Two for the road this weekend in downtown St. Catharines

 It may be a rainy Saturday in the city but at least it's spring now, so things can only get better...right?!  Ah the early spring, ready to spring a surprise on us all at a moment's notice!

No surprise we have a wealth of entertainment options this weekend in Niagara, but I'll focus on two this weekend in downtown St. Catharines that might interest you, both taking place at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre on St. Paul Street.

Bravo Niagara! Festival of the Arts kicks off their spring season as part of the TD Jazz Series with a performance by Juno and Grammy Award winner Alex Cuba tonight in Robertson Hall.  Cuba is, oddly-enough a Cuban-Canadian singer-songwriter performing music that reflects his many and varied Latin and African influences, fused with a mix of funk, jazz and pop.  

This will be an intimate solo concert and will highlight music from his recent Grammy Award winning album "Mendo".  The concert begins at 7 pm tonight and tickets are limited, but you can log on to www.bravoniagara.org to see if there are still tickets available if you do not already have them.

Also at the PAC tonight and again tomorrow afternoon in the spacious Partridge Hall the Niagara Symphony Orchestra presents their final POPS! concert of the current season, with a concert entitled "The Music of Phil Collins and Genesis".

The NSO comes by their affinity for the music of Genesis naturally, it seems, as Music Director Bradley Thachuk often performs the music of Genesis with the band's original guitar player, Steve Hackett.  In fact, after the Sunday concert Brad travels to Europe to perform again with Hackett in both England and Germany.

In the recorded world, Bradley and Steve collaborated on the release "Steve Hackett - Genesis Revisited Band & Orchestra:  Live at Royal Festival Hall".  Filmed in London, the concert features Thachuk's own arrangements of many of Phil Collins' solo hits as well as many Genesis classics.

While Hackett will not be in attendance for the performances this weekend at the PAC, Bradley and the NSO welcome and all-star band to join them along with vocalist Jeremy Saje.

Tickets might be hard to come by for this evening's 7:30 performance but for both that and tomorrow afternoon's 2:30 matinee performance you can contact the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre box office for tickets or if you dare, just turn up at the door prior to the performance.

Music is in the air this weekend in downtown St. Catharines...

Have a great weekend!

March 25th, 2023.

Warm up this week with a couple of arts-related events

 Spring officially arrives on Monday afternoon, but you'd never know it from what I am looking at outside my office window this morning...cold, windy and snow flurries.  Take heart, better weather is coming I'm told, but until it does here are a couple of arts related events coming up this week you might be interested in.

Gallery Players of Niagara present their next concert in the current winter season tomorrow afternoon at 3 pm in the friendly confines of Silver Spire United Church in downtown St. Catharines at 366 St. Paul Street.

The concert is entitled "Inside the Music" and will feature the Eybler Quartet and Suzanna Clark, who is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard University.  Professor Clark will be hosting a conversation with members of the Quartet, exploring essentials such as harmony, phrase structure, and the social significance of the works on the programme including Haydn's String Quartet in F minor, Op. 20, and the Mozart "Hunt" Quartet in B-flat major, K. 458.  This latter work was famously dedicated to "my dear friend Haydn" and indeed they were good friends during Mozart's relatively short professional life.

The Eybler Quartet consists of Julia Wedman and Patricia Ahern on violins, Patrick Jordan on viola and Margaret Gay on cello.

The concert is available both in person and online as it will be recorded tomorrow and available online from March 21st to the end of July.  

You can purchase tickets to both in person and online virtual events through the Gallery Players website, or if you are going to the concert, at the door as well.

Later this week when the weather promises to be a little bit warmer, you can journey through a guided tour  of downtown St. Catharines, with a focus on site-specific audio, visual and performance installations that it is hoped will allow you to re-imagine a variety of downtown St. Catharines public spaces.  Offered by our local arts theatre group Suitcase in Point, "Metanoia:  The Experience" is an evolution of "Metanoia: The Mixtape, bringing various artistic interpretations of change to life in the heart of the city.

This is largely an outdoor event, running evenings starting at 8 pm each night from this Thursday, March 23rd to Saturday, March 25th.  There is a limited capacity for each tour, which will be about 40 minutes in length as participants trek to outdoor locations within just one downtown block of St. Catharines City Hall.  Those who attend will also be able to enjoy the after show lounge each evening at Wandering Spirits, located right downtown at 31 James Street.

The evening is produced by Suitcase in Point with contributing artists including Sodienye Waboso Amajor, Roselyn Kelada-Sedra, Shannon Kitchings, Mayumi Lashbrook, Heryka Miranda, Chance Mutuku, Phil Davis, Deanna Jones, Alex Ring and Lauren Garbutt.

Tickets are available in advance by contacting Suitcase in Point.

Have a great weekend and stay warm!

March 18th, 2023.

The Niagara Symphony and The Foster Festival are both taking to the stage soon

 After another snowfall in Niagara you may be ready for an arts-related diversion or two, so I'll offer up a couple of ideas for you to consider as you head through your snowy Saturday...

The next Masterworks concert for the Niagara Symphony takes place this Sunday afternoon at 2:30 at their home base, Partridge Hall at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in downtown St. Catharines.  There are two large works making up the programme tomorrow, one by a Sri Lankan-born Canadian composer and the other by a Russian composer from the last century.

