With upcoming recitals at the Royal Festival Hall (London), Philharmonie de Paris, and Carnegie Hall – and that’s just in the first three months of 2026 – Ólafsson’s busy schedule has been a boon to classical markets across the world, drawing in audiences excited to see the man dubbed the “new superstar of classical piano”.

The recently-anointed Grammy Winner (2025, “Best Classical Instrumental Solo”, for his recording of the Goldberg Variations) has a strong association with Toronto’s Koerner Hall, having already performed here five previous times since his “post-COVID” debut in 2022.

And on an exciting note, his program is more or less the exact album he recently released to great critical acclaim: the Opus No. 109 release, gathering together Beethoven’s fabled Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109 alongside a host of related works by Beethoven and other composers.

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While there’s no denying the power of the works on display – and Ólafsson’s interpretation thereof – we were a bit bewildered by his decision to perform the entire program uninterrupted.

It’s one thing to request that audiences refrain from applause between pieces; that much we can understand. But performing a succession of pieces, back to back, with barely a pause between each, turned the matinée performance into a sort of mega-sonata, composed jointly by Beethoven, Bach, and Schubert. At times, it was difficult to tell where one piece ended and the other began, so swiftly did Ólafsson move between them.

As for the individual performances themselves – to the extent we could even distinguish them – highlights included Bach’s Prelude No. 9 in E Major, BWV 854, Schubert’s Piano Sonata in E Minor, D. 566, and the aforementioned Beethoven masterpiece of Opus 109. Rounding out the program was Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, Op. 90, Bach’s Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830, and a wealth of encores, including some lovely Rameau.

Ólafsson is, of course, rightly heralded for his interpretative skill, nearly unmatched amongst his class of pianists. While we’re ever-so-slightly more partial to Yuja Wang (who, incidentally, Ólafsson collaborated with barely a year ago in a highly acclaimed Carnegie Hall recital), there’s no denying his sheer musicality, light touch on the keys, and impeccable instincts. His ability to conjure raw emotion from the mix (or shall we say, medley) of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert was impressive, and earned a well-deserved standing ovation (and all those encores).

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Next up on the RCM Season Calendar is a hotly anticipated visit from the Budapest Festival Orchestra under the baton of Iván Fischer. Stay tuned for our thoughts on that concert soon.

Check out the RCM’s 2026 Season Calendar here.

The post Víkingur Ólafsson at Koerner Hall (Concert Review) appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

As an educator for over 20 years, Amanda has mentored students of many ages in various settings, from private lessons to college classrooms, including recent engagements at the University of Manitoba Canadian Jazz Summit, the Canadian League of Composers, and the VSO School of Music Sister’s Jazz Workshop. Currently, Amanda is on full-time faculty and instrument lead for keyboard at one of Canada’s premiere music institutions, Humber College.

Name:

Amanda Tosoff (of the Ostara Project)

Genre:

Jazz

Founded:

2022

# of Albums:

As a leader, I have released 6 under my own name. My recent album is the first for the Ostara Project that I co-lead with bassist Jodi Proznick

Latest Album:

The Ostara Project

Latest Single:

Bye Bye Blackbird

Favourite musician growing up:

Oscar Peterson

Favourite musician now:

That’s a hard one! I’d say pianist Renee Rosnes comes to mind, as she has always been a huge inspiration for me.

Guilty pleasure song:

What a Fool Believes by the Doobie Brothers! I love it!

Live show ritual:

When I’m nervous and backstage, I do a little dance and say “I’m making music with friends, I’m making music with my friends” and I always feel more at ease.

Favourite local musician:

So many to list just one! But the one that comes to mind is saxophonist Kelly Jefferson. I just had the pleasure of recording with his band last February – he’s one of my favourite composers, players and humans. The best all around!

EP or LP?

LP

Early bird or night owl?

If I never worked at night, I’d be up at 5 am every day!

Road or studio?

The road. Playing live shows for an audience is always special. You can’t recreate that energy in the studio – although the recording is also a really special thing too!

Any shows or albums coming up?

A project I co-lead with bassist Jodi Proznick, called the Ostara Project, just released a recording last November. We also received a recent JUNO nomination for it! We’ll be touring jazz festivals across Canada, so I hope readers may join us in Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Medicine Hat or Winnipeg!

Where can we follow you?

Website | Instagram | Facebook

***

Rapid Fire Local Questions:

What is your favourite local restaurant?

Descendant Pizza

What is your favourite street in your city and why?

Queen St E, close to the beaches. I love how it feels like a little small town within this big city.

