Dear Subscribers, Patrons and Friends,

Welcome to Consortium’s new website! It is a work in progress that we hope you will visit often, to keep yourself informed about our plans for bringing our music, from ‘Baroque and Beyond!’ to you.

At a recent board meeting the directors of Consortium Aurora Borealis reluctantly made the decision to postpone the production of the seven-concert series planned for 2020-21 until next season. Our top priority in doing so was to keep our audience, musicians and volunteers safe. Government restrictions imposed for controlling the spread of the Covid-19 virus have made ‘business as usual’ impossible for Consortium. We are happy to report that all of the musicians whom Consortium’s Artistic Director, Elizabeth Ganiatsos, had contracted for the postponed concerts have agreed to the rescheduling of their performances of the same works during our 2021-22 season. We are asking all our subscribers who have paid in advance for their 2020-21 season’s passes to watch for an email from Consortium in which they will be offered choices regarding the disposition of their season pass payments.

We want our loyal audience members to know how the pandemic, and the resulting government restrictions, have influenced our decision to postpone our planned season. At the present time our concert audience is limited to a maximum of 50 socially-distanced people. Our use of St. Paul’s United Church is strictly regulated. We must enforce rules about masking and hand cleaning. We must ensure that there is adequate separation of audience members from each other, from our musicians and from our volunteers. We cannot use the church elevator to transport our disabled patrons to our performance space. We are responsible for post-concert sanitizing of the venue and all surfaces in it that have been touched. Some of our out-of-town guest artists did not want to risk travelling during the pandemic. Many of our subscribers and other audience members have let us know that they feel the same reluctance about attending our concerts, or any large gathering, at this time. We have heard and heeded these concerns and restrictions.

Now we are focused on devising new ways of providing opportunities for our local musicians to perform, and for our audience members to hear, our music—our ’food for the soul’—during this, our 42nd season. In the weeks ahead, please look for postings on this website regarding possible future mini-concerts, videos of excerpts from Consortium’s past performances, music-education programming and special events, both live and on-line. We hope you will enjoy Consortium’s innovative ’musical offerings’ during the coming months.

If you wish to support Consortium’s work in producing its new music programming, your donation will be most welcome. Please see the ‘Donate‘ section for our mailing address.

For our latest news, and comments from the public, please visit our Facebook page, at
https://www.facebook.com/ConsortiumAuroraBorealis

Thank you for your patronage, support and friendship.

The Board of Directors
Consortium Aurora Borealis