What's On Upcoming Events: 2024 / 2025

SPELLBINDING STORIES FROM IRELAND, ANTARCTICA, MÉTIS NATION & FINLAND

For over 50 years, the Vancouver Chamber Choir has dazzled global audiences with top-tier live performances and recordings, receiving acclaim for tours and workshops across Europe, Asia, and North America. They return to Toronto for Soundstreams with their new music director, Kari Turunen. 

All of the featured works in the show are set to compelling stories, including Rough Notes by Nico Muhly with words by Captain Robert Scott from the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica. 

Tarik O’Regan’s The Spring (from “The Colloquy of the Ancients”) follows two aged Irish warrior-heroes, inexplicably still alive as they travel across Ireland in search of faith. 

Histoire des Métis: The Freedom Songs by T. Patrick Carrabré is an important and powerful collection of pieces, based on Métis stories that are rarely told or known, while Riikka Talvitie’s Kuun kirje, which translates to “Moon song,” is a work at once both mysterious and sensuous. 
“Great choral music is one of the richest and most rewarding forms of storytelling from diverse heritages,” says Lawrence Cherney. “The brilliant Vancouver Chamber Choir makes a rare Toronto experience for our season, this being their first appearance here under their esteemed Finnish music director Kari Turunen. In the second half of the show, four extraordinary Canadian and international composers are performed for the first time together on our stages. The passion and expressiveness of music by these luminaries is combined in the first half by the boldness and vitality of six short new works by the rising stars of the next generation of composers, all participants in our RBC Bridges Emerging Composer program.”

The 2025 RBC Bridges Composers are: Mari Alice Conrad (Alberta, Canada), Rebecca Hass (British Columbia, Canada), Josema García Hormigo (Valencia, Spain), Oskar Österling (Stockholm, Sweden), Katharine Petkovski (Ontario, Canada), and Mees Vervuurt (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). Participants in Soundstreams’ RBC Bridges Emerging Composer Program will be mentored by Tarik O’Regan leading up to the concert.

The Soundstreams emerging composers program is an annual, tuition-free offering that connects a celebrated composer-mentor with six emerging composers to have their work debuted by a visiting ensemble of note. Past invited composers have included R. Murray Schafer, Unsuk Chin, Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho, Chris Paul Harman, Paul Grabowsky, and André Ristic.
“I am very much looking forward to the emerging composer workshop and the concert during our Soundstreams sojourn,” shares Kari Turunen. “It is always exciting to work on novel compositions and the Soundstreams Bridges format allows us to connect with the composers in a wonderful way and together work our way to the performance. It is an additional treat to be able to perform the music of their visiting mentor Tarik O’Regan, whose choral music I have admired for a long time. It will be a delight for us to perform three of his works in the concert.”

ARTISTS
Vancouver Chamber Choir
Kari Turunen, Music Director

Artistic Director Kari Turunen began leading the Vancouver Chamber Choir — Canada’s longest-running professional choir — in September 2019, its 49th concert season. 

Jon Washburn founded the choir in 1971 and it has become an amazing success story, ranking with the handful of North America’s best professional choruses and noted for its diverse repertoire and performing excellence. The choir has presented concerts to audiences at home in Vancouver and on tour across Canada. International excursions have taken them to the USA, Mexico, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine. 

Honoured with the Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence by Chorus America, the choir has performed countless concerts and broadcasts, released 36 recordings and received numerous awards. Foremost supporters of Canadian music, they are responsible for commissions and premieres of 334 choral works by 145 composers and arrangers, most of whom are Canadian. Over the years the choir has sung over 4,000 performances of works by Canadian composers, in addition to their extensive international repertoire. 

The choir’s award-winning educational programs include the Conductors’ Symposium for advanced choral conductors, Interplay interactive workshops for choral composers, Focus professional development program for student singers, OnSite visitations for school choirs, the biennial Young Composers’ Competition, and many on-tour workshops and residencies.