About this Event
The Canadian Chamber Orchestra opens its 2026/27 season
Can beautiful art come from difficult places? What happens when we let the darkness surrounding a piece of music change the way we hear its light?
Silver Linings sits with that question through six works spanning centuries, cultures, conflict, illness, and artistic struggle. Every composer here was doubted, dismissed, or condemned in their own time; Their music outlasted the verdict.
Charles Ives, written off as an insurance man with a hobby, leaves us suspended in The Unanswered Question, where the questions keep coming even when there are no easy answers, featuring Renata Cardoso's trumpet as the celestial questioner. Biber's wildly inventive Battalia à 10 turns the chaos of conflict into music of startling imagination, including a movement so dissonant that listeners still flinch at it three centuries later. Mozart's radiant Piano Concerto No. 23 brings beauty and brilliance to the centre of the program, with its extraordinary confessional slow movement, performed by Murasaki Matsutani, winner of the Unionville Concerto Competition.
After intermission, Copland's Quiet City, written by a composer who would later be called before House Un-American Committee and asked to account for his loyalty to America, brings back trumpeter Renata Cardoso, and adds Caitlin Broms-Jacobs on English horn. Kareem Roustom's Dabke brings the energy and cultural voice of the Levant into the concert hall, a reminder that silver linings can simply be dancing together. And Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang offers the most profound of all: music born from profound suffering, transformed into an astonishing expression of gratitude and renewal.
This is a concert about sitting with contradictions: Beauty alongside darkness, suffering alongside joy, brilliance alongside human imperfection.
Happy hour opens at 6:30pm, so come early, meet the musicians, and settle in before the performance at 7:30. The CCO musicians bring the music, you bring the magic.
About the orchestra
The Canadian Chamber Orchestra performs without a conductor. Every interpretive decision is negotiated among the players in real time, in front of you. For Silver Linings, our core ensemble of fourteen strings expands to twenty-nine musicians, the largest group we have ever assembled and the first to include a wind section.|
Before the concert
Join us for a pre-concert happy hour. Musicians and audience in the same room before the downbeat, no formality required. The players you meet over a drink are the ones you will watch negotiate Biber's chaos an hour later.
Agenda
🕑: 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Happy Hour
Event venue & nearby stays
Eglinton St. George's United Church, 35 Lytton Boulevard, Toronto, Canada
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