Accolades for The Royal Conservatory

Published on January 24, 2020

The Taylor Academy Chamber Orchestra is to be featured in a national broadcast this Sunday, January 26 plus rave and international reviews for Kuné – Canada’s Global Orchestra, Koerner Hall, and ARC Ensemble – all of which underscore The Royal Conservatory’s leadership in developing human potential through the arts.

 

Koerner Hall

The State Choir LATVIJA is recognized as one of the world's great choirs, renowned for its nuanced a cappella performances, as well as guest appearances with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, and the Berlin, London and St. Petersburg Philharmonic orchestras.  At the end of each calendar year, members of the choir complete an internal survey about their performances for that year.  The choir voted their Canadian debut concert at Koerner Hall last July as their Top Performance in 2019, and Koerner Hall also won their vote for Best Acoustics.  This is very high praise since the choir also debuted at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg (built at a cost of one billion dollars) and gave performances in 17 different concert halls around the world last year.

ARC Ensemble

Article from FarodiRoma (translated)
 
“The ARC Ensemble, renowned as one of the best chamber music groups in the world, will perform at the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara. The sublime Ensemble, composed of a string quintet, a piano and a clarinet, has dedicated itself to the rebirth of composers suppressed by the repressive regimes of the twentieth century and in particular by National Socialism. The ARC Ensemble has performed in major European and North American festivals, such as the Budapest Spring Festival, the Lincoln Center Festival in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Wigmore and Cadogan Halls in London and the Kennedy Center in Washington and has earned three Grammy nominations. Thanks to the painstaking work of The Royal Conservatory today, several masterpieces, hitherto unknown, are re-emerging and being restructured into an ever richer and more complex repertoire.”

 

The Taylor Academy Chamber Orchestra 

CBC Radio will be airing a pre-recorded Taylor Academy Chamber Orchestra performance on Sunday, January 26 on In Concert with Paolo Pietropaolo.  This CBC program showcases “the 'best of the best' live classical music … gorgeous chamber works, the world's finest orchestras, and intimate recitals featuring some of Canada's best young musicians on the brink of stardom”.  The chamber orchestra consists of students from The Phil and Eli Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists between the ages of 11 and 17, and the recording is of their December 2019 performance of Dvořák’s Nocturne and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.  The fact that their performance is airing on a national broadcast is a testament to their professional level of artistry.

 

Kuné – Canada’s Global Orchestra

It was a rave review for The Royal Conservatory’s Kuné after their debut performance last weekend with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. “Kuné performance delivers welcome message of inclusivity” reads the headline in the Winnipeg Free Press. The review begins with a strong endorsement, “In a brave new world increasingly fractured and fuelled by schisms of "us" and "them," … Kuné proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that cultural harmony can – and does – exist through the power and wonder of art.”  The article continues, “Beyond the eye-popping sight of 11 disparate musicians … performing together on 25 world instruments … one of the evening’s most powerful moments arrived early with ‘Lahzeye Sokut’. The haunting work's deeply moving opening solo by Iranian tar player Padideh Ahrarnejad, dedicated to the memory of the Tehran airliner crash victims, became balm for the soul in the way that only music can.” It concludes with, “The ensemble is a significant artistic voice in today’s ever-changing global village, never more critically needed than today.

 

The Glenn Gould School

Glenn Gould School alumna Miriam Khalil was the lead performer of Ayre by composer Osvaldo Golijov at the opening of The Royal Conservatory’s 21C Music Festival.
 
Miriam Khalil breathes new life into Against the Grain’s Ayre

Courtesy of The Globe and Mail
By Jenna Simeonov 

Like a Canadian homecoming of sorts, Ayre came back to Toronto this weekend, the centrepiece in an all-Golijov concert at Koerner Hall to kick off the Royal Conservatory of Music’s annual 21C Festival.  Even for a festival dedicated to world premieres and 21st-century music, starting it all off with Against the Grain and Ayre packs a unique kind of artistic wallop. Ayre also belongs to Khalil. Since her first Toronto performance, presented at the Ismaili Centre by Against the Grain Theatre in late 2016, the Lebanese-Canadian soprano has sung the mountainous work worldwide. Her Ayre: Live, a new definitive recording, won a Juno Award in 2019.
 
Khalil’s interpretation leaves listeners wrung out from what feels both like a trip around the world and travelling through time. Khalil plays with her audience, delivering coy eyebrow raises in between luxurious lines padded with the vibrato of a true opera singer. She sings of ruthless princesses and hateful city walls, lurching around the stage in strange conversation with the jumble of instruments behind her; she trades a cannibalistic lullaby for some psychedelic accordion, then throws to the audience the shock of an exquisite melody laid over the sad poetry of persecuted people and desperate prayers.