Winter's Delight: Musical Merriment With Good Company

Presented by:

North Wind Concerts

Event Details

Happy new year! On January 24, The Musicians of the Egg gather to present music full of warmth and good cheer from the European Renaissance. Chansons, madrigals, dance tunes, motets and fantasias from the 15th and 16^th centuries, performed with voices, lute, hurdy gurdy, flutes, recorders and percussion, are guaranteed to brighten up January’s darkness. Join us for musical merriment as we celebrate the renewal of our musical collaboration with music by Lassus, Byrd, Campion, Weelkes, Crequillon, Eccard, Morley and others performed in the beautiful acoustics of St. Thomas’s Anglican Church on Huron Street.

 Michele Deboer, soprano; Laura Pudwell, mezzo; Cory Knight, tenor; Olivier Laquerre, baritone; Ben Grossman, percussion & hurdy gurdy; Alison Melville, recorder & flute; Jonathan Stuchbery, lute.

Presented with the generous support of Greig Dunn.

Featured Program

About the musicians:

The Musicians of the Egg are former members of the Toronto Consort and esteemed colleagues from past projects. We are delighted to be making music together again, prompted by enthusiastic encouragement from our audience and friends, a generous donation from a long-time and very kind supporter, and an invitation to perform at the Toronto Music Garden in July 2025. That wonderful opportunity reminded us how much we enjoy making music together, and how many people enjoy listening – truly an inspiration to carry on.

 Why this name? When the Music Garden publicist needed a promotional group photo in a hurry, we didn’t have access to one, and individual headshots wouldn’t convey our camaraderie. So, we searched for a painting from the European Renaissance, the same era as much of our music, and found The Concert in the Egg. Painted by a follower of Bosch, the image depicts several ordinary-looking people making music together in a large egg, gathered around a book of music and joined by various birds and other creatures…And as for a group name, we couldn’t use the one by which we were formerly known, and so The Musicians of the Egg was hatched. That the egg is also a common symbol for renewed life just makes for extra resonance.

Soprano Michele DeBoer, based in the GTA, has performed widely as both a soloist and ensemble member with many leading musical organizations. Her particular love of early music led to long-standing engagements with Tafelmusik and the former Toronto Consort, though her interests have always been broad, ranging from new music projects to everything in between. Highlights of her career include performing L’Amour in Lully’s Persée with Opera Atelier in Toronto and Versailles; singing in Tehillim and Music for 18 Musicians with Soundstreams for Steve Reich’s 80th birthday celebration; and providing the voice for “The Wedding Song” by Mychael Danna for the television series Camelot. Michele is also a registered Speech-Language Pathologist and supports clients from toddlers to adults in all areas of communication.

Ben Grossman is a busy musician and sound artist: improviser, studio musician, composer, and noisemaker. He works in many fields, having played on over 100 CDs, soundtracks for film and television, composition and sound design for theatre, dance, installations, work designed for radio transmission, and live performances spanning early medieval music to experimental electronics. Ben's tools of choice are electronics, percussion, and especially, the vielle à roue (hurdy gurdy), a contemporary electro-acoustic string instrument with roots in the European middle ages. Through extended techniques, and sometimes electronic processing, Ben seeks to use it as a physical interface into sound creation, spontaneous composition and the exploration of acoustics, form and extended aesthetics. www.macrophone.org

Tenor Cory Knight holds a Master of Arts in Historical Performance Practice from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland and an Advanced Diploma in vocal performance from the Glenn Gould School. Described as “that rare, wonderful, lyric tenor who turns every note he sings into gold” (Musical Toronto), Cory performs as both an ensemblist and soloist. He has sung at major festivals across Europe, including the Utrecht Early Music Festival, Trigonale Early Music Festival, and the Baroque Music Festival in Ambronay, France. Highlights of his work in Canada include performances with Pacific Opera Victoria, Les Violons du Roy, Opera Atelier, La Chapelle de Québec, and Soundstreams. Cory also appears on several recordings, including Luzzasco Luzzaschi Madrigals, Motets, and Instrumental Music with the vocal ensemble Profeti della Quinta, and Frescobaldi & the Glories of Rome with The Toronto Consort. In addition to his musical career, Cory is an elementary teacher with the Toronto District School Board.

