Here is all of the very most pressing seasonal news.
I finished the epic task of baking a traditional, dark and fruity Christmas Cake on ‘Stir Up’ Sunday with an old friend who is luckily a much more experienced baker than I am. She put me right on several culinary details that averted small disasters. Who knew there were different ways of measuring dry and wet ingredients! I do now. The recipe is a special one, passed on to me by my dear friend Janet, who in turn received it from her Mother. Who knows how far back the recipe goes originally? Like many important and worthwhile things, the making of the Christmas Cake takes time, strategy, planning, thinking ahead, judicious tasting, and plenty of rum. I look forward to sharing it (sparingly) with friends and family over the festive season.
I’m happy to share some news about performances of my musical compositions coming up in this busy concert season.
‘Winter Nights‘, a cantata I wrote 12 years ago for Emily and Bruce Burgetz, is having a partial outing at Pax Christi Chorale’s ‘Christmas Through the Ages’ concert on the afternoon of Saturday, December 10 at Grace Church-on-the-Hill, Toronto. The wonderful Elaine Choi conducts this program which was mostly ready to go last year, but had to be cancelled at the last minute due to new COVID restrictions. Join them for a celebration, not only of the holiday season, but a return to choral singing!
Joel Tranquilla will be conducting ‘Winter Nights’ in its entirety at the Chan Centre in Vancouver on Dec. 4 at 2:30pm for those of you out on the West coast. His choirs from Trinity Western University join forces for their traditional concert called Christmas at the Chan which they present for the first time since 2019.
You can hear the award-winning Exultate Chamber Singers on Dec 16th at Calvin Church in Toronto, singing the cleverly-titled concert ‘Silence, Frost and Snow’. They’ll be singing an excerpt from my recent work ‘A Frost Sequence’ conducted by the marvellous Mark Ramsay . They will sing the final piece from the sequence which sets the beloved Robert Frost poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.
Out of the blue I received an email from Andreas Peterl, the choir director of the cathedral in Linz, Austria. On Sunday December 4 their choir will sing my Missa Lumen for women’s voices in this historic building where Bruckner wrote some of his best-loved choral pieces. As a weird coincidence, I am working on a commission to compose a setting of the Latin text ‘Locus Iste’ for a choir in San Fransisco, and my new oratorio will premiere alongside Bruckner’s Te Deum Laudamus with the Grand Philharmonic in May 2023. Is Bruckner trying to tell me something?
Christmas Cake