Of course launching a blog is easy. Keeping it up to date is the harder part, so here is a slightly belated post about our recent Ontario tour. This is something of a fixture in our February schedule now and sees us performing concerts in venues both near and far across Ontario. These are a mix of overnight trips and what we call ‘runouts’ – i.e. where we are close enough to Toronto to return the same day.
This year’s tour saw us take a special concert entitled ‘Bach and His World’ to Gravenhurst, Midland, Port Perry, and London, with two performances in each location – a daytime school concert and an evening performance as well. The school performances were particularly memorable for the audience’s enthusiastic participation singing along with new words to Bach’s Cantata 137!
One of the highlights of the annual Ontario tour is of course the excitingly wintry (you may sense a little tongue-in-cheek tone here) weather which usually accompanies it. However, for at least one member of the orchestra this really was a bonus – our violist Stefano (accompanied by his wife Isabella) got to walk on a lake for the first time!
Isabella Bison and Stefano Marcocchi walking on a lake for the first time
Huge thanks must go to our funders, the Ontario Arts Council and Sun Life Financial, for making the tour possible, and of course to our ever-enthusiastic musicians for being game for the many hours of sitting on the tour bus!
Of course we never stand still at Tafelmusik, so after a week at home in Toronto with an all-Mozart programme we’re just starting to prepare for our next tour – we’re off to Vancouver and Western Canada this Thursday. More on that very soon…