#toronto symphony orchestra

[gaypineappppppple]

When your local orchestra's social media person is a certified tumblr girlie

[nurhanarman]

Schumann: Spanish Love Songs Op. 74, nos. 1 and 3

Happy birthday Robert Schumann! Spanisches Liederspiel Op. 74 No. 1 Erste Begegnung (In the beginning) No. 3 Liebesgram (Love dream) Sinfonia Toronto / Nurhan Arman, Conductor Recorded live on January 27, 2017 CBC Glenn Gould Studio, #toronto #classicalmusic https://youtu.be/uF3BiqjY59s?si=HeT0TAZAeK4Po-21

[domifucker]

i can’t believe i’m actually going to a pwhl game…

[topoet]

Symphonic Disco

When The Moody Blues used strings on ‘Nights in White Satin’ it was seen as daring but when disco introduced strings it was seen as the death of music!  The Philly sound embraced strings & several ‘groups’ followed suit. On this mp3 collection I have John Davis & The Monster Orchestra: Ain’t That Enough For You (1976), Up Jumped The Devil (1977), The Monster Strikes Again (1979). I came across a…

[4trackcassette]

toxic trait i think the Mormon tabernacle choir does a lot of the best versions of classic Christmas songs....

[dianadimauro]

Some stage photos from my recent performance of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, in Toronto. I played the role of Mother Marie. This was one of the most challenging and rewarding characters I have ever had the privilege to play. The opera is a masterpiece.

[travellingfoodie]

Casa Loma Symphony Orchestra plays Fortnite Theme Song

[srbachchan]

DAY 5624

Jalsa, Mumbai              July 11/12,  2023               Tue/wed 4:09 AM     

🪔 .. July 12 .. birthday greetings to Ef Vijay Joglekar from Dombivali .. Ef M. Zaheer Sattar from Malawi 🇲🇼 .. Ef Dr. Pravin P Patel from Toronto Canada 🇨🇦 .. love and prayers for wellbeing from the Ef Family .. 🙏🏻🚩

‘ Sympathy ...you can get it from anybody ...but 'jealousy'...Boss u have to earn it.” ~

great words gifted from Ef Barun .. and how apt they are .. earn it boss, earn it .. jealousy you must earn .. and each day we are earning .. 

music is the food of late night creations .. impromptu, irrelevant but so apt .. much like the genius of many that never realised what they were designing .. and there are examples of such in the annals of music history .. a great composer I know designed a symphony on paper .. never played what he had written .. never heard it .. but it was sent to a philharmonic orchestra overseas .. to London .. and on the day of its recital, in an event he was invited and he heard the symphony being played for the first time .. 

he wept like a child, to the brilliance of his own creation .. never heard before , never ever played it .. yet ..

Brilliance ...

this brilliance infests itself into us at times and the immediate or instinctive music that gushes out is the result of just being together to appreciate each others cooperative effort .. and at times the comedic impact of the creation ..

.... and it plays for me as I write  .. so much hilarity and laughter .. only to be shared by them that accompany me .. NEVER to go out .. never .. for they will never understand the reason and the cause and the immediate, informal, on the spot creation without knowing what is going to come out .. and then the surprise of its making .. the collective effort and the immense reference to situations .. 

वो ढोलक का ठेका जब बजता है तो बता नहीं सकते हम की क्या होता है  , बस सब माल निकल आता है  

the tall of the dholak is the inspiration behind the music that emanates willfully and in the unown  ....

it now approaches almost 5 am .. and the desire to carry on is supreme .. I have yet to sleep, but who the hell cares .. Ef is more important  .. so ..

there is envy .. and jealousy .. to not have what they have .. they lead a pleasured life .. and my life suffers .. the alternatives have ever been the reason .. they can do, I can’t .. so I need to be in an alternative .. 

and music brings that alternative from them  .. they shall give me the strength of belief with guidance and quality .. and that is what I do not have .. so I shall soon find one and perhaps then .. the envy shall be crushed by the learning of the alternative shall survive and breed ..

Breed .. 

for we want the need to be through generations .. generations that shall look back to my LIFE .. and the envy of the household shall abate .. and the theka shall stop appropriately ..

 LIFE .. shall survive .. that particular LIFE shall .. survive .. and to hell with all the other baggage .. its weight is getting too heavy to carry .. 

time to bring the new instruments down to the recordings of LIFE .. and to learn lessons on fresh instruments .. to play .. 

