NextSteps, Harbourfront Centre's new dance series announces it's second season, celebrating a range of home-grown choreography. Performances showcase the diversity of Canadian culture and offers work ranging from flamenco to South Asian and from folkloric and Afro-Caribbean to contemporary. Presented both in the Premiere Dance Theatre and the Harbourfront Centre Theatre September 2007 through May 2008, NextSteps brings together the astonishing breadth of dance companies into this exciting program in its sophomore year. Watch for further details in late August this year.

Further information check the Harbourfront Centre website:  http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/noflash/perfarts/dance.php  

This year the Festival takes over all of Roy Thomson Hall with acrobats from Zero Gravity Circus; intermission chats with visiting composers led by the TSO Composer Advisor Gary Kulesha; as well as post-concert musical performances by Indian jazz fusion groups Attar Project, Autorickshaw and RagaWrap. In addition, for the first time ever, a live video feed of the concerts will be projected simultaneously on two screens set up above the stage.

On Friday, April 11, New Music Concerts proudly presents premiers at Toronto's Glenn Gould Studio. The evening includes the world premiere of SUB by Korean-born So Jeong Ahn, a truly Torontonian work, using the Toronto subway as a source of inspiration for a piece of concert music.

The concert also features the world premiere of Rodney Sharman's Incantation for solo bassoon, string quartet and harp, written especially for Kathleen McLean, and the first Canadian performances of large ensemble works by Canadians Alice Ping Yee Ho and the Toronto-based Mexican composer Juan Trigos.

Anton Kuerti,

Kuerti, who is in his first season as Mooredale Concerts' artistic director, will include an illustrated commentary prior to his performance of the celebrated 33 Variations on a Theme by Anton Diabelli in C major, Op. 120.

According to Kuerti, the rarely performed Diabelli Variations are "the absolute summit of Beethoven's piano music. This sublime work is both the longest and the greatest of his piano works, and was written several years after all his 32 Piano Sonatas were completed.†It is definitely my favourite!" Kuerti has recorded all of the Beethoven piano concertos and sonatas, as well as the Diabelli Variations.

• Saturday Apr 12, 8pm at: Willowdale United Church
  347 Kenneth Avenue, North York
  Four blocks south of Finch, One block east of Yonge.  (Finch Subway Station)
• Sunday Apr 13, 3pm at: Walter Hall
  Edward Johnson Building, University of Toronto
  South of the Royal Ontario Museum, behind Childrens Museum.  (Museum Subway Station)

Roy Thomson Hall’s magnificent Gabriel Kney pipe organ shares the spotlight with Canada’s most celebrated organists and choirs – a delightful way to relax for one hour with great choral music and the King of Instruments.

France’s world-renowned Olivier Latry, titular organist of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, performs a solo organ recital. The event coincides with his appearance as soloist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

From southeast Africa, Tony Bird, a Malawi-born song man, is a complete original. With a mesmerizing intensity, his voice, vision, guitar style and persona are unique in all of folk music. Bird's African roots have produced a performer with a far-ranging repertoire that includes exotic travelogues of mountains with misty landscapes, desert and bushland filled with lions, birds, bushmen, mangoes, monkeys, sunsets and bicycles. All this savannah-laden tropicana is interspersed with narrative tales of darkness and delight, topical and historical commentary, love songs, musical tone poems, rallying cries of inspiration and a whimsical sense of humor.

On Sunday, April 20 at 8 p.m. at The Music Gallery, Continuum Contemporary Music presents Common Chords, a co-production with The Music Gallery.

Recent work from two leading Czech composers finds aesthetic kinship with Czech-Canadian Rudolf Komorous and new works by Gyula Csapo and Cassandra Miller, which explore the cultural artifacts of language and story. The Continuum ensemble, joined by conductor Gregory Oh and soprano Carla Huhtanen perform these works that find commonality through revisiting and revising past practice (scraps of the tonal system are drafted into service in surprising ways).

The Music Gallery is located at 197 John Street, north of Queen in Toronto.

Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman has received critical acclaim as much for her innate musicianship and voluptuous voice as for her dynamic and vibrant stage presence. She has performed with many of today's finest international orchestras and most esteemed conductors. Her operatic credits include Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's The Dialogues of the Carmelites (Vancouver Opera), Juno in Aeneas in Karthago (Staatsoper Stuttgart) by Joseph Martin Kraus, Li_ in Puccini's Turandot and Sister Rose in Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking (Cincinnati Opera). An exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon, Ms. Brueggergosman's first recording with the label, Surprise, was released throughout North America in autumn 2007.

