The Ukulele Orchestra of Toronto premiered TWO virtual performance videos this afternoon. The group worked very hard to learn their parts, record them and let us put them together virtually.

In both of these, our director, Eve Goldberg, mixed the audio submissions from each member and I put the final music tracks to a couple of video montages.

The first is the hymn from Finlandia by Jean Sibelius, we had members send in photos of their favourite places in the world and we put them to the music along with the beautiful lyrics of this melody.

In the second video, we just recorded ourselves during one of our Tuesday night Zoom rehearsals and sent Eve our recorded audio parts separately. Voila! An MTV style snapshot of this incredible time we are living through, and it’s set to Bird of Paradise, a beautiful song by Tony Bird with such a great message about what’s important in this life.

As we get closer to the anniversary of our last rehearsal together, I’m also feeling really thankful that the members of the orchestra are persevering through the pandemic and continuing to create with together, these moments of musical joy, despite the chaos of the time.