I’ve spent more than my fair share of rush hours on the TTC sandwiched between harried businesspeople, flippant students (and their even more flippant backpacks) and the iPod-blaring irreverants. Recently, police officers have been standing sentinel at Yonge station for the sole purpose of ensuring that we all usher ourselves on and off the subway in an appropriate manner. It is a total madhouse.
In an effort to avoid the ridiculousness of rush hour, I will be an eager attendee of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s (TSO) Afterworks concert next Wednesday, November 25. The TSO has created a special concert series geared specifically toward the busy downtown professional: you’re in by 6:30 p.m. and home by 9 p.m. Each concert is neatly contained in a window of time open to a busy lawyer — a window that conveniently sits right atop rush hour. So next week, after a quick dinner, I will be in a comfortable seat at Roy Thomson Hall, ready to be enveloped in an orchestrated pocket of classical music.
Sadly, if you can’t make it on Wednesday to hear Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, the next Afterworks show isn’t until June 16, 2010. However, you can tune into the Afterworks podcast, Afterbytes, to hear CBC Radio 2 host Tom Allen’s primer on Shostakovich. You can also attend the TSO on any number of other occasions — I’m a big proponent of the one-hour Young People’s Concerts for lawyers and their lawyerlings (read: kids) as well as the Saturday Masterworks series. And if you’re 35 or under, you can get $12 seats to select TSO perofmances through their Tsoundcheck program.
Leanne is an associate at Heenan Blaikie LLP. She spends her free time indulging in art, film, music and literature and swears that culture tastes better than chocolate. Her column will appear every Friday here on lawandstyle.ca.
Photo of TSO Music Director Peter Oundjian by Hasnain Dattu