Your Guide to this year's Toronto Summer Music Festival

WORDS & INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK

The first time I attended the Toronto Summer Music Festival, back in 2019, I remember milling about in Walter Hall during intermission at a concert when this elderly man came up to me. We locked eyes just across the way when he started making his way over, and immediately I thought, “uh oh, here we go, brace for impact...” He walked over and without introducing himself, said, “young man, I was on my way here to compliment your hat, it’s got a real zeal to it. But halfway here, I realized, it’s not the hat.“ And then he just walked away. It took me a second to recover, and by that time he was out of sight. I’m not even sure what he meant by that, but I’ve been riding the high of that compliment for the last seven years. Now, am I saying everyone that attends the TSM festival will be the recipient of such a tactfully executed compliment? Well, that depends on the quality of your hat. But what this festival promises, and has delivered year after year, are memorable experiences both in and outside of the concert hall.

Any musical experience is as much about the music as it is about the people. And with classical concerts during the regular fall-to-spring seasonal programming, the hustle and bustle of life as usual can make it hard to really engage with the people that you’re sharing the music with. But there’s just something about the summertime—people are a bit more relaxed, conversations are a bit more protracted—that makes the music sink in just a little bit more.

I attended over ten TSM concerts in 2019, covering it in a seven-part series for my old music blog. I think that an immersive approach is the best way to experience this festival, which runs from July 9 to August 1. As the World Cup stretches well into the end of July, I’m looking forward to this festival as a respite from the fever pitch of the FIFA pitch. It’s a deeply meditative quality to string together a series of chamber concerts in the middle of summer, generating a feeling of stillness that can be sometimes so hard to find in the city. To that end, I have curated a list of the 10 must-see/hear concerts in this year’s festival. From stalwarts of the chamber canon to unexpected experiments beyond classical music, this year’s festival, and the list below, promises something for every appetite. So I look forward to seeing you there, with or without a nice hat.

1. Opening Night: Les Arts Florissants ─ The TSM sure knows how to kick off a festival: their opening to the 2025 festival, The Coronation of Poppea, remains the best opera-in-concert experience I’ve had over the last 12 months. It’s a tough act to follow, but this year’s opener at Koerner Hall seems poised to live up to the hype with a powerhouse presentation by the ubiquitous Les Arts Florissants ensemble. William Christie will be leading the ensemble through Charpentier’s Les arts florissants and La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, a double-bill that pairs the tale of Orpheus’s descent with a work that gave the ensemble its name. | Thu Jul 9 - Koerner Hall

2. Heifetz & the “Dolphin” Strad ─ No dolphins will be involved in this production, owing to Walter Hall’s strict “no actual dolphins allowed in building” policy. Instead, violinist Timothy Chooi will be wrangling a 1714 “Dolphin” Stradivarius─the same instrument Jascha Heifetz once made his own─for an evening that traces a single violin’s voice across four centuries of music. Heifetz has made several appearances in TSM programs, including his arrangement of selections from Porgy and Bess in 2019, but having his violin in Chooi’s hands is the closest the festival will be to having the famed violinist in attendance. | Tue Jul 14 - Walter Hall

3. Golden Age: Erin Morley & Lawrence Brownlee ─ Nothing hits quite like a program that’s designed to be a living breathing jukebox of bel canto era’s grandest seductions. That’s exactly what two of some of opera’s most celebrated voices, soprano Erin Morley and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, are intent on delivering in this grab-bag program. Pianist Malcolm Martineau will be in tow to steer the program through some Rossini, Verdi, Bizet, Delibes, and Bellini─each aria a tiny opera of longing, jealousy, or desire. This is basically fodder for an unforgettable date night (hint hint!). | Thu Jul 16 - Koerner Hall

   

4. Frühlingslieder: Brahms & Zemlinsky ─ “Frühlingslieder” (try saying that ten times in a row) translates to “songs of spring.” It is the title borrowed by this ReGeneration concert which puts the festival’s emerging artists alongside veteran pianist Warren Jones for an afternoon of lieder spanning Brahms, Fauré, Wolf, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, before closing with the warmth of Brahms’s “Spring” Quintet. (Schubert’s “Frühlingslied” is noticeably missing from this program!!!). Late afternoon concerts at Walter Hall are über underrated, and this Frühlingslieder affair promises to be a great way to take in some art songs right before your Hühnerschnitzel dinner. | Sat Jul 18 - Walter Hall

