Alcinous, majesty, shining among your island people, what a fine thing it is to listen to such a bard as we have here — the man sings like a god." — The Odyssey It's fitting that a story about a storyteller begins with a quote about a
This weekend Ottawa's Cantata Singers will open their 56th season with a performance of a cantata by Benjamin Britten, along with other works by the British composer. The centrepiece of the concert is the Saint Nicolas cantata which premiered in 1948 to mark the 100th anniversary
Dan Mangan jokingly calls his current string of concerts "a comeback tour." As if. The Vancouver singer-songwriter and musical entrepreneur is coming the the National Arts Centre on Saturday to perform a selection of his songs — old and new — with the NAC Orchestra. Playing with
On this day, Julie Taymor was feeling a bit tired. She's been working 12 hour days in post-production on the film The Glorias: A Life on the Road about the life of Gloria Steinem, the writer, activist, the co-founder of Ms. Magazine and an important figure
Jonathan Biss is Beethoven-obsessed, or at least he has been for the past decade. He's recorded all 32 piano sonatas during this period. And, he said in an interview with ARTSFILE, he's "been playing them for far longer than that." The last CD has just come out
The winner of the 2019 Sobey Art Award is a Filipina-Canadian artist who lives and works in Toronto and Berlin. Stephanie Comilang holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University, Toronto). Her documentary-based work examines the social and cultural factors
Bryan Smith is a filmmaker who truly goes the distance to make his films. He's followed wingsuit flyers, mountain climbers, white-water kayakers and other explorers and extreme adventurers into the wild places and come back with amazing images and great stories. His company Reel Water Productions has been
“We are women who do what must be done.” So says the cigarette-puffing, mahjong-addicted great-grandmother in Jeff Ho’s one-man play trace, now at the NAC. The fallout of doing what you must do, especially in fraught circumstances, is the subject of Ho’s taut, chamber piece about three
It's probably the most fitting award Angela Hewitt has had in many years, even her Governor-General's lifetime achievement award. The Ottawa native has been awarded the City of Leipzig Bach Medal. The woman, who is on a three year long Bach Odyssey, and who has recorded the master's
As a child, Nikki Chooi's parents wanted him to be exposed to a lot of different possibilities. So he played soccer and baseball. He tried gymnastics and visual art. But pretty early on he showed a real aptitude for something else — the violin. "It was
