With an emphasis on fostering new talent, the Classical Music Consort is an orchestra committed to enlightening audiences and attracting a new generation of Canadians to the resonance and relevance of Baroque and Classical music through a combination of historically informed interpretation on authentic instruments and innovative presentation.

Founded in 2006 under the direction of harpsichordist/conductor Ashiq Aziz, the ensemble pursues a variety of projects designed to promote and attract new audiences to classical music, including concert performance, commissioning of new work, and staged opera.

The orchestra’s recent work has included a complete cycle of Haydn’s twelve London Symphonies, as part of a year-long festival of concerts over the course of 2009 commemorating the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death. Programmed among these performances was a new work for solo piano by Canadian pianist/composer Adam Sherkin, inspired by the music of Haydn and his contemporaries. Since 2008, the CMC has collaborated with the multi-disciplinary performance company Opera Erratica, lead by director and designer Patrick Eakin Young. Together, they have developed the critically-acclaimed Underground/Opera series dedicated to breaking boundaries and building new audiences for classical music by performing innovative and edgy interpretations of opera in non-traditional venues, with modern staging and video projections. Of its most recent Underground/Opera production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Tamara Bernstein wrote in the Globe and Mail that “it was impossible not to be drawn into this production, which marks a new level of sophistication for baroque opera in Toronto.” On the success of its productions, Underground/Opera has become a major part of the CMC’s programming and an important tool for building new audiences for its work.

Forthcoming projects for the CMC include a series of four concerts co-presented with Toronto’s St. James Cathedral dedicated to Handel’s ravishing lesser-known works, culminating in a performance of his masterfully written and operatically conceived oratorio, La Resurezzione. The CMC will continue in August with an original Underground/Opera project entitled Orlando/Lunaire, a multimedia video cabaret weaving together movements from Handel’s Orlando with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, in an industrial shed in Toronto’s Dufferin Grove neighbourhood. Following this will be a performance of Rameau’s Pygmalion in December at the Four Seasons Centre’s Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, as part of the COC’s Free Lunchtime Concert Series.