“Little kids were pointing at the tubas, a gentleman with a mohawk admired the cellos and a fellow in the front row inexplicably wrapped himself in a Mexican blanket,” writes Michael Vincent in Tuesday’s (2/9) Toronto Star. “Is this what I think it might be? A genuine classical music happening? … Saturday was the second of two concerts as part of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s Intersections Series, which explores multi-interdisciplinary collaboration. I recall the music director Edwin Outwater’s Rebel Music Ted Talk, where he argues popular music isn’t the music of rebels anymore; classical music is. This proved true on Saturday.” The guest artist was “Tanya Tagaq, an Inuk throat singer from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. … she won the 2014 Polaris Prize for her critically lauded album Animism.” Works included “Transported” by Toronto’s Rose Bolton and ‘Suspension’ by Vancouver’s Rodney Sharman. “The second classical rebel rouser was Derek Charke and his ‘Cercle du Nord III.’ It featured Tagaq grunting, gasping and harrumphing at the orchestra like a deep-sea diver coming up from a close encounter with a shark. … The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony was a surprise, but Tagaq was the real delight. … Rebels, all.”
Posted February 11, 2016