5. Two Sides of the Same Fiddle ─ This festival is organized around three simple concepts: Toronto, summer, and music. While the music will always focus on classical and chamber material, the festival could benefit from occasionally looking beyond these genres to surprise and delight its diverse Toronto audience. This program, presented by incoming Artistic Director William Fedkenheuer, does exactly that. It opens in concert hall mode with Beethoven and Dvořák alongside pianist Orion Weiss, then crosses over into fiddle territory with Ben Plotnick, swapping bow-tie restraint for barn-dance swagger. | Tue Jul 21 - Walter Hall

   

6. Kleztory ─ Ditto on the delight of branching into other genres. The Montreal sextet Kleztory is set to turn Walter Hall into something like a wedding tent in a shtetl with clarinet, accordion, and violin trading wails and whoops over a klezmer pulse. Built on original arrangements rather than museum-piece tradition, Kleztory’s sound is engineered for joy, the kind that arrives a little ragged around the edges and all the more real for it. | Mon Jul 20 - Walter Hall

   

7. Poiesis Quartet ─ This is definitely the concert to bring the gang out to if you want to show off your musical deep cuts (lookin’ right at you Gen Z!). Fresh off taking top honours at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, the very chic Poiesis Quartet arrives with a program built to prove range as much as polish. Just because they exude cool doesn’t mean they’re not dead serious about delivering an S-tier performance that is equally fluent in the unfamiliar and the canonical. | Wed Jul 22 - Walter Hall

   

8. Council: Kahane & Kuusisto ─ This concert seems like what you’d get if Bob Dylan went electric but everyone loved it. Gabriel Kahane (piano, voice, electric & acoustic guitars, harmonium, loops) and Pekka Kuusisto (violin, voice, harmonium, four-string electric violin, loops, electronics) come together for an evening with no fixed program and no clear borders between classical, folk, and electronic textures. “Programme to be announced from the stage,” is quickly becoming one of my favourite things to read in a program note so here’s hoping this program is all hits and no misses. (And if you’re thinking, “Gabriel Kahane? Surely that’s the brother of James Kahane, conductor of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra?”─nope, no relation! But Cannopy will be interviewing James later this summer, so keep an eye for that!). | Mon Jul 27 - Walter Hall

   

9. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center ─ Lest we forget that chamber music is still the plinth on which this festival is based, New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center brings its trademark polish to TSM, threading together three composers separated by a century but bound by the same restless intimacy of the piano trio form. Haydn’s “Gypsy” trio opens with mischief and dance, before Brahms’s late, autumnal Cello Sonata settles into something deeper, and Mendelssohn’s D minor Trio closes the program on storm and resolve. This is definitely the “Summer of New York,” so if you can’t make it to the Big Apple, this is at least one way to grab your bite of it. | Tue Jul 28 - Walter Hall

10. Élisabeth Pion & Emmanuel Ceysson ─ The TSM Festival Orchestra closes its Koerner Hall season with two soloists stepping into rarely-shared spotlight: pianist Élisabeth Pion and harpist Emmanuel Ceysson, the latter taking on Henriette Renié’s Harp Concerto (yes, you read that right). Honegger’s pastoral miniature opens the evening gently before Mendelssohn’s stormy G minor Concerto (Pion’s Toronto debut!) and Mozart’s brilliant “Haffner” Symphony carries it to a close. | Thu Jul 30 - Koerner Hall

    

• 2026 Gala ─ An evening of music and celebration set at the picturesque Toronto Hunt club, blending fundraising with festival spirit (I’m looking right at you future donors).

• Hauntings: Fauré & Schubert ─ TSM Academy Fellows pair Fauré’s elegiac Piano Quintet No. 1 with songs by Auric, Turkewich, Lili Boulanger, and Schubert (who this festival needs more of), conjuring the spectral and the songful in one sitting.

• In Memoriam: Mendelssohn & Ravel ─ Rising TSM Fellows perform Mendelssohn’s String Quintet No. 1 alongside Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor, pairing one composer’s youthful confidence with the harmonic restlessness of Ravel at his most exacting.

• Distant Memories: Beethoven & Saint-Saëns ─ Another entry in the ReGeneration series pairing TSM Fellows with mentor artists, this program sets Beethoven’s structural certainty against Saint-Saëns’ Romantic shimmer in a meditation on what music carries forward across generations

SUBSCRIBE