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Season-at-a-Glance – Announcing Soundstreams’ 2022/23 Season

Our 2022-23 season explores provocative themes that resonate within our communities. It reflects a spectrum of genres ranging from unique instrumental music to soaring vocal and choral music, along with storied stagings. Exhilarating artists will be presented in venues ranging in size and character from Crow’s Theatre to Koerner Hall. During this anniversary season, several Main Stage events will open with newly composed celebratory fanfares taking inspiration from Igor Stravinsky’s Fanfare for a New Theatre, the first work ever performed by Soundstreams 40 years ago.

Soundstreams’ 40th anniversary provides us with the opportunity to reflect upon the past at the same time as we re-imagine the way forward. We continue to build legacy for Canadian music past, present and future by creating new opportunities for an ever-greater diversity of artists.

Highlights for our 40th Anniversary season

  • Choral Splendour opens the season with the world premiere of Soundstreams’ 40th Anniversary Fanfare by SlowPitchSound (Cheldon Paterson), the world premiere of Paul Frehner’s largescale oratorio LEX conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, and the world premiere film by Michael Greyeyes that accompanies a live orchestral performance of Claude Vivier’s Zipangu.
  • Irish composer Donnecha Dennehy’s sizzler for percussion quartet, Surface Tension and world premieres of six works by Bridges Emerging Composers’ Workshop participants performed by TorQ
  • Toronto’s beloved annual tradition of Electric Messiah, returning live and in-person this year with the world premiere of a new interpolation Body by Lieke van der Voort
  • “The most acclaimed percussion group on earth” NEXUS and “outstanding – no, make that astonishing!” TorQ perform in Steve Reich: Now & Then with the Canadian premiere of the film Reich/Richter
  • Arlan Vriens, winner of Soundstreams’ guest mentorship program New Voices, curates Waiting for Godot? as a cathartic and forward-looking reflection of the Canadian pandemic experience.
  • World premiere of Dragon’s Tale, a new Canadian opera that travels from contemporary Toronto to ancient China by Chan Ka Nin.

Calendar at a glance

Main Stage

  • September 21, 2022 – Choral Splendour
  • October 22, 2022 – Surface Tension
  • December 22-24, 2022  – Electric Messiah
  • March 25, 2023 – Steve Reich: Now & Then
  • April 2023 – Waiting for Godot?
  • June 15-18, 2023 – BONUS – Dragon’s Tale

Encounters

This outreach/performance series probes themes in an informal format that combines performance, discussion and audience participation.

  • November 2022 – Encounters: Indigenous Voices I      
  • January 2023 – Encounters: Sampling
  • February 2023 – Encounters: Indigenous Voices II     
  • April 2023 – Encounters: Blurred Realities