Play baby play .. for they shall bring the joy of playing that instrument, live

Amitabh Bachchan

[datshitrandom]

𖦹 New Year ft. Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Atlanta, GA) | Download 𖦹 Don't You/Stutter (Charlotte, NC) | Download 𖦹 Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Charlotte, NC) | Download 𖦹 Sami/Even Though (Clearwater, FL) | Download 𖦹 I Still Think (Fort Lauderdale, FL) | Download 𖦹 I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas (Fort Lauderdale, FL) | Download 𖦹 Christmas Medley (Fort Lauderdale, FL) | Download 𖦹 When You Wish Upon A Star (Orlando, FL) | Download 𖦹 A Very Potter Musical Medley (Durham, NC) | Download 𖦹 I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas (Vienna, VA) | Download 𖦹 Christmas Dance & Medley | Download 𖦹 I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas (Toronto, ON) | Download 𖦹 Teenage Dream (Detroit, MI) | Download 𖦹 Winter Wonderland (Detroit, MI) | Download 𖦹 I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas (Madison, WI) | Download 𖦹 Teenage Dream/Have Yourself A Merry Christmas (Madison, WI) | Download 𖦹 To Have a Home (Northfield, OH) | Download 𖦹 Teenage Dream (Northfield, OH) | Download 𖦹 Somewhere In My Memory (Nashville, TN) | Download 𖦹 Medley (Nashville, TN) | Download

AVDC 2023 Masterpost | AVCD 2022 Masterpost | More Audios | ♡

[crabtreee]

Murdoch Mysteries in Concert: Rhapsody in Blood performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (March 8, 2024)

[shosty-we-understand]

You may recognize Dmitri Shostakovich in the snazzy sweater on the right, but you may not be as familiar with the rest of his family. Here he is pictured with his son, Maxim.

Maxim has led an interesting life. Born in 1938, he is the second and youngest of Shostakovich's children. He fled his hometown of Leningrad in 1941 with the rest of his immediate family, and spent the majority of his childhood in Moscow. He would take after his father and learned piano as well as conducting, studying at the Leningrad and Moscow conservatories. Maxim would later claim it was hearing his father's seventh symphony when he was four years old that inspired him to study music. He would later become the principal conductor of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra and would take on the task of conducting the premiere of his father's fifteenth symphony in 1972.

In 1981, six years after his father's death, Maxim and his family defected to West Germany under the Brezhnev government and eventually made their way to the United States. He would continue to champion his father's music, popularizing many of his lesser known compositions.

Maxim has been very successful as a conductor, conducting for symphonies and orchestras in New Orleans, Hong Kong, Seoul, New York City, Rome, Toronto, Liverpool, Goteborg, Dallas, Ottawa, Kyoto, Jerusalem, Florence, Los Angeles, London, and Trondheim, to name a few.

Maxim eventually would return to Russia and settle in his hometown of St Petersburg, and has continued to travel the world conducting various orchestras. He is still alive to this day.

[nurhanarman]

Edvard Mirzoyan: Theme and Variations

Happy birthday to great Armenian composer Edvard Mirzoyan (1921-2012). His Theme and Variations is a masterpiece. Edvard Mirzoyan: Theme and Variations Theme, Variations 1, 2 and 3 Sinfonia Toronto / Nurhan Arman, Conductor https://youtu.be/baEo0FPT21c

[dressupjohnnyk]

I’ll be at Roy Thomson Hall Saturday evening to hear Conductor Laureate Sir Andrew Davis lead the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Ed Frazier Davis’ “Mother and Child”, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and Fauré’s Requiem.

[justforbooks]

Sir Andrew Davis

One of Britain’s greatest conductors widely admired for leading the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms

One of the most beloved and highly esteemed conductors of his generation, Sir Andrew Davis, who has died aged 80 of leukaemia, was a familiar presence on the podium, not least through his countless appearances at the BBC Proms in his capacity as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1989-2000).

After Adrian Boult, his was the second longest tenure of the post in the history of the orchestra. During the same period he was also music director of Glyndebourne Opera (1988–2000), conducting works by Mozart, Janáček and Richard Strauss, among many others.

