21C Music Festival Sets Upcoming Livestreams

Mervon Mehta, Executive Director of Performing Arts at The Royal Conservatory of Music, today announced that all 21C Music Festival concerts that take place in Koerner Hall will be livestreamed for free at https://www.rcmusic.ca/livestream, in order to share these unique and special evenings with an audience throughout the world.

This is the third edition of 21C Music Festival, which runs from May 25 to May 29, 2016 and includes seven concerts featuring music composed mostly during the 21st century, which crosses boundaries and genres: classical, Inuit throat singing, jazz, contemporary Japanese sounds, progressive rock, atmospheric orchestral, and electro-acoustic music.

The concerts being livestreamed include:

Kronos Quartet with special guest Tanya Tagaq on Wednesday, May 25, 2016 at 8:00 pm

The evening includes Canadian premieres of Nicole Lizée's The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop [Fibre-Optic Flowers] and Mark Applebaum's Darmstadt Kindergarten, a new work titled R?qs (Dance) by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, and two highly-anticipated world premieres, titled Snow Angel and Sivunittinni (The future children), by the incomparable Tanya Tagaq commissioned as part of Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. The evening also features Tagaq and Kronos Quartet performing their piece Nunavut alongside Fodé Lassana Diabaté's selections from Sunjata's Time, Aleksandra Vrebalov's My Desert, My Rose, and the Ontario premieres of Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Words," Laurie Anderson's Flow, and Mary Kouyoumdjian's Bombs of Beirut.

A Post-concert Talk with artists and Mervon Mehta will follow the concert.

Brad Mehldau - Three Pieces After Bach on Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 8:00 pm

Combining his signature technical ability with command of structure and rhythm, American pianist Brad Mehldau presents his Three Pieces After Bach, a new work co-commissioned by The Royal Conservatory of Music/Koerner Hall, Carnegie Hall, The Dublin National Concert Hall, and Wigmore Hall. In the balance of the program, he juxtaposes several canonical pieces from Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, featuring his own jazz compositions for solo piano.

Jherek Bischoff, Dawn of Midi, and The Visit on Saturday, May 28, 2016 at 8:00 pm

Ambient orchestral music composer Jherek Bischoff makes his Toronto debut on May 28 as he shares the evening with Brooklyn-based trio Dawn of Midi and Toronto's own The Visit. Bischoff has blazed an unconventional path in creating an impressive body of work in his 30-odd years. After starting his career with indie rock and experimental groups, he eventually turned to orchestral music and composing. Dawn of Midi is a trio of piano (Amino Belyamani), bass (Aakaash Israni), and drums (Qasim Naqvi), from Pakistan, India, and Morocco respectively, now living in Brooklyn, whose sound has been described by The Guardian as "more boundary-pushing than the sort of freeform noodling that sometimes give the term "jazz trio" a bad name. Here, rhythms are delivered, repeated and built with a fractal precision that makes for music as menacing as it is meditative. It's exploratory without ever seeming uncertain; it sounds like nothing else right now and listening to it is to experience a very welcome warping of time." Cello-vocal duo The Visit conjures sounds from the Middle East, progressive rock, and classical chamber music.

James Ehnes & Andrew Armstrong on Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 3:00 pm

Canadian superstar violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong return to Koerner Hall on May 29, to close out the festival with a concert that is part of the James Ehnes@40: Canada 2016 recital tour, featuring stops in all of Canada's provinces and territories. The program includes the Canadian premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis's Two Movements (with Bells), Ontario premiere of Carmen Braden's Magnetic North, and the Toronto premiere of a new work by Bramwell Tovey, titled Stream of Limelight, alongside James Newton Howard's 133 ... At Least, Händel's Violin Sonata in D Major, Op. 1, No. 13, HWV 371, and Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata.

The 21C Music Festival is made possible through the generous support of Michael and Sonja Koerner

21C Music Festival Supporters: David G. Broadhurst, Philip and Eli Taylor, Joanne Tod, Kris Vikmanis and Denny Creighton.

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