Toronto Chamber Choir Blog

Toronto Chamber Choir’s Music & Memory kaffeemusik concert on Oct. 26 will explore ways in which music affects our ability to think and remember. We’re thrilled to have Sharang Sharma as guest conductor for this concert, with our artistic director Lucas Harris doing the narration.

Sharang is an up-and-coming light in the field of early music, with expertise in both vocal performance and historical music research. You can read his bio on our website (torontochamberchoir.ca), but we’re taking the opportunity here to ask him a few questions to get to know him better

What especially draws you to early music?

 Early music seems always to have resonated with me. Although it formally entered into my life during my university years when I joined the Early Music Studio at Western University, I had been aware of J. S. Bach throughout high school. I found the counterpoint in his music to have interesting mathematical patterns, repetitions, and internal relations. And while the numbers always made sense in the invertible counterpoint of his canons and fugues, the musical sound created by these numbers was just beautiful and perfect to my ears – even sublime. I have since experienced many such instances in polyphony and counterpoint where the brain and the heart meet, and perhaps that is what draws me most to early music.

What keeps me excited today are the many pieces of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods imminently awaiting rediscovery, so that they may be resurrected from manuscripts and realized in performance.

Are there any special considerations to take into account when performing or conducting early music?

 Of course, a performance will benefit from a solid foundational technique that the performers bring to it. Even so, the ultimate factor that sets up any interpretation for success is bon goût – nothing beats good taste, and that is just how I aspire to perform all the music that I make. By combining the appropriate level of technique, a well-researched background that tells how a piece ought to go and a desire to perform in bon goût, we can create music that is beautiful, meaningful to us and to our listeners, and authentic with regards to its origin and its performance in the modern day. 

If you could time-travel, when and where would you go and what would you do there?

If I could go back in time, there is no doubt in my desire to take a transcontinental trip across Asia and Europe in the 11th century. There is so much to witness of that age, and while we can amass a good deal of information from manuscripts and extant artefacts, it is hard to say what certain things may have felt like, smelled like, and sounded like. Oh, what I would give to hear the sound of Old Roman chant! It is a repertory that fascinates me a great deal, and it would be wonderful to experience it in the world that surrounded it.

 You spent several years studying and performing in England. What were some of the highlights of your time there?

 I was in England during my undergraduate course on a study abroad program when I joined the chapel choir at King's College London. I developed some profound friendships over the time spent together in rehearsals, services, tours within and outside of the U.K., and in learning and performing masterworks like Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil and Brahms’s German Requiem.

I returned to the U.K. again for post-graduate studies and sang with the chapel choir of Queen's College, Oxford. This choir is renowned for their high-level of performance, and for collaborating with excellent orchestras. That was when I first got a chance to sing the Bach Magnificat and the Monteverdi Vespers. Apart from working on masterpieces, I fondly remember the evensong services that I would sing, sometimes every day of the week, at different colleges. In both London and Oxford, the most memorable moments were the dinners and social events that afforded me many opportunities to form bonds with my choir mates, some of whom will remain friends for life. 

What do you hope people in the audience will take away from a concert that you conduct?

I hope the audience thoroughly enjoys the music at the concert and is touched by the joy that will emanate from the performers of the Toronto Chamber Choir. I hope to engage people in the drama of the show's structure, appeal to their modern sensitivities through historical music and by commenting on music and memory, and do all this in a way that is beautiful and rich. Ultimately, I hope the performance stirs curiosity and joy, leaving people moved and inspired by the power of these works.

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 Music & Memory takes place on Saturday, Oct. 26. at 3:30 p.m. at Church of the Redeemer at Bloor and Avenue Road. Ticket prices are $40/$30/$5, pay what you can. The Kaffeemusik concert will include short choral pieces by Mozart, Victoria, Handl, Allegri, Sandrin, de Prez and Purcell. The music will be interspersed with narration by Artistic Director Lucas Harris on the concert’s theme, plus an excerpt from the award-winning documentary film Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory.