The Toronto Chamber Orchestra draws its players from the best orchestras in Toronto, with principal players from the Toronto Symphony, the Canadian Opera Orchestra, the Canadian Ballet Orchestra, Tafelmusik and Aradia Ensemble. Many of the players also play baroque instruments and all are well-versed in stylistic issues from the eighteenth-century to the modern day. As such, the orchestra’s approach is to extend to all periods of music the transparency and purity of tone one achieves with period instruments. In addition to Principal Conductor Kevin Mallon, the Toronto Chamber Orchestra has worked with international soloists including Patrick Gallois, Tom Stacy, Guy Few and Nadina Mackie Jackson and conductors Nicholas McGeegan and Alain Trudel. The orchestra has made over twenty recordings for Naxos.

Irish/Canadian conductor Kevin Mallon studied composition with Peter Maxwell Davies and conducting with John Eliot Gardiner alongside singing and Baroque violin.

He served as concertmaster with Le Concert Spirituel and Les Arts Florissants in Paris before moving to Canada to take up posts with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and the University of Toronto.

In 1999 he founded the Aradia Ensemble, with whom he has toured widely and has made over 50 recordings for Naxos.

In Ireland, he was appointed Artistic Director of Opera 2005, formed to celebrate Cork’s tenure as European Capital of Culture.

In 2009 he began working with Odessa Opera, Ukraine, conducting productions in Odessa before touring across Holland, Belgium and Spain.

Mallon is Music Director of Thirteen Strings Chamber Orchestra in Ottawa and has recently been appointed Artistic Director of Symphony in the Barn in Ontario.

For more information, visit www.kevinmallonmusic.ca.

Born in Vienna, the composer and violinist Karl von Ordonez was active in Vienna as an amateur violinist and violist, playing chamber music in the houses of the minor nobility to which he belonged. His official appointment as land registrar in Lower Austria came to an end in 1783, when tuberculosis forced his retirement both from government service and from his musical activities.

Stage Works
Ordonez won some success with his marionette opera Alceste, a parody of Gluck performed at Eszterháza, where Haydn directed the musical establishment. His Singspiel Diesmal hat der Mann den Willen! was staged at the Vienna Burgtheater and in Berlin.

Orchestral and Chamber Music
Ordonez composed a great deal of chamber music, including 27 authenticated string quartets, a Violin Concerto and 73 symphonies, music that won fairly wide dissemination in his lifetime. He has some importance in the development of the forms that were to dominate in the first quarter of the 18th century.