This glittering new production of Idomeneo will be directed by Marshall Pynkoski and choreographed by Jeannette Zingg, with set designs by Gerard Gauci, costumes by Margaret Lamb, lighting by Bonnie Beecher, and Andrew Parrott conducting the Tafelmusik Orchestra. Idomeneo also features the extraordinary American male soprano Michael Maniaci in the role of Idamante, Peggy Kriha Dye as Ilia, Olivier Laquerre as Arbace, Chad Shelton as Idomeneo, Curtis Sullivan as Neptune, with Artists of Atelier Ballet. The production will be sung in Italian with English and French SURTITLESTM.

Many singer-songwriters are fans of Paul McCartney, though it is rare that the opposite is true - as is the case with Ron Sexsmith. Come hear one of Canada's most prolific and acclaimed songwriters debut the music from his new record. Ron will also perform his greatest hits backed by orchestra. The best of both worlds! This concert will be recorded by CBC Radio for future broadcast.

Ontario fans will get a chance to see Lightfoot live this Spring during a special four-city concert tour that includes a two-night stop at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on April 19th and 20th; followed with appearances at Hamilton Place on May 2nd and Centre in the Square in Kitchener on May 3rd. Lightfoot will conclude the tour with a return visit to Toronto's Massey Hall from May 7th through 10^th.

Striking young Russian dynamo Olga Kern, winner of the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition, makes her Toronto debut as soloist in piano concertos by Haydn and Shostakovich.

On May 22, the 30-piece orchestra will perform Arnold Schoenberg's lush Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Aria by Friedrich Gulda, Aria and two tangos by Astor Piazzolla, with accordion solo.

Show One is also presenting the Moscow Virtuosi at Vancouver's Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on May 8.

George and the Destroyers are also notable for undertaking a rigorous touring schedule after appearing throughout the Rolling Stones tour in 1981. After two shows in Boulder, Colorado, George and his band flew to Hawaii and played for only one night. The next night they appeared in Alaska for one show. The following day the band flew to Washington State, met their roadies who had their car and a truck, and continued a one show per state tour for all fifty states in exactly fifty nights. In addition, they played Washington, DC on the same day that they performed a show in Maryland.

Cohen is arguably the greatest singer songwriter of modern times. At his induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, he as recognized by Lou Reed as, "Without question one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a figure whose body of work achieves greater mystery and depth as time goes one." Among those inducted with Cohen were: Madonna, John Mellencamp The Dave Clark Five, and the Ventures.

The much buzzed-about, celeb-packed showcase of Canadian and international talent is the most fan accessible award show on the planet. From the wildest red carpet arrivals to the hottest performances, thousands of music lovers get friendly with their favourite stars...and love every second of it.

Her contributions to country-rock, the bluegrass revival, folk music, and the Americana movement are widely lauded, and in recent years Emmylou Harris certainly has carved out a sound that is uniquely her own. Her 1995 Wrecking Ball was a watershed album for her, combining several world-music elements with acoustic instruments, driving percussion, and a folk/roots flavor, and in general catching audiences by surprise, as Harris yet again reinvented her sound.

Gilberto Gil's Broadband Tour dives headlong into the vertiginous waters of the digital revolution and its accelerated infoways. The theme has coloured the whole of Gil's career: from the time of Tropic·lia, with CÈrebro EletrÙnico [Eletronic Brain] and FuturÌvel [Futurable] (1969), to CibernÈtica (1974), and Parabolicamar· (1991), finally bursting out in 1997, in the double album Quanta, where he brought together many of his reflections on art/science and the new technologies. The disc was preceded by the pioneer launch of his website in April 1996, and by the transmission, online, in the same year, of Pela Internet, the first Brazilian music to be officially launched on the Internet.

The Broadband Tour consists of Arthur Maia: bass; Alex Fonseca: drums; Bem Gil: guitars; Claudio Andrade: pianos; Gustavo de Dalva: percussion; Sergio Chiavazzolli: guitars.

The Saltimbanco Arena Tour will also stop in Hamilton at the Copps Coliseum, August 27 to 31.

Saltimbanco belongs to the emblematic style of Cirque du Soleil - a signature Cirque du Soleil show with a style that borrows from theatre, dance and music and where spectacular costumes, lighting and make-up take pride of place. The current cast of 49 artists,15 of whom were part of the show's original big top tour, hail from Canada and 20 other countries.

Saltimbanco—from the Italian "saltare in banco," which literally means "to jump on a bench"—explores the urban experience in all its myriad forms: the people who live there, their idiosyncrasies and likenesses, families and groups, the hustle and bustle of the street and the towering heights of skyscrapers. Between whirlwind and lull, prowess and poetry, Saltimbanco takes spectators on an allegorical and acrobatic journey into the heart of the city.