The sheer range of his repertoire was in fact one of the defining features of Davis’s career. Not only was he acclaimed as an empathetic interpreter of British music from Elgar and Vaughan Williams to Holst and Bliss, but he also had the ability to assimilate contemporary scores such as Michael Tippett’s The Mask of Time, Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, Nicholas Sackman’s Hawthorn or David Sawer’s Byrnan Wood, all of which were either introduced at the Proms or recorded. The Birtwistle was named record of the year at the Gramophone awards in 1987.

But as he showed season after season in the BBC post, Davis could bring both vitality and a discerning sense of idiom to almost any music. One recalls, almost at random, a 2015 concert featuring a sensuous account of Delius’s In a Summer Garden, followed by a lithe and muscular suite from Ravel’s erotic Daphnis et Chloé, the ecstatic choral shouts and shuddering climaxes leaving little to the imagination. The concert also included music by Carl Nielsen and a new work, Epithalamion, by Hugh Wood.

One of many highlights of his Proms appearances was his commanding premiere in 1998 of Elgar’s Third Symphony in the “elaboration” by Anthony Payne (effectively a performing version made from the composer’s sketches).

Another was his speech from the podium in 1992, delivered as a patter song to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I am the very model of a modern major-general”, complete with witty rhymes and repartee with the delighted audience. The trick was repeated on the final night of the 2000 festival, his last as the orchestra’s chief conductor. On his arrival at the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the more truculent members of the ensemble had to be won over, but they were, by his genial humour and charm, as well as his purely musical talents.

He was also popular with soloists, not necessarily offering a radically new perspective of his own, but listening carefully to them to provide an ideal accompaniment. The pianist Stephen Hough said he had “the sharpest ear and the clearest stick”. Both on and off the podium Davis exuded bonhomie and affability. His concern as a conductor was always to create the conditions that enabled musicians to give of their best.

Born in Ashridge, Hertfordshire, he was the son of Robert Davis, a compositor, and his wife, Joyce (nee Badminton). Andrew began to learn the piano at the age of five and attended Watford grammar school. In 1959 he started organ studies with Peter Hurford and subsequently won an organ scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, where he played under David Willcocks. He then studied conducting at the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome, under Franco Ferrara, and in London with George Hurst. From 1966 to 1970 he was pianist, harpsichordist and organist with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

In 1970 he made his debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and in the same year was appointed assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He then became principal guest conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (1974–77) and music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1975–88), whose stature he boosted with major tours of North America, Europe and Asia. In 1982, he helped establish the orchestra’s new home at Roy Thomson Hall, and advised on the construction of its organ.

Then came the posts at the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Glyndebourne. His debut at the latter had been in Strauss’s Capriccio (1973) and he was to become a noted exponent of the composer’s operas.

In 1989 he married the soprano Gianna Rolandi, whom he had met when she sang Zerbinetta under his baton first at the Metropolitan, New York, in 1984 and again at Glyndebourne in 1988.

On his retirement from the BBC in 2000 he moved to the US with Rolandi and their son, Edward, to take up the appointment of music director, until 2021, of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he conducted nearly 700 opera performances including Wagner’s Ring cycle (2004–05). A second cycle was planned for the 2019–20 season, but was never completed on account of the Covid pandemic. He additionally conducted orchestral concerts at the Lyric and free concerts at Millennium Park.

From 2012 to 2019, he also held the post of chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, becoming conductor laureate, while continuing to live in the US.

In addition to his conducting, he made an orchestration of Handel’s Messiah, performing it with the Toronto orchestra, and of Berg’s Piano Sonata, op 1, and Passacaglia (Berg was a composer who inspired him, he once said, throughout his life). His own compositions included La Serenissima: Inventions on a Theme by Claudio Monteverdi (1980), Chansons Innocentes for children’s chorus and orchestra (1984) and Alice (2003) – settings of Lewis Carroll for mezzo-soprano, tenor and children’s chorus. At his death he was working on orchestrating some of JS Bach’s organ music.

During the pandemic lockdown he drew on his knowledge of the classics, gained as a student, to undertake an original translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Though modest about his poetic abilities, he did comment that the experience was comparable to that of making music: “The manipulation of sonorities and rhythms and the search for ways of bringing to life the vividness of Virgil’s imagery and at times his great emotional power struck me as remarkably similar to the search that I have been engaged in all my life on the podium.”

