From Elora Festival to Music Niagara - great choral music is yours to enjoy!

This past Sunday we travelled up to Elora for the first of two concerts my wife and I will be attending this season, and we came away just amazed at the performance we enjoyed at the Gambrel Barn.

The Gambrel Barn is where the town stores their salt reserves in the winter, I'm told, along with other town uses.  At first blush, you would not expect the venue to be acoustically sound, but it is.  Wonderfully so, in fact.  As a result, many of the Elora Festival events are held there each year during the month of July.

Opening weekend has just passed and we had the pleasure of attending the performance by the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, England, directed by Stephen Layton, a long-time friend of Festival Artistic Director Noel Edison.

Layton has the dry wit you expect from a proper Englishman, commenting at one point on the "frail English" inability to cope with our hot summer weather here in Ontario.  We didn't find it that hot, really, but it clearly affected one member of the choir who had to be helped by St. John Ambulance personnel in attendance during the performance.

The performance, a full 90-minute programme with no intermission, ranged from William Byrd and Thomas Tallis to J.S. Bach to more modern composers such as Arvo Part and Morton Lauridsen.  They also presented a setting of Judas, mercator pessimus by a member of the choir, Owain Park.  Park also happens to be one of the Organ Scholars for the choir.  As an encore, imagine a fine English choir cutting loose with a clever, witty rendition of The Teddy Bear's Picnic and you can imagine the response of the capacity crowd on Sunday afternoon.

From start to finish, the performance was breathtaking in its precision and clarity, as well as the simplicity of the presentation.  This is a choir you need to hear again and again in order to fully appreciate what great choral music can sound like.

In Canada, the Elora Festival Singers are one of the finest choirs you'll hear on any given day, but it was a special treat to hear this fine English choir on Elora's home turf on the weekend.

Here in Niagara, both the Elora Festival Singers and the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, England will be performing as part of our own local music festival, Music Niagara in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  Music Niagara also got under way on the weekend, and they continue just beyond the Elora dates, running to the second week of August.  In Elora, they wrap up the three-week Festival July 27th.

I don't have specifics on the performances scheduled for Music Niagara yet, but I would imagine the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge will present a similar programme when they appear at St. Mark's Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake this evening, in fact as well as Wednesday afternoon at 4 pm.  The Elora Festival Singers present a Picnic Supper performance at St. Mark's on Saturday, August 2nd at 6 pm.

I have written before about the wonderful experiences to be had each summer at both of our premiere music festivals in Ontario, and there is still time to experience either one or even both before they are done.

The Elora Festival presents Week Two with performances ranging from The Irvine Twist Trio Wednesday evening and the Elora Festival Singers in a performance of Rachmaninoff's Vespers on Thursday evening.  On the weekend, Canada, Fall In! commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War I will be presented twice on Saturday afternoon, and Richard and Lauren Margison perform together Saturday evening.  For more performances, check out the Calendar page on my website at www.finemusic.ca, and for tickets and more information, call 1-519-846-0331 or go to www.elorafestival.com.

Music Niagara continues this week as well with several performances scheduled, including the ever-popular group Quartetto Gelato at St. Mark's Friday evening and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada Sunday evening at Jackson-Triggs winery.  For more information on performances, again you can check out my Calendar page at www.finemusic.ca, or call Music Niagara at 1-800-511-7429.  You can also log on to their website at www.musicniagara.org.

Enjoy some great music this summer!

July 15th, 2014.