Canadian baritone Olivier Laquerre has built an international career that cheerfully oscillates between powdered wigs, battlefield brass, and the occasional philosophical egg. A long-standing member of Opera Atelier in Toronto, he has appeared in more than twenty-five productions with the company, including the title role in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Arbace (Idomeneo), Achilla (Giulio Cesare), Pluto (L’Orfeo), and the unforgettable dual portrayal of Céphée and Méduse in Lully’s Persée, performed in Toronto and at the Opéra Royal de Versailles and featured in a CBC documentary — saving, as one should, Papageno (The Magic Flute) for dessert. He is also a regular guest at the Boston Early Music Festival, appearing in numerous productions and recordings. More recently, Olivier portrayed the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Celestial Revolutions for a Toronto-based early music collective and appeared as Osman Pacha in Grétry’s La Caravane du Caire in France. A sought-after concert soloist, he performs widely across Canada. When not singing baroque heroes and rogues, Olivier is an active member of the Canadian Armed Forces, where he serves as a horn player and has just completed two consecutive seasons as Drum Major of the Ceremonial Guard on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

After starting the recorder in a school classroom in London (UK), Alison Melville’s subsequent career as a player of recorder and historical flutes has taken her across Canada and the USA and to New Zealand, Iceland, Japan and Europe, most recently to Spain. Some highlights: playing on the soundtracks of The Tudors, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, a Midsummer commercial for IKEA, and for CBC’s The Friendly Giant; solo shows in inner-city London (UK) schools; an improvised music-and-movement duet with an acrobat in northern Finland; and a summer of concerts in prisons across southwestern Ontario. She appears regularly with Tafelmusik, is a past member of Ensemble Polaris and the Toronto Consort, and has played with many other ensembles, companies and festivals. Alison has been heard on CBC/R-C, BBC, RNZ, NPR, Iceland’s RUV, and on over 65 CDs, including several critically acclaimed solo recordings. She taught for many years at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and for other universities, colleges and workshops across North America. www.alisonmelville.com

Grammy-nominated mezzosoprano Laura Pudwell has established a superb reputation through her performances in London, Paris, Salzburg, Houston, Vienna, and Boston. Laura sings a vast repertoire ranging from early music to contemporary works and has received international acclaim for her recordings. She is best known in Boston for her appearances in operas presented by the Boston Early Music Festival. A frequent guest of many national and international presenters, she has had the privilege of working with many outstanding conductors, including Hans Graf, Hervé Niquet, Andrew Parrott, Ivars Taurins, David Fallis, Brian Jackson, John Sinclair, Bernard Labadie, Lydia Adams, Howard Dyck and Robert Cooper. On the opera stage, Laura has performed across Canada with such companies as Opera Atelier, the Calgary Opera, Vancouver Early Music, and Festival Vancouver, as well as with the Houston Grand Opera and the Cleveland Opera. Her many roles include Cornelia (Giulio Cesare), Marcelina (Le Nozze di Figaro), Nerone and Arnalta (L’Incoronazione di Poppea), Mrs. Quickly (Falstaff), and Dido/Sorceress (Dido and Aeneas), the Paris production of which also was an award-winning recording. She is a regular participant in many festivals, including Festival Vancouver, the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the Banff Summer Festival, the Elora Festival, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Grand River Baroque Festival, and the WinterPark Bach Festival in Orlando. Laura is a past member of the Toronto Consort and is a frequent guest soloist with Tafelmusik, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Toronto Chamber Choir, Symphony Nova Scotia, the St. Lawrence Choir, Le Concert Spirituel, Chorus Niagara, and the Menno Singers. Laura lives in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario with her husband and two children.

Jonathan Stuchbery is a Toronto-based specialist in instruments of the lute and guitar family.  A sought-after performer praised for his “energizing precision” (The Whole Note) and “wistful lute performance” (La Scena Musicale), he has shared the stage across Canada and abroad with ensembles and soloists including Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Arion Orchestre Baroque, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Early Music Alberta, Rosa Barocca, Capella Intima, and Dame Emma Kirkby. As Duo Oriana with soprano Sinéad White, Jonathan has toured throughout Canada, the UK, and Ireland, including features with the English Lute Society (London), at Windsor Castle, and with Early Music America, and released a first CD ‘How Like a Golden Dream’ in 2023 under the Leaf Music label. He is also a member of Toronto based renaissance vocal quintet Diapente. A passionate educator, he has been an instructor at the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute, Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School Pacific (Vancouver), Sinfín Armonia (Ecuador) and the Pass Early Music Festival (Lethbridge), in addition to teaching private students at home in Toronto. Jonathan is also interested in composing and collaborating with composers to develop new repertoire for historical instruments. Thanks to a 2024 Toronto Arts Council grant, he has set four newly commissioned poems by Toronto writers to music for Duo Oriana, and he was part of the creation of multiple works for the Cygnus Trio’s 2018 album Amalgam.  Jonathan studied early music performance at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, after earning a Bachelor of Music in Guitar and Lute from McGill’s Schulich School of Music. Off stage catch him walking his pug Satie through Christie Pits or whiling the hours away drinking tea.