His numerous recordings reflect the vast range of his repertoire, British and contemporary music looming large alongside Stravinsky, Strauss, Berlioz, Ives, Sibelius, Weill and the complete Dvořák symphonies. A 16-CD retrospective collection celebrating British composers on Teldec’s The British Line series was released by Warner Classics.

In 1991, he received the Royal Philharmonic Society/Charles Heidsieck music award. He was appointed CBE in 1992 and knighted in 1999.

Rolandi died in 2021. Davis is survived by Edward, a composer, singer and conductor.

🔔 Andrew Frank Davis, conductor, born 2 February 1944; died 20 April 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[dianadimauro]

I'm playing the role of Constancia, aka "The Illustrious Dishwasher" with Toronto Operetta Theatre.

https://www.torontooperetta.com/shows/el-hu%C3%A9sped-del-sevillano-(the-guest-at-the-inn)/da3d7b59-4eed-455e-8d92-39a3bd7adbbd

[appalamutte]

it pains me this fandom hasn’t explored an orchestra/classical musician au :/ like y’all are really going to make me write it aren’t you? against my will? without any compensation besides my own personal fulfillment?

like just imagine: 

bob zimmermann is the yo-yo ma of the violin. he’s internationally recognized. he’s performed in the greatest concert halls around the world -- carnegie hall, vienna musikverein, the sydney opera house, palais garnier, etc. -- and his playing style is so controlled yet so brash that he’s dubbed “Bad Bob” because you would expect he’s going to be bad from how harshly he plays. he has strong preference for dissonance in his playing and a firm disregard for the traditional playing styles of the baroque and romantic eras, making him controversial in the world of music and leading many to believe his fame is nothing more than accidental luck.

but it isn’t. he’s one of the best, and he helped revolutionize classical music into the modern style we know it as today.

he meets alicia at a gala in prague, and within two years they marry and have jack. jack, who as a baby would cry and cry and could only be soothed with his father’s playing. jack, who plays his first note on his father’s old violin before he says his first words. jack, who grows up with a bow in hand and the classical music world’s eyes on his back.

from early on, it’s clear jack’s taken on his father’s talent. bob starts giving jack lessons as early as five years old, and while he gets caught up in the prospect of his son following in his footsteps, alicia is determined to make sure jack knows he isn’t pressured to do so.

jack knows, mostly. he spends hours every week with a violin in hand because he wants to. it’s more than a hobby, more than following his father’s footsteps; playing the violin gives him this sense of purpose nothing else can. he learns from his father, he practices daily. he builds calluses. he performs his first concerto at eleven, he plays for the canadian prime minister at the place des arts in montreal at thirteen. he joins his father on bob’s last world tour at sixteen, playing alongside him in berlin, rome, moscow, tokyo, sao paulo.

he does it all, trying to make a name for himself, and it almost works. people recognize his playing. he’s stopped a few times on a trip to vienna by fans wanting pictures. different symphonies reach out to him--not his father--personally asking if he’d perform with them for a special event. but the world still sees zimmermann and asks him what it’s like to follow in his father’s footsteps, why is it that jack’s playing style is so different from his father’s, does he feel pressured because of the zimmermann shadow, is his father proud of him?

after a particularly intrusive interview where jack tries to keep the topic on his attempts at composing his own works, he takes a few months off and tries to not read the internet too much. he spends time with his grandparents in quebec city, he stays at his family’s vacation home in halifax, alicia and him fly off to san diego for a few days, just the two of them.

it’s in their san diego hotel that jack caves. he goes online and reads, reads, reads. there’s article after article with clips from that interview, headlines ranging from Jack Zimmermann: the Modern Day Mozart to Is Jack Zimmermann Living up to the Zimmermann Standard? to The Prodigy to Revolutionize Classical Music, Just Like His Father.

he lets it soak into his skin, staying up at night until sleep finally comes, only to dream of walking onto stage with a program showing his face and reading Bob Zimmermann. he comes back from his hiatus and ups his medications. he holds performances in vancouver, chicago, toronto, and he reads more and more articles about him every night before bed. he starts to pull away from his mother’s hugs quicker. he finds himself unable to look his father in the eye.

jack rehearses and reads and he breaks a string three minutes before he has to perform in ottawa at a fundraising event for his father’s new non-profit to uplift music in the schools and he can’t control his breathing in the bathroom fast enough to walk out on time.

