THE DIY MAESTRO

How to respond to a millionaire who's willing to pay big money to conduct your orchestra? The TSO said yes. Its musicians said, Seriously? And Mandle Cheung got to raise his baton at Roy Thomson Hall

- BY NAOMI BUCK

THE FIRST TIME I heard Mandle Cheung’s name was at rehearsal this past May. As I, along with the other 100 members of the Amadeus Choir, pulled out copies of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, our conductor, Kathleen Allan, announced that we would be performing the piece the following month with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra—under “Mandle.” A murmur travelled through the rows.

I didn’t know who or what “Mandle” was, but many of my fellow choristers did. The 78-year-old multimillionaire and tech entrepreneur had made small waves in Toronto's classical music community. Without any formal musical training, Cheung has been paying to conduct the greatest works of the classical canon with the best musicians he can find. Opinions varied wildly. Some said he couldn’t conduct to save his life, others that he was actually quite good. Some called him an egomaniac, others a true patron of the arts. There was consensus on one thing only: Mandle Cheung paid well.

Mahler’s second symphony, also known as the Resurrection Symphony, is the late-Romantic composer’s 90-minute reckoning with death. It’s an incredibly powerful piece, a marvel to perform and almost overwhelming to listen to. It is not for beginners. Over the next couple of weeks, our choir rehearsed with Allan. She turned the piece inside out, as is her way, dissecting its dissonant chords, obsessing over its German diction, pointing out its musical antecedents. Allan holds our choir in the palm of her hand: when she asks us to shimmer, we shimmer. “Swim like a school of fish,” she says, and suddenly all voices are singing as one.