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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etc; Editor: Wah Keung Chan; Assistant Editor: Andreanne Venne
ISSN: 1206-9973

Bourgie Hall. Photo: Julia Marois.

Jazz: Bourgie Hall

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 31 January 2025 City, Jazz, La Scena Online, Montreal, Scena Jazz

A Chick Corea Rarity Since its opening in 2011, Bourgie Hall has become an indispensable venue for Montreal concertgoers. Situated within the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the concert hall—a beautiful, converted 19th-century Romanesque Revival-style church—has presented, within its walls, such renowned performers as Víkingur Ólafsson, Alexandre Tharaud, The Tallis Scholars and Andreas Scholl. While such a setting is ideal for chamber music and singers, jazz also plays a growing part in the hall’s programming. In the 2024-25 season, no fewer than nine jazz concerts are featured. For Olivier Godin, the venue’s artistic director for three seasons, the hall’s added…

The Sun Ra Arkestra. Photo: Ben Houdijk.

The Sun Ra Arkestra: Space-Age Jazz Returns

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 31 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

As the joke goes, symphony orchestras are mostly 19th-century cover bands. In jazz, the big bands provide that link to the past, with “ghost bands” surviving the disappearance of their leaders for many decades—yes, it is still possible to see a version of the Glenn Miller Orchestra live in 2025! However, if the Sun Ra Arkestra fits that description, it is indeed quite an unusual “ghost band.” This writer vividly recalls the sight of a dozen or so gentlemen (some quite elderly) dressed in colourful, shimmering robes, playing old swing charts and free-form freak-outs. From Morton Street in Philadelphia (Arkestra…

New Releases (Feb 2025)

By La Scena Musicale Team on 31 January 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews

This section is an advertising supplement. To announce here, contact [email protected]. Golden Duets Daria Fedorova & Ilya Takser (piano duo) GENUIN Classics, GEN 24894d Release: September 2024 The internationally acclaimed Fedorova & Takser Piano Duo revitalizes the grand tradition of the piano duet on their new GENUIN album. The music spans from Romantic salon pieces to grand concert hall works by Debussy, Bach, and Brahms, along with exciting discoveries by David L. McIntyre and Edward McDowell. Known for their elegant and multifaceted performances, the duo includes two of their original transcriptions—a tribute to the piano duet’s history, shaped by transcriptions…

Credit: Vancouver Sun

Remembering Kazuyoshi Akiyama (1941-2025)

By Madeline Boldt on 29 January 2025 Arts Industry, Canadian Music, Classical, Classical Music, Obituaries, Orchestral, Toronto, Vancouver

Legendary Japanese conductor Kazuyoshi Akiyama has passed away at the age of 84. A cornerstone of Vancouver’s classical music scene, Akiyama led the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for over 13 years. Under his leadership from 1972 to 1985, the VSO transitioned from the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to the Orpheum, marking a new era of growth, increased ticket sales, and a revitalized sound. Early Life and Career Born in Japan in 1941, he launched into the world of classical music in 1964 when he made his debut with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. His immediate success earned him the roles of both Music…

Lebrecht Weekly | The More Satisfying Mahler Seventh on Record

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 January 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

The seventh was the least understood of Mahler’s symphonies and the last to get recorded. Bruno Walter, Mahler’s closest apostle, never performed it. Otto Klemperer, next in line, distended it to twenty minutes over its regular length. At 75 minutes, it can tax an audience’s patience. The symphony has five movements, two of them designated ‘Night Music’, though not in the Mozart sense. The score requires a tenor horn, cowbells, guitar and mandolin. Arnold Schoenberg grasped these Klimt-like colours as the foundational palette of modernism and used the last two in his turning-point Serenade, opus 24. Hermann Scherchen, who made…

Lebrecht Weekly | Reynaldo Hahn and Hans Gal Chamber Musics

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 January 2025 Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly

If you are about to step into a warm bath, put one of these on the player and submerse your January body in a fantasy world that never changes. What Hahn and Gal have in common, other than a one-syllable name, is a reluctance ever to be tempted beyond the musical language they were born into youth. Hahn, Venezuelan-born lover of Marcel Proust, composes remembrances of those lost times before the First World War. The string quartet and piano quintet on this album, each composed directly after a world war, might easily be mistaken for Fauré or Saint Saens, masquerading as Vinteuil…

Soprano Lauren Margison and tenor Colin Ainsworth.

Review | Lauren Margison & Colin Ainsworth Shine in OIC Alceste

By Gianmarco Segato on 13 January 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera, Toronto

Although Toronto audiences have experienced memorable Robert Carsen stagings of two operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck in relatively recent seasons (Orfeo ed Euridice and Iphigénie en Tauride, both in 2011), Voicebox: Opera in Concert (OIC)’s Jan. 12th presentation of his Alceste (1767) is a Canadian premiere. Its 1769 preface was a de facto manifesto outlining Gluck’s ideals for operatic reform. The result is an opera stripped bare of virtuosic vocal display that relies on expert articulation of its French text to make an effect. Happily, in soprano Lauren Margison and tenor Colin Ainsworth, OIC had found two exemplars of French,…

TSO conducted by Anja Bihlmaier at Roy Thomson Hall. Photo: Jae Yang

Review | TSO Delights with Dvořák and Mozart Crowd-Pleasers

By Denise Lai on 13 January 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Toronto

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) heralded the new year with two audience favourites: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95 (“From the New World”). On Jan. 12, the concert opens with the usual choice of a rarely-performed modern piece. Most Toronto audiences, myself included, are unfamiliar with Grażyna Bacewicz, even though she was one of Poland’s most well-regarded composers of the mid-20th century. Her “Concerto for String Orchestra” is her best-known and most-performed piece, and considered a prime example of Polish neoclassicism, showcasing Bacewicz’s style of blending traditional and…

Lebrecht Weekly | Santtu offers imaginative performances of Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos. 6 & 9 with the Philharmonia Orchestra

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 January 2025 Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Four months ago, I wrote about one of the least satisfying Shostakovich records I have ever heard, a performance where the conductor, a hyped young Finn, skied across the musical surface without penetration or strategic concept. The gloom that overwhelmed me at the onset of a full cycle of symphonies from this unprepared interpreter has since been mitigated slightly by the emergence of a parallel cycle from a Finnish compatriot, Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Turning 40 this year, Rouvali is music director of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and a long-shot to be the next chief in San Francisco or Los Angeles.…

Death of Tenor Alain Nonat

By Wah Keung Chan on 4 January 2025 Arts Industry, Obituaries, Opera

La Scena is sad to learn of the passing of tenor Alain Nonat on Dec. 31, 2024 at the age of 82. Alain was a good friend of singers and La Scena Musicale. We include below his official obituary and the last article we wrote on Jeunes Ambassadeurs Lyriques (JAL) organized by Théâtre Lyrichorégra 20 (TL20). We offer our condolences to his family. Every fall, young singers from across Canada prepare for auditions and competitions. The rewards are usually cash prizes and recognition. The set of auditions of the Jeunes Ambassadeurs Lyriques (JAL) organized by Théâtre Lyrichorégra 20 (TL20), however,…

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