> CONCERT SAMPLER
Live-music highlights for the week of May 25 to 31.
Angèle Dubeau and La Pietà Montreal violinist Angèle Dubeau announced in February that she was retiring from touring after near on 40 years of that grind, a development that turns this 21C Festival show with the 12 women of her La Pietà into a local farewell for an award-winning artist of national renown and worldwide appeal.
Since Dubeau founded the allfemale strings-and-piano ensemble 20 years ago, they’ve grown into an enduring, versatile and above all crowd-pleasing collaboration dipping from classical into jazz, pop and beyond, with Dubeau’s fiddle in the lead a marvel of technique and drama.
The program here includes Ludovico Einaudi, Max Richter, Philip Glass and more, much of which ended up on last year’s Silence on joue — Take 2 album of movie faves. (Friday, Koerner Hall, 8 p.m.)
Bang On a Can All-Stars The weekend-long 21C Festival’s other pick here comes with the six New Yorkers who have continued a project going back 30 years probing the outer limits of contemporary classical music.
Now it’s this “Bang on a Canada” program of sesquicentennial selections by Canadian composers Richard Reed Parry, René Lussier and a world premiere from John Oswald — as well as Julia Wolfe’s “Reeling,” a delightful bit of folk minimalism built from a sample of a French Canadian singer’s scatting, or in Wolfe’s words, “basically the music that you make when you don’t have a fiddler and you don’t have a banjo.”
Such layered transformations are meat and drink in these capable, Pick of the Week hands. (Saturday, Koerner Hall, 8 p.m.)
Pharmakon As Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet has built up an underground following and an overwhelming head of steam over 10 years of making freaky electronic noise that’d make the vast majority of pop-music listeners run out of the room screaming for their lives.
She wouldn’t quite say “mission accomplished,” perhaps, but she might shriek in response that that’s certainly part of the point — surrender your ears and constraints. She’s the top of the equally unsettling bill for this drone-themed night, moved from its original Music Gallery church space. (Saturday, Baby G, doors 7:30 p.m.)
Animal Collective After four years away from T.O. there’s some catching up to do for a foursome that broke big with 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion — even if last year’s most recent record Painting With didn’t hit quite those buzzy heights, they remain as bouncy as ever.
The new record got help from John Cale and Colin Stetson, and the effervescent “Golden Gal” opens with a sample from TV’s Golden Girls (since then, their Record Store Day EP ranged further to include field recordings from a Brazilian rainforest).
This being the final date of a short spring tour, they should be freewheeling, and former Sampler pick Circuit des Yeux in support will sec-
With her crisp diction, light dancehall-party vibe and dance moves, Tkay Maidza has the total package that recalls Santigold or a less in-your-face M.I.A.
ond that emotion. (Sunday, Danforth Music Hall, doors 7 p.m.)
Tkay Maidza Zimbabwe-born, Australian singerrapper makes her T.O. club debut with much momentum.
Most of that’s down to her own charms — the crisp diction, the light dancehall-party vibe and dance moves, the total package that recalls Santigold or a less in-your-face M.I.A. — but she’s also got a boost from Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike, who last year gave her props amid an ongoing cultural-appropriation debate around fellow antipodean Iggy Azalea, and continued the respect lending his edge to a track on her debut LP TKAY from last fall. This intro in cosy surroundings is just a start; Toronto will be seeing her again soon in bigger rooms and hearing her hi-test pop sugar more and more. (Monday, Drake Underground, doors 8 p.m.)
Venetian Snares and Daniel Lanois Besides being the go-to production hand for countless A-listers over the past four decades, Daniel Lanois’s own musical journeys, whether on his own or in collaboration, are always worth noting.
The latest example comes with this show (and an upcoming album) matching Lanois with Winnipeg-born electronic producer Aaron Funk, a.k.a. Venetian Snares.
Advance track “Night” sets the anticipation level high for adventures in analog-digital fusion, with Lanois’ ambient steel guitar spilling out languidly under Snares’ machine-gun snares and beeping synths. Joanne Pollock, who teams with Funk in their Poemss project, rounds out the bill. (Wednesday, Great Hall, doors 7 p.m.)