What is your favourite park in your city and why?

High Park – so many beautiful spots to walk through!

What is your favourite music venue in your city?

The Rex – so many great memories playing and seeing shows at this classic club.

What is your favourite music store in your city?

The staff at Long and Mcquade has always been helpful to me!

The post Five Minutes With: Toronto-based Jazz Pianist and Composer Amanda Tosoff appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Not all child stars make the transition to adult stardom smoothly, but since his debut nearly forty years ago with the Ulyanovsk Symphony Orchestra, Kissin has moved from success to success, including several acclaimed recordings with the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, not to mention multiple Grammy Awards.

Kissin’s prodigious musical talent was on fine display in his recent solo concert at Roy Thomson, well over two hours (more on that in a moment) of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff. The preternaturally gifted Kissin brought fine technique and honest, heartfelt emotion to the performance, particularly in the latter half of the program where he featured a selection of his personal favourites from fellow countryman Rachmaninoff.

The concert opened with Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 (c. 1720). Originally composed for harpsichord, it has become a centrepiece of the piano repertoire, with a quasi-improvisational feel and quickly-moving toccata sections which, along with being in the same key, call to mind the composer’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

Next up were pieces from Mozart and Chopin. The Mozart, his Piano Sonata No. 9 in D major, K. 311 (1777) was probably my favourite work of the evening, with its simply gorgeous second movement marked Andante con espressione. Closing out the first act, we had the pleasure of Chopin’s Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44 (1841), the “Tragic”. I can’t pretend to be able to differentiate the many Chopin polonaises (a type of dance) – there are 23 in all! – but this one has always stood out for its sadder nature, hence the “tragic” appellation. Kissin managed to bring both a dancing flavour and a wistfulness to his interpretation to this piece, one of the better-known Chopin polonaises.

A Russian expatriate based in Prague, it’s impossible to discuss Kissin without mentioning his passionate advocacy on behalf of Ukraine. Kissin has been vocal in condemning Putin’s actions, putting a very public, Russian face to the criticism of the invasion. (Unlike, ahem, certain other Russian stars.)

Of course, opposition to Russia today does not mean we cannot champion the best of Russia yesterday. Hence, the second half of Kissin’s program being given over entirely to late-19th/early-20th century Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, probably the last truly great composer for piano. Kissin’s handpicked selections are too long to list here, but standouts included the II. Lento assai in A minor and IX. Allegro moderato: Tempo di marcia in D Major, both lifted from Rachmaninoff’s Études-Tableaux, Op. 39, which were composed in the mid nineteen-tens.

I would like to be able to tell you how many Rachmaninoff selections we heard, but in all honesty I began to lose track after the third(!) encore. My allusion above to a longer-than-usual concert was a hint that this was, in certain respects, a unique moment for our classical music scene. Toronto audiences tend to be fairly conservative, even predictable: at least two to three cell phones go off every concert, everyone stands for an ovation, and there’s at most two curtain calls before people rush to catch their rides home.

The Kissin audience was different: sure, the cell phones still went off far too often, but nearly every piece was met with rapturous applause, and there was a warm, shared delight in cheering Kissin on for multiple encores, which he happily obliged with ever more Rachmaninoff. It might have sent me home on the TTC later than expected, but it was a singular moment which I was glad to be a part of.

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For the full Roy Thomson Hall calendar, click here.

The post Evgeny Kissin at Roy Thomson Hall (Concert Review) appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

After releasing her debut noir chamber pop album Hour of the Wolf in 2017, Anastasia Minster went on to work on a more ambitious and comprehensive project: her second record Father, released in 2020. Three tracks were created in collaboration with English musician, composer and record producer Steve Jansen, and feature his signature atmospheric synth and string arrangements.

Other tracks boast multi-layered cello arrangements by Canadian virtuoso cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne and trumpet parts by JUNO-nominated Tara Kannangara. The album was recorded at Sonology studio in Toronto using a variety of vintage analogue sound equipment. The lyrics are inspired by the works of Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Name:

Anastasia Minster

Genre:

Noir Chamber Pop

Founded:

2012

# of Albums:

2

Latest Album:

Father, 2020

Latest Single:

Father, 2020

Latest Video:

Favourite musician growing up:

Nina Simone

Favourite musician now:

David Sylvian, Scott Walker

Guilty pleasure song:

The Phantom of the Opera

Live show ritual:

Meditation just before going on stage

Favourite local musician:

Picastro

EP or LP?

LP

Early bird or night owl?

A little bit of both

Road or studio?

Studio (I’m an introvert)

Any shows or albums coming up?

