MASTERFUL PIECES
Music and Beyond Festival boasts artistry of all kinds
Everything from leading international string quartets, to a Grammy-winning tango maestro, to the premiere of a made-in-Ottawa opera for puppets will be among the eclectic highlights of Ottawa’s ninth annual Music and Beyond Festival July 5 to 18.
Artistic and executive director Julian Armour’s event, which takes classical music as its starting point but embraces significantly more than that, will stage 75 concerts during the festival, principally at Ottawa churches but also at such venues as the National Arts Centre, the Algonquin Commons Theatre and Soif, the Gatineau wine bar.
Baroque music masterpieces will be in the spotlight at several concerts, including the July 8 performance of Handel’s final oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth by five soloists including sopranos Shannon Mercer and Pascale Beaudin, 12 choristers and L’Ensemble Caprice.
That Juno Award-winning group will also play on July 6, sharing the bill with the U.S. I-90 Collective at a concert that will present concertos by Vivaldi. The celebrated London Handel Players will give three concerts on July 10, 11 and 12.
Visiting string quartets include Russia’s famed Borodin Quartet, which will give concerts on July 5 and 6, and Spain’s Cuarteto Quiroga, which will perform different programs at each of three concerts on July 9, 10 and 11.
The festival will also feature two Shakespeare-themed concerts, one by the German saxophone ensemble the Alliage Quartet (July 5) and another featuring Canadian early music soprano Suzie LeBlanc (July 14).
At two concerts, German baritone Holger Falk and pianist Steffen Schleiermacher will delve into interesting repertoire — works by Hanns Eisler and Franz Schubert on July 12 and music by Erik Satie and Charles Ives on July 14. Schleiermacher on July 13 will give a concert dedicated to “Music in the time of the Great War.”
Argentinian pianist Pablo Ziegler, famed for performing with bandoneon player and nuevo tango icon Astor Piazzolla and who this year won a Grammy Award for the best Latin jazz album, performs with Ottawa’s Thirteen Strings on July 5 and gives a second concert on July 6.
Premiering at Music and Be- yond this year is the unique madeinOttawa puppet opera Sleeping Rough (July 10, 11 and 12), which takes the plight of a homeless man as its subject and features music by Ottawa guitarist and composer Roddy Ellias and a libretto by poet Sandra Nicholls, who is Ellias’s wife.
Fulfilling the festival’s quotient of “beyond” presentations are events such as the July 13 and 14 performances of the eight-person Beijing Modern Dance Company, which will present their work Blooming of Time at the Algonquin Commons Theatre.
Armour is also staging a “Music and Wine” event on July 9 at Soif, featuring its owner, award-winning sommelier Véronique Rivest.
Passes, tickets and more information are available by visiting musicandbeyond.ca.