Voices of Tomorrow ring out in Music Niagara Festival's upcoming choral series

This Sunday’s concert featuring the Oakville Choir for Children and Youth at Ironwood Cider House marks a number of new beginnings for Music Niagara Festival. 

It’s the first official performance of the 2024 season, the 26th for Music Niagara. As the festival’s founder and artistic director Atis Bankas told The Local recently, this year marks the beginning of a new quarter century for the non-profit organization. 

Over the first 25 years, Music Niagara has evolved into a world-class summer music festival featuring Canadian and international musicians performing a variety of music genres. The offerings have included everything from chamber, choral, vocal and contemporary music as well as country, soul, folk and jazz. 

This year is no different. And five of the first six concerts feature youth choirs in a new series called Young Virtuoso and Voices of Tomorrow. 

Kicking it all off on Sunday will be the singers from Oakville. Music director Maria Conkey is hoping the concert will begin a new, longstanding partnership between her own non-profit group and Music Niagara. 

“We are thrilled and honoured to be opening the season,” Conkey told The Local during a recent phone conversation. “Especially to have young singers open the festival, it shows how Music Niagara is committed to music education and young artists as a whole.”

Conkey oversees seven different ensembles that give children between the ages of four and 18 the opportunity to find their voice. 

“We believe that every child can sing, and that every child should sing,” said Conkey. “We don’t have auditions. Instead, we have a vocal placement process, where we find the right ensemble for each singer. Our mission, our goal is to help each child to find their voice.”

Conkey insists that any child that is interested in singing should be able to do so no matter what their financial situation might be. To that end the Oakville Choir offers bursaries to support choristers. 

For the Father’s Day show, Conkey will be leading an amalgam of members from three different Oakville Choir groups. 

“It’s a special performance ensemble,” explained Conkey. “It’s made up of some of our senior girls choir (United Voices), our senior boys choir (Noble Voices) and our intermediate girls choir (Vibrant Voices). It’s a special ensemble just for this special opener.”

Oakville’s chamber choir, a smaller, select group called Chamber Voices, will also perform one number, Letter from a Girl to the World, which Conkey promised “really reflects the voices of tomorrow. It’s about wishes for the future, wishes for a fresh start. The music we chose for Sunday is Canadian and based on that theme.”

Though Conkey has only been with the Oakville Choir for Children and Youth for two years, the organization recently wrapped up their thirtieth season.

“Many of our members have gone on to be professional musicians,” says Conkey, who is also a conductor at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Choir School and is completing a doctorate in choral conducting at the University of Toronto. “We also have graduates who are engineers, lawyers, and teachers who still make choral singing part of their lives.”

And it’s not lost on Conkey at that Sunday’s concert will be the first at a brand new venue, the new tent at Ironwood Cider House. 

Ironwood’s hospitality office manager Devon Ryback explained that the tent which will host ten Music Niagara concerts this year came about through a relationship between Ironwood owner Richard Liu and the festival.

“We hosted a couple of events last year in the cider house,” Ryback recalled. “This year Karen Lade (Music Niagara’s general manager) reached out looking for a home for a tent that they received a grant for. Richard is a huge music fan, and this is right up his alley. He has actually joined the Music Niagara board.”

The 200-capacity tent is set up about 70 metres behind the building, tucked in between vineyards and orchards. All four walls can be rolled back for an open-air experience or closed to protect against the elements. It’s a picturesque, bucolic location to enjoy some great music.

After Sunday’s show, the Young Virtuoso and and Voices of Tomorrow series continues on Tuesday, June 25 at St. Mark’s Church with the Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco. It’s back to Ironwood on June 26 for the Philippine Madrigal Singers, winners of top prizes in the world’s prestigious choral competitions, including the Grand Prix at the 2016 Concurso Internazionale di Guido d’Arezzo in Arezzo, Italy.

Yip’s Ensembles and the Canadian Youth Chinese Orchestra collaborate for a performance on Sunday, June 30 at St. Mark’s. And the choral series concludes with a special concert from the Monaco Boys Choir at the Mount Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls on Friday, July 5. 

“We have national and international youth choirs,” Bankas said about the series. ”It will be an interesting experience, and it’s something we hope to build on for future seasons, maybe even the return of a choral festival.”

Sunday’s 4:00 p.m. concert is free for the entire family. For tickets to any of this summer’s Music Niagara Festival performances, visit musicniagara.org.