then he disappears at eighteen, and all is quiet.

there’s speculation, rampant in the beginning until it dwindles over the years. some say he couldn’t handle the attention and ran off to some private boarding school in the middle of nowhere. others say he couldn’t handle the pressure and left music entirely. a few spitball conspiracies that he died, willingly or not, that being bad bob’s son was too much to bear, that jack’s fame wasn’t accidental but rather forced, nepotistic.

in 2008 a reddit post claimed to have seen jack leaving a hospital in montreal. in 2009 a random twitter user posted two grainy pictures of what appeared to be jack in an elementary school. in 2010 a tmz article said alicia and jack were spotted multiple times in boston, though bob was noticeably absent.

in 2011, jack zimmermann enrolls at the Samwell Conservatory, a small, undistinguished music school struggling to compete with the likes of Juilliard and Berklee. 

it’s his first official public appearance in three years.

-- -- --

eric bittle didn’t pick up a violin until he was twelve years old.

originally, he didn’t even want to join his middle school’s orchestra. his family had just moved to an atlanta suburb thanks to his daddy’s new defensive line coach position at georgia tech, and his mama’s job at the doctor’s office had her working late in the evenings, so they made him pick an extracurricular activity to keep him occupied after school.

the gay-straight alliance was a no brainer. the co-ed hockey team dug up too many bad memories. the home ec club was tempting, but he knew what the other boys would say if he joined it.

so the school’s orchestra it was.

on his first day he was given all sorts of instruments to try: the cello was too big for his small body, the double bass was even bigger, the viola hurt to hold for too long. the violin was perfect, though, and soon enough eric found that he was rather okay at it. maybe more than okay. he caught on quickly with how to tune, how to hold the bow on the strings, how to read sheet music. vibrato was a bit hard to get used to, but the boy he shared a stand with was nice enough to help him, staying after rehearsals to show him how to wiggle his finger on the string and all.

(eric blushed bright as a tomato when the boy leaned close and grabbed his hand to put it in the right position. he couldn’t make eye contact the next day.)

it was fun, too, to eric’s surprise. he liked being able to hear songs come together, to be a part of something bigger than himself rather than be a solo act. it was easy to blend in while sitting in the middle of all the violins, and the end product of the music slowly grew from being just a bonus to being an accomplished reward.

he stuck with the violin throughout middle and high school, spending weekends rehearsing and weekdays with the other violins. he found that he could almost be himself with them, and being in the school orchestra was better than being a figure skater, even though it still wasn’t the football team. boys played the violin all the time. no one batted an eye when he carried his violin in every morning like they did when he’d have to bring his leotards because katya wanted him to rehearse his program with them on after school. his father even came to all of his concerts, and his mother has an entire home library of videos and pictures from throughout the years.

on a whim, and after talking rather extensively with his director, eric sends in a video audition to the Samwell Conservatory. he thinks that it’s just for fun, that he honestly has no shot of getting in. he loves the violin, and yeah, he’s been first chair for three years now, but he knows he’s not nearly good enough to pursue it as a livelihood. coach’s position at georgia tech paves a perfect path for eric to go there anyway. maybe a business degree is attainable--everyone always gets a business degree when they have no real life plan, right? that’d be useful if he follows his other dream of opening up a bakery one day.

then he gets a letter saying he’s advancing to the in-person auditions held in boston.

then he has a panic attack in his director’s office.

then his mama and he fly up to boston in the middle of march and somehow eric doesn’t fuck up his audition too terribly, but still just enough that he can’t eat the lunch his mama buys him afterward.

it’s not until the first seventy-degree day in april that eric gets the acceptance letter. he’s in the middle of baking a lemon meringue pie when his daddy drops the mail off on the counter, saying a letter’s there for him from Samwell. eric stops everything and rips open the envelope at the kitchen table and reads the letter three times over.

he cries. his mama cries. coach sniffles and gives him a hug with a pat on the back. a half dozen pies get made. his moomaw and aunts and uncles and cousins come over that weekend for a celebratory cookout. his tweet garners nearly fifty likes (a record), and his mama’s facebook post is shared over a hundred times by their friends and neighbors.

his school orchestra throws him a surprise party during their next rehearsal and it hits him, standing in the middle of all his fellow violins, that he’s done it. he’s going to boston.

he’s going to attend the Samwell Conservatory.