DaCapo’s perfect musical melding
11/13/2006 The Record Stephen Preece Saturday evening’s DaCapo Chamber Choir performance, entitled Twilight, created a wonderfully transcendent experience. Superlative conducting, disciplined singing, and inspired programming, all combine to a remarkable musical achievement. A packed house in the acoustically and esthetically pleasing St. John the Evangelist church in Kitchener didn’t hurt. Twilight is that middle-time, writes conductor Leonard Enns, that gift of repose and reflection. An apt theme for a rainy Remembrance day, it provided a fitting umbrella for the artistic...
Read MoreDaCapo choir’s midnight journey enchants
03/05/2007 The Record Susan Deefholts Midnight. A time of darkness, power and transformation. In our daily compass, with its cardinal points of dawn, noon, dusk and midnight, it is at the moment when the day is poised in the centre of night that the most wondrous of transformations takes place: rebirth. A new day emerges and the cycle begins once more. On Saturday night, the DaCapo Chamber Choir and Artistic Director Leonard Enns captured the mysticism and transcendence of this moment in their concert Midnight: Darkness and Wonder, at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church in...
Read MoreConcert was wondrous journey to a spring day
05/07/2007 The Record Susan Deefholts Da Capo’s concert on Saturday night at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church was a joyous paean to innocence and awakening. Daybreak: Sounds of a New Day brought us into the tender, crisp light of a morning in spring. Featuring one of artistic director Leonard Enns’s works — a musical setting of several poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence — the first part of the program reflected this fresh simplicity. It seemed altogether appropriate for Enns to have selected something from early in his own career...
Read MoreDaCapo’s One wholly satisfying
12/11/2007 The Record Susan Deefholts After my first DaCapo concert, there was no going back. From then on, I knew I’d never hear choir music in quite the same way again. It’s not simply the music that artistic director Leonard Enns selects — which is potent and often supremely challenging. Nor is it that the thoughtful use of a unifying motif for each concert is then reflected and refracted through carefully chosen overarching themes that, in turn, unify each season. It’s mainly because they’re among the best choirs I’ve ever heard. Before...
Read MoreTwos wild at combined choirs Second Glance
04/04/2008 The Record Marcia Adair There’s no getting around it, rescheduling a concert is a hassle for all involved. Those who turned up at St John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Kitchener Wednesday evening know that sometimes, it is worth it. Initially a victim of an early march snowstorm, take two of this concert presented by Waterloo’s Da Capo Chamber Choir and The Guelph Chamber Choir was entitled Two: A Second Glance. The idea behind the program is ingenious. Since most sacred music is conceived to be functional, that is used in liturgy, it is not usual for the same texts to...
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