Music Toronto
27 Front St. East M5E 1B4 Toronto, ON, Canada

Thoughts about pianist George Li from John Lehr, former music reviewer for The Toronto Star, tenor, amateur pianist, retired professor of English. As much as I enjoy hearing performances by older, well-established musicians, I actually prefer listening to young artists. By the time young musicians have settled on a career in music, they have learned a good deal of repertoire, and yet they are still in the great discovery phase of their musical lives. And the good communicator...s among them share the wonder of discovering things that are supremely beautiful or deeply meaningful in works that some of us jaded souls may think we’ve already heard too many times. I love that. George Li, who played a recital for Music Toronto in December 2012, at the age of 17, communicates his discoveries particularly well. Li, who just turned 25, is now an internationally respected soloist and recitalist, but I find his early chamber music performances especially interesting as a part of the musical education that powerfully shaped the artist he became. When Li was eleven, studying at the New England Conservatory, he was teamed with violinist Momo Wong and cellist Jonah Ellsworth (both twelve) in a piano trio called the Vivace Trio. In their second year together, they played Dvorak’s Trio in E minor, Op. 90, (Dumky). The rhythmic energy, the direct expressive connection to the genre and character of the music, the awareness of the interconnectedness of their parts, the meticulous preparation for the technical demands of the piece show these kids laying a solid foundation for future growth. Dvorak-Dumky Trio by Vivace Trio and George Li (12 yr) https://youtu.be/QBznsv8dQv8

! : 70-minute multimedia live stream performance with the . , : ... Featuring: Gryphon Trio Jamaal Jackson Rogers - poet spoken word artist performing new work created for this program World Premiere of Homecoming - a new work by Juno Award winning composer Dinuk Wijeratne World Premiere of projected visuals created for this program by Kevork Mourad Produced by the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts for their Fall Festival Classical Series : @-. .

Our Artistic Producer writes Among international concert artists at the level of our live concerts, everyone can play. It is much less a question of skill or technique than of interpretation and interest and style. What to look and listen for? How to choose? There is usually some character that shines through. With the Schumann Quartett whom we introduced in 2018, it is an engaging combination of intensity and wit, an almost instinctive sense of give and take, a pinpoint ...accuracy of ensemble. With vision string quartet (they prefer no capital letters) whom we introduced in 2019, what appears at first may seem bravado - they play standing up and entirely from memory. But they are serious performers with deep personality, a lean, focused and precise style. Two very different young European quartets we were privileged to hear.

A personal essay from Keith Horner, radio and recording producer, music writer, and the one who writes the wonderful programme notes for our live concerts and the blog on our website. The second time I met Benjamin Britten haunts me to this day. By the spring of 1971 I had my dream job, producing a Sunday morning radio magazine program I devised for BBC Radio 3. ... It was called Music Weekly (not the strongest title, in retrospect), with the aim of bringing a long overdue journalistic edge and increased production values to the Beeb’s spoken words shows about classical music. My mission was to get Benjamin Britten to talk about his new opera for tv called Owen Wingrave. It was to be premièred on BBC2 later the day the interview was broadcast, Sunday May 16, 1971, with further telecasts throughout Europe immediately afterwards. It was, in short, a Big Deal the largest ever audience for the première of an opera. Still, Britten was uncertain about his opera and the shoot at the Snape Maltings had been tense. Britten’s mind, by then, was on what was to be his final opera, Death in Venice, and his health was beginning to deteriorate. My proposed interview was frowned upon by those protecting the composer and was only agreed with the considerable help of the Music Weekly co-host, Alan Blyth. On the train from London to Suffolk, I anxiously tested out my BBC-issue Nagra tape recorder and went over the questions I would ask in my interview with the famous composer. I had been sternly informed that I had just 15 minutes of the composer’s valuable time. My interview in the Red House in Aldeburgh was brisk and business-like. Before it began, I made sure to mention what a privilege it had been to play under the composer’s baton in Cambridge. Like any well-trained young broadcaster I wore ‘cans’ a headset to monitor the results throughout the interview. Everything from the initial voice check to the interview itself sounded technically OK. At the end of my 15 minutes, I rewound the tape a minute or two and pressed the Play button to double check that all was well. The result? Silence and a feeling of being sick to the stomach. The Swiss-designed Nagra tape recorder into which I plugged my headphones was a beautifully built piece of Swiss engineering. But, for me, it had what I have to view as a fatal design flaw. It was very easy to believe you were listening to what was coming out of the tape when all you I mean ‘I’ was doing was listening to the Input. It will sound better, the second time around, Britten said, not quite smiling, but not angry. It did.