is noted for his quiet, if powerful, critique of Soviet ideology. He expressed this via his tintinnabuli compositional style exemplified in pieces like Spiegel im Spiegel from 1978 (composed just prior to Pärt’s departing his homeland) and Fratres (1977).

TD Encounters: Another Side of Arvo Pärt on Feb. 9 (at Hugh’s Room) will feature the famous Fratres as well as work by Canadian composer Omar Daniel and Ukrainian-Canadian multimedia artist Anna Pidgorna. “Our purpose is often to connect Canadian composers and performers with international composers and performers,” Cherney says, “and the greatest way to do that is when foreign ensembles come here, we ask them to sing, perform, and play Canadian music. Some of these ensembles have taken the repertoire we commissioned back home. There’s no greater compliment to any composer than to have another country’s ensemble championing their work.”

Arvo Pärt at 90 on Feb. 14 (at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church) features the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir led by Grammy Award-winning conductor and ensemble Artistic Director Tõnu Kaljuste. The program features an array of composers in the first half, with works by Lucio Berio and Philip Glass, as well as Estonian Evelin Seppar and a world premiere by Toronto-born Esko Maimets. The concert’s second half is comprised of works by Pärt, including Magnificat (1989) and The Deer’s Cry (2007).

“There are, of course, ways in which his music connects us to the past—it has the sound of medieval music, but it’s not medieval music,” Cherney says of Pärt’s oeuvre. “And people who have no particular faith love his music. They don’t have to have an adherence to Christianity or some other set of spiritual beliefs. It is music that seems to connect.”

Quatuor Bozzini will deepen that sense of musical connection in April. The Montreal-based string quartet is premiering three new works by Canadian composers Taylor Brook, Zosha Di Castri, and Cassandra Miller in a concert titled With Strings Attached at the Jane Mallett Theatre. The works were co-commissioned by Soundstreams, New York’s Time:Spans Festival and Montreal’s Le Vivier. “Each has a very different and distinct style—a really interesting and very personal voice,” says Cherney of the new works and their respective composers. Six short new works by participants in the Soundstreams Bridges Emerging Composers Program,developed under the mentorship of Miller and Di Castri, will also be performed as part of the concert.

“It’s not often that we’re able to feature, you might say, a ‘standard’ formation,” he adds. “Often new works are for mixed combinations of instruments. But we thought this was a great opportunity to celebrate three really fantastic Canadian composers, performed by a very wonderful string quartet that specializes in this repertoire.”

I Want to Tell You Everything: An Anthology of Love Songs (April 9) takes its name from a new work by Franco-Ontarian composer Thierry Tidrow, which receives its premiere that evening. “Of course it’s a popular genre, the love song,” says Cherney, “but we thought there must be some really interesting ways of exploring it.” Also on the program are Dring! Dring! by Montreal-based composer Ana Sokolović, a witty commentary on contemporary cellphone obsession, and three works by Canadian composer Nicole Lizée. Acting as a kind of anchor for the entire program are two works by famed 20th-century Québécois composer Claude Vivier: Love Songs and Shiraz,both from 1977.

“In programming, I’m always trying to think about how we can help people find a way in,” says Cherney, “and that has nothing to do with watering down what you’re doing. What it does mean is providing proper context.”