Friday, October 16 • 7:30 PM
Market Hall Performing Arts Centre
Victoria Yeh’s Timeless promises a musical detour from the expected — a show built around the violin, yes, but not the polite, museum-piece version of it. This is the instrument unboxed, rewired, and sent travelling across centuries and genres, from baroque refinement to world folk, jazz fusion, and freshly minted original work that refuses to sit still.
At the centre of it all is Victoria Yeh, moving between acoustic and electric violins with the kind of range that makes genre borders look more like suggestions. She’s joined by her band and the Spirit Awakens women’s string orchestra, conducted by Cheryll Chung, for a performance that aims less for recital-hall formality and more for something vivid, expansive, and alive.
Concertgoers have called it “inspiring and unexpected,” which feels about right. Yeh’s reputation rests on exactly that tension: deep classical training fused with a taste for the adventurous, the atmospheric, and the electrified. Her playing has drawn comparisons to boundary-pushers like Jean-Luc Ponty, Jerry Goodman, and Ann Marie Calhoun, which gives some sense of the territory — technically sharp, stylistically fearless, and uninterested in staying in one lane for very long.
A true musical shape-shifter, Yeh has recorded across a striking range of projects, from film and television work to recordings that move through avant-garde textures, hip-hop, electronica, folk, fiddle, world music, and rock. Her latest album, Spirit Awakens, leans into that restless spirit, blending original compositions with the talents of some of Canada’s most respected musicians. Written during her year as Artist-in-Residence at Toronto’s Heliconian Club, the album reflects her long-standing pull toward the meeting point of fusion jazz and classical music.
So no, Timeless is not just an evening for violin purists. It’s for anyone curious about what happens when a traditionally elegant instrument gets handed to someone with both the chops and the nerve to push it somewhere new.
Cabaret: $59 Advance, $74 Door
Tiered Seating: $39 Advance, $44 Door