I have just released my first vinyl record. This is my album Father, which was recorded mostly on analogue equipment and I feel that vinyl is the perfect medium for this kind of music.

Where can we follow you?

Website | Spotify | Instagram | BandCamp | Facebook | Twitter

***

Rapid Fire Toronto Qs

Favourite local restaurant:

Terroni (I love Italian!)

Favourite street in your city:

Mt Pleasant Road. I like the part where it runs through the cemetery, one of my favourite places to take a quiet walk… it looks beautiful and timeless in any season.

Favourite park in your city:

High Park is quite special for me. I used to live just across the street and it was a huge inspiration. I would watch the hawks soaring above the trees in the morning and listen to the coyotes at night. I even used a photo of High Park on the cover of my first album, Hour of the Wolf.

Favourite music venue in your city:

Massey Hall. Classic.

Favourite music store in your city:

Soundscapes! It’s a shame they had to close down.

The post “Five Minutes With” Toronto-based singer and composer, Anastasia Minster appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Twenty-five years later, it would be interesting to know whether Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt have as complicated a relationship with their uniquely successful play/shared memoir 2 Pianos 4 Hands, on now at the same Royal Alexandra Theatre where I first encountered it some twenty-four years ago. As of 2022, Dykstra and Greenblatt have been performing as “Teddy” and “Richard”, two talented Canadian kids learning to play (and love) classical piano, for more than a thousand performances.

Seeing them back together again, they certainly appear to be having fun, revelling in audience laughter they can see coming from a quarter century away. Plus, they’re obviously grateful for the money: Greenblatt, a theatre director of some note, and Dykstra, cofounder and co-artistic director of Toronto’s tiny but exciting Coal Mine Theatre (which can accommodate, at most, ninety people), are both stalwarts of a Canadian theatre scene not exactly known for making millionaires out of its stars. But 1,000-plus performances and twenty-five years is a long time, and I admit that I approached the revived 2P4H with a certain amount of trepidation.

Is it still funny? Is it still fresh?

If Greenblatt and Dykstra made 2P4H today, it would almost certainly debut as a Fringe show. The Toronto Fringe has become something of a proving ground for shows that start small, pick up steam, and eventually snowball into something so wildly successful that they accomplish that rare Canadian feat: going Big in the USA. Don McKellar and Bob Martin’s 1999 Fringe production The Drowsy Chaperone eventually ballooned into a Broadway behemoth that scored five Tony Awards. We can thank Ins Choi’s Fringe hit Kim’s Convenience for paving the way for Simu “Shang-Chi” Liu. The recent Boy Falls From the Sky hasn’t made it south of the border (yet), but it too started life as a Fringe show before Mirvish Productions turned it into a major theatrical event.

Like Boy Falls From the Sky and The Drowsy Chaperone before it, Dykstra and Greenblatt’s 2P4H is a celebration of a particular art form that the show itself embodies. But where Boy and Chaperone are musical odes to musical theatre, 2P4H is all about classical music. Specifically, it’s a showcase for two decently talented amateur pianists who, decades ago, begrudgingly took up piano at their parents’ bidding, eventually growing to love their chosen instrument and aspiring to careers as professional musicians. It’s not a spoiler to say they didn’t make it, but their retelling of that story, which follows Teddy and Richard from the ages of about six to seventeen, is consistently funny, occasionally moving, and full of wonderful excerpts of works from across classical, jazz, and popular music.

For the most part, the 2P4H of 2022 is the same show that debuted at the Tarragon Theatre in 1996. It still consists of two men sitting at two grand pianos. It still serves as a celebration of the highs and lows of musical performance and practice. Structurally it remains the same, with Dykstra and Greenblatt taking turns playing their childhood selves at the piano, with the other actor stepping into the role of the parent, teacher, or adjudicator required by the scene. Once in a while, the characters Teddy and Richard interact directly, as in a hilarious Kiwanis Festival duet performance of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, or in a later scene where they get drunk and marvel at the genius of Vladimir Horowitz.

2P4H follows Teddy and Richard as they argue with parents, concoct schemes to avoid practicing, deal with oddball teachers, compete at the dreaded Kiwanis Festival, fall in love with Bach and Mozart, amuse themselves with musical digressions into Elton John, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Billy Joel (much to the indignation of the adults around them), and eventually confront the fact that they will not actually succeed as professional pianists. Again, none of this is a spoiler: there’s a reason why Dykstra and Greenblatt are here on the Royal Alexandra stage (and in the West End, and Tokyo, and Off-Broadway, and dozens of other locations over the decades) and not in concert at Roy Thomson Hall. They’re actors, writers, directors – some of the finest in Canada – but they never did make it in the classical world.