Dinuk Wijeratne is a Juno and multi-award-winning composer, conductor and pianist who is equally at home working with symphony orchestras such as the NSO as well as string quartets, tabla players and even DJs.  The TorQ Percussion Quartet will be performing along with the NSO in the orchestral world premiere of Wijeratne's Invisible Cities, which is described as being full of bold and invigorating percussive colours.

Mr. Wijeratne will be in attendance for the concert tomorrow afternoon, giving a pre-concert talk in Partridge Hall beginning at 1:45.  The concert itself begins at 2:30 pm.

The second half features one of the most romantic of symphonic works from the last or any other century for that matter, the popular Symphony No. 2.  The work has inspired many performers and other composers over the years, including infamously Eric Carmen back in the mid-70s.

Rachmaninoff was really a throwback to the era of Romanticism in classical music, almost old-fashioned in the first half of the last century when he and his family emigrated to North America and settled first in New York City and then due to declining health relocating to Beverly Hills, California.  He only became a US citizen shortly before his death in 1943.

Tickets for the performance are available through the FirstOntario PAC box office either in advance or at the door prior to the concert tomorrow afternoon at 2:30.

Meantime rehearsals are currently underway for the world premiere of the play Danny & Delilah by Norm Foster, which opens this coming Wednesday evening by the Foster Festival.  The Festival, dedicated to producing mostly plays by Norm Foster, also offers world premieres of most all of his works now, and the Festival has been tremendously successful since it began about a decade ago.

Danny & Delilah tells the story of high school student Delilah who goes to live with 72-year-old Daniel and his guidance counsellor daughter Sherry for a month.  Needless to say there is a generational and cultural clash between the two D's before they forge a solid connection.  The newest Foster play is one of friendship in the unlikeliest of places and is full of Foster's trademark humour.

The play stars Taran Bamrah, Erin MacKinnon, Peter Millard and Karen Wood.  These latter two veterans have done extensive work in theatre for many years, most notably at both the Shaw and Stratford Festivals.  

Marcia Kash is the director of Danny & Delilah and I was pleased to see an old acquaintance of mine, Alexa Fraser, is the costume designer for the production.

Performances begin Wednesday and continue until the 26th of March at the Mandeville Theatre at Ridley College, where parking is free.

Tickets are available by contacting The Foster Festival directly or at the door prior to the performance.

Have a great weekend!

March 11th, 2023.

Two destinations to get out of the house this weekend

 We seem to have weathered the latest blast of Old Man Winter, which arrived late yesterday and finally blew itself out earlier this morning.  Here in my part of North Niagara things are really not bad at all, although the snow we did get is rather wet and heavy.  But it won't last, as we have some milder weather on the way and besides, it is early March, so how much more of this will we get?  Not bothering to consult with the groundhog for obvious reasons.

Other parts of Ontario seem to have been hit harder than most of us here in Niagara, so be careful while venturing outside today.  

If you get a bad case of cabin fever and want to escape for a bit, I have a couple of performances this weekend that might be of interest to you, one here in Niagara and the other in one of my favourite little corners of the world, Elora, by way of Kitchener.

Tomorrow afternoon at 4 the Elora Singers will continue with their winter season with a concert entitled "Baroque Meditations" at St. Matthew's Lutheran Church at 54 Benton Street in Kitchener.

The concert begins with the haunting and rarely-heard "Stabat Mater" by the early baroque Italian composer Agostino Steffani, composed in 1724 for six voices and Orchestra.  It was a later work for the busy composer and was presented along with some madrigals to the Academy of Vocal Music in London on the occasion of his being elected their Honorary President for Life.  It didn't last long though, as Steffani died on a trip to Frankfurt, Germany four years later.

Steffani, who was born in 1654, was an ordained priest as well as a prolific composer, eventually attaining the title of Kapellmeister at the Court of Hanover.  It was in this position he met and befriended a young George Frederic Handel in 1710, helping the younger composer early on in his career.

Speaking of Handel, his familiar "Dixit Dominus" rounds out the Elora Singers concert tomorrow afternoon, and was written while he lived briefly in Rome at the beginning of the 18th Century.

Tickets for the concert can be picked up at the door or in advance by calling the box office at 1-519-846-0331 or online at www.elorasingers.ca.

Closer to home, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake has already started previews of the World Premiere of a long-awaited South Asian epic in two parts at the Festival Theatre.  The production, in collaboration with Why Not Theatre, gets the 2023 Shaw Festival season underway on an epic journey.

The production, "Mahabharata", is a contemporary adaptation of the four-thousand-year-old Sanskrit epic written and adapted by Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes from an original concept developed with Jenny Koons, and uses poetry from Carole Satyamurti's "Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling".  Jain and Fernandes are also directing the production, 

The presentation is in two parts:  "Karma (Part One)" and "Dharma (Part Two)" and there are performances of both parts along with "Khana", a community meal with storytelling, on March 4, 5,9,11,12,16,18,25 and 26.

The World Premiere was commissioned and will be presented by the Shaw Festival through to March 26th.  The production is by Why Not Theatre in association with the Barbican in London.

For tickets and more information go to www.shawfest.com.

Have a great weekend!

March 4th, 2023.