Our Recommendations
Indulge your appetite for arts and culture.
With so many exciting arts and culture events happening you can feel overwhelmed. The Music on Main Team is here to help! We’ve carefully chosen a list of wonderful digital and live events to discover and experience. Whether you’re looking for a theatrical diversion or a blockbuster art show, some new dance or a classical concerto, our recommendations is a list of must-see events whenever you’re looking for a hit of culture. Make sure to check back often, as we are always scouting fun events that we think you’ll love!
Our Recommendations are must-see events, some from our Vancouver home base and a few from across the globe that we think you’ll enjoy. We’re your trusted source that you’ll want to come back to every time you’re looking for something new and exciting to discover. If you’re looking for only Music on Main events check here.
Forest Benson Solo Piano Recital
Seventeen-year-old Vancouver pianist Forest Benson is already making his mark with standout achievements, including his Orpheum Theatre debut performing Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Concerto as first-prize winner of the BC Provincial Concerto Competition. If you joined us at the opening of Music on Main’s Summer Pop-Up Concerts, you’ll remember his captivating artistry. Don’t miss his solo piano recital at the Vancouver Academy of Music. Free admission.
7:30PM | KOERNER RECITAL HALL
Amanda Sum & Sam Tudor
Join Sam Tudor & Amanda Sum for an evening of music. This double headline concert features full sets from two of East Vancouver’s favourite songwriters, each performing with full bands and numerous special guests. A celebration of community & catharsis.
Amanda’s writing floats on top of the indie-pop genre, sometimes dipping into jazz or visiting alternative folk. Amanda’s debut full-length record, New Age Attitudes, was released in 2022. Her music video, Different Than Before (directed by Mayumi Yoshida), was JUNO Nominated for Music Video of the Year, and won the SXSW Music Video Jury Award. She aims to champion other under-represented artists in her music work.
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vActory
We’re proud to present vActory on September 19-20 at What Lab (202-1814 Pandora Street)!
The vActory Series is a short-form, cabaret-style presentation series. In the program’s third season, 3 Asian Canadian artists are invited to create a 15- to 20-minute long performance. MC Hilary Wheeler will also be sharing excerpts from her own piece, The List.
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Much Ado About Nothing
“As merry as the day is long.” Two of Shakespeare’s most tumultuous couples—sparring singles Beatrice and Benedick, and young lovers Claudio and Hero—discover all is not as it seems in an idyllic town recovering from war. Will the truth win in this mischievous game of love? Secret love, courtship, and marriage intertwine with darker themes of warfare, deception, and mischief in Much Ado About Nothing. Romance, wit, and mistaken identities power this new staging of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy full of colourful characters, passionate poetry, and Shakespeare’s wittiest wordplay.
Directed by Johnna Wright with additional text by Erin Shields.
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Music for Turtles
Music for Turtles is a multimedia concert featuring acclaimed pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa and visual artist SD Holman. Turtles have lived on the planet for 230 million years, survived 3 mass extinction events, inspired sacred creation stories, and are inextricably entwined with the fate of the natural world, for better or for worse.
Holman and Iwaasa commissioned world premieres by composers Eliot Britton, Emily Doolittle, Glenn Sutherland and Nancy Tam drawing on turtles as a multivalent metaphor. With compositions by Jennifer Butler and Kara Gibbs and images by Holman, Music for Turtles is part love song, part elegy, part demon turtle revenge fantasy, exploring climate grief, natural wonder, interspecies kinship and ecological imaginings.
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WOMEN OF THE FUR TRADE
In eighteen hundred and something something, somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory, three very different women with a preference for twenty-first century slang sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love, and the hot nerd Louis Riel.
This lively historical satire of survival and cultural inheritance shifts perspectives from the male gaze onto women’s power in the past and present through the lens of the rapidly changing world of the Canadian fur trade.
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