2P4H is very funny. Those who have ever suffered through mandatory practice time (“but the guys are all out playing hockey, Ma!”), sat through an interminable day of “sixty-seven kids all playing the same piece” at a music competition, or quivered in fear in a Royal Conservatory audition room, will respond immediately to the incidents recreated here. Even those who never studied music will likely nod and laugh along in sympathy with Teddy and Richard’s experiences: the arguments with overbearing parents, the deal-making with said overbearing parents (“Dad, promise me you will never try to help with homework again!”), the moment of realization that a hobby could blossom into a career, and, for most of us, the subsequent moment when you realize it isn’t meant to be.

The first half of 2P4H remains the best, and funniest, part of the show, although it’s in the second half that we get its show stopping number.

Act I is all about the early days: learning to play the piano, practicing at first lazily and then with some degree of commitment, carving out identities as two seriously nerdy music nerds. Adult actors playing kids is always a tricky endeavour, but Dykstra as “Teddy” and Greenblatt as “Richard” never descend into caricature, even as they capture the youthful and occasionally annoying energy of a couple kid piano players who would rather be out playing hockey. Highlights of Act I include the aforementioned Kiwanis performance, their arguments with an ever-changing roster of teachers, and the riotously funny practice session in which Teddy and Richard, teaming up to practice Mozart’s Sonata for One Piano, Four Hands in D Major, do everything they can to annoy and distract one another.

Act II hardly lacks for laughter, though it does turn ever so slightly darker, as Teddy and Richard come to realize they will never be professional pianists. Hence, a (very funny) scene built around a bar patron drunkenly insisting that lounge pianist Richard (now a teenager) perform Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”, or the parallel audition scenes in which Richard and Teddy are devastated by the harsh words of critical conservatory examiners. One gets the feeling that these scenes, which each allow Dykstra and Greenblatt to inhabit the role of dream-destroying adjudicator, are a form of exorcism for the two performers. Act II also features the show stopping “Medley of Pop Tunes”, during which Greenblatt and Dykstra relieve stress by blasting through a string of amusing musical references, from the Mr. Dressup Theme to “Heart and Soul” to a crowd-pleasing “Great Balls of Fire” riff that somehow never gets old.

Speaking of getting old, one thing that has changed about 2P4H is the performers themselves. Dykstra and Greenblatt remain as energized and committed as ever, but the receding hairlines and gray hair do suggest that this Teddy and Richard are different from the ones who first showed up on a mid-90s Toronto stage. For one thing, they’re now aware, much like their audience, that even though their piano careers never amounted to anything, the story of those careers has been hugely successful. It adds an odd sort of metatextual layer to the show, and it’s also probably why they seem to still be having fun; the 25th anniversary of 2P4H is, if nothing else, a justification for all those childhood years given over to that great big black-and-white instrument.

Inevitably, 2P4H feels less fresh than it once did. A show this finely honed is more or less guaranteed to deliver big laughs, but it also no longer feels spontaneous. It’s a bit like seeing a classic rock act decades later; Elton John played a mean “Bennie and the Jets” when I saw him a few years ago, but it was a “Bennie” that he had performed thousands of times, and it occasionally showed. 2P4H doesn’t really suffer from any distracting staleness, but aside from one or two updated references – like the shout-outs to Minecraft and “smartphones” – it’s striking how little has changed. And really, some aspects of the show could use an update, including a few dated musical references during the pop medley, and some jokes that rely on tired stereotypes that were already boring/lazy back when this show debuted.

Thankfully, there’s still a hint of the improvisational or even experimental in 2P4H‘s opening piano duel – that’s duel, not duet – consisting of ten straight dialogue-free minutes in which Greenblatt and Dykstra perform a medley of familiar classical themes, gamely and comically trying to one-up one another at their respective pianos. A quarter century later, the choice to launch a comedy show with ten minutes of classical music remains an interesting one, which both respects and rewards the audience each and every time 2P4H is performed. Credit to Greenblatt and Dykstra – “Richard” and “Teddy” – for their technical proficiency, their belief in the power of music, and their ability to win over audiences, twenty-five years and running, with this little story of a lifetime tinkling the ivories.

*

2 Pianos 4 Hands runs now until July 17, 2022 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Tickets are available here.

The post 2 Pianos 4 Hands (Theatre) Review: Heart, Soul, and Wit appeared first on Toronto Guardian.