Since when do new Canadian compositions get a premiere in Paris? The answer: pretty much never. So the performance of the NAC Orchestra's Life Reflected quartet of Canadian music in Paris on Friday night was something to pay attention to. The orchestra played this contemporary music in
Who were the Neanderthals and why do we keep saying all those rotten things about them? You know, things like they were little more than a nasty, brutish and short bunch with underdeveloped brains and a fondness for dank caves and big, wooden clubs. Neanderthal, at
Samuel Greffe-Bélanger is a producer with Montreal's Normal Studio. He’s pretty hip to new technology and the latest software. And yet these days he’s become a classical music junkie. He blames Life Reflected, the NAC Orchestra’s quartet of four new Canadian compositions. Greffe-Bélanger worked on Normal’s
It’s my second time in as many weeks at a new exhibition that straddles art and science, and what an inspired frontier it is. Where dispassionate data and untethered imagination meet, the potential for insight seems, well, infinite. Two weeks ago it was Leonardo da Vinci:
LONDON — About 11 years ago, Erin Wall decided to start running. The Canadian soprano had just ended a long relationship and was looking to change her life. "Now it is a habit I don't seem able to break," she said in an interview with ARTSFILE. "I started
In his other life, NACO Music Direct Alexander Shelley is principal associate conductor of London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. That means he's often in the various symphony halls of the capital including a small — some 900 seats — creampuff white venue known as Cadogan Hall. It's
David DQ Lee is a Korean Canadian countertenor with an international reputation. He has joined the NAC Orchestra's European tour for two concerts. In London's Cadogan Hall Tuesday night he sang the JUNO winning composition, and NACO commission, Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes by Ana
What is the purpose of a national orchestra? Well, there are many, but surely one is for Canadians perform the music of Canadians on foreign stages. That is certainly the case with the National Arts Centre Orchestra's 50th anniversary tour of Europe. For the British-born Alexander
LONDON — When you meet her, Esther Abrami seems just like any other young music student anywhere. But the petite, attractive violinist from Aix-en-Provence in France is not any other young music student. She has become a social media phenomenon, mainly on Instagram, where she has
LONDON — The Atlantic Ocean was no barrier to music making on Monday afternoon here. Monday morning in Canada's capital, the music makers of Ottawa's Orkidstra joined forces with the Brent District Youth Band, who were in Knightsbridge Monday afternoon local time, to participate in a
