From the Bimah to the stage…

Conceived for the congregation’s hundred and eightieth anniversary year: a fourth visit by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal to a room it has played three times in its entire history.

Rafael Payare conducts the orchestra and the OSM Chorus in Haydn’s The Creation, chosen for the double meaning — the oratorio, and the creation of Shaar Hashomayim, whose hundred and eightieth year is being celebrated in 2026–2027. Before it, Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, with the cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Zelermyer sings the tenor solos, with the soprano Anna-Sophie Neher and the bass Alex Halliday.

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Two lawyers from the same small city in what is now Ukraine gave international law the words genocide and crimes against humanity. Neither knew the other. Both lost their families to the man they would help to put on trial at Nuremberg.

Philippe Sands told that story in East West Street, and then turned it into an evening: he narrates, the soprano Natalie Dessay narrates alongside him, the Metropolitan Opera baritone Laurent Naouri sings, and Guillaume de Chassy plays — Bach, Rachmaninoff, and Leonard Cohen. It has sold out in New York, London, Berlin, Sydney, Kigali and Lviv itself.

Zelermyer joins the company for two nights: at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto on 1 November, for the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and the following evening at The Shaar. It is the second of two Sands programmes he sings this autumn, after Rupture / Justice at the same festival in October.

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Zelermyer had appeared on multi-cantor concerts of this kind three times as a guest — Boca Raton in 2008, Toronto in 2012 and again in 2016. In 2024 he brought one to his own building.

Five cantors on one platform, accompanied by Raymond Goldstein of the Jerusalem Great Synagogue — Zelermyer's own teacher at the Tel Aviv Cantorial Institute — with a chamber ensemble. A portion of the proceeds went to the Emotional Trauma and PTSD Centre at the Sourasky Medical Centre in Tel Aviv, chosen in the aftermath of October 7.

He had wanted to stage it for years. His reason for its urgency was simple: fewer and fewer synagogues now have a full-time cantor at all.

Photograph — Ryan Blau

The most ambitious thing the congregation had ever attempted, and the first concert after the pandemic. It was built around the nine biblical verses inscribed on the sanctuary walls — with high-definition projection thrown onto those same walls as the music played, from a video wall standing more than thirty feet high behind the platform.

The programme ran from traditional liturgical music through Bernstein and Broadway into outright pop, on the theory that a synagogue audience can be surprised. Of the verse above the ark — know before whom you stand — Zelermyer has said he reads it less as an admonition than as a job description: the clergy stands before the congregation as the conduit for their aspirations, and that is not an easy thing to be.

Part of the two-year global centenary. Rather than assemble an evening of highlights, the programme set Bernstein's own music — the Chichester Psalms, West Side Story, Candide, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Concerto for Orchestra — beside the Mahler and Copland that formed him.

It was also the first time the choirs of Shaar Hashomayim and St. Matthias' Anglican Church — which stands directly across the street — had sung together. That was deliberate: an argument, made in music rather than in speeches, about what neighbours can do.

The evening was hosted by Jamie Bernstein, the composer's eldest daughter, who narrated tribute concerts around the world through the centenary years.

Ten years earlier, at a dinner, Kent Nagano had asked why the OSM travels to Notre-Dame every Christmas to perform sacred music but had never come to The Shaar. Zelermyer's answer was that it was a good question. The two then spent a decade finding the right work.

They settled on Elijah, which Mendelssohn composed in 1846 — the year Congregation Shaar Hashomayim was founded. It was the orchestra's third visit to the synagogue in its history, and its first in more than twenty-five years. Nagano had not conducted the work since 1979.

The evening opened with a commissioned fanfare receiving its world premiere. Zelermyer sang Obadiah and — as he put it — sometimes just the Tenor.

Photograph — Ryan Blau

Photograph — Ryan Blau

A secular collaboration with the McGill Chamber Orchestra, described by its writer as an opera without the histrionics — a documentary with a live orchestra.

The music came first; the subject was found afterwards, when a member of the men's choir was asked for a theme and refused the usual cast of generals and dictators. He asked instead about the women, and came back with four: Charlotte Delbo, the French Resistance fighter sent to Auschwitz; Ruth Gruber, the New York Times journalist made a commissioned general by Roosevelt; Hannah Senesh, the Hungarian paratrooper; and Irena Sendler, who took some 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. The narrative he wrote was read by women, over film of the four.

The evening included the world premiere of Cantata for the Unsung.

A cantata for two cantors, narrator, orchestra and children's choir, first performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles and brought by Zelermyer to Montreal.

The work sets symphonic arrangements of the golden age of German cantorial music — Lewandowski, Sulzer, Birnbaum — against virtual architectural reconstructions of the synagogues destroyed on the night of 9 November 1938. The visuals come from an exhibition covering fifteen German cities, among them Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and Nuremberg.

Sacred Echoes remains available to present elsewhere.

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The congregation’s 165th anniversary concert, in the main sanctuary with a stage built out over the bimah and a screen above it: an evening of music written for the screen and the stage, produced and directed by Stephen Glass and hosted by the CTV news anchor Tarah Schwartz.

Zelermyer sang it with the soprano Leah Edwards and the actor Eddie Aronson, with the 165th Anniversary Symphony Orchestra. The evening honoured the congregation’s forty-nine members, officers and companions of the Order of Canada and the Order of the British Empire.

The poster makes the argument before a note is sung: a shtetl sketched across the top, and along the bottom the Warners Theatre marquee advertising Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer — the film in which a cantor’s son leaves the synagogue for the stage. Between those two images lies the journey the evening traced, cantorial singing carried out of Eastern Europe and onto the concert platform.

The evening was the brainchild of Rabbi Dr. Allan Nadler, the academic and lover of cantorial music who also narrated it. Zelermyer sang it with Cantor Asher Hainovitz of the Yeshurun Central Synagogue in Jerusalem and the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir, in a multimedia staging presented by the congregation’s Hazzan Nathan Mendelson Music Foundation. Stephen Glass’s dramatic instincts made the journey theatre as well as instruction — teach and entertain at once, which is the brief every one of these evenings works to.

It also opened the Montreal International Yiddish Theatre Festival — which is to say the synagogue hosted the opening of a theatre festival, in a concert about how the two came to share an audience.

The earliest of these evenings, and in a sense the argument all the others are still making. Richard Tucker was the Jewish boy from Brooklyn who became the Metropolitan Opera's greatest star for three decades and went on singing the High Holy Days as a cantor throughout. He never accepted that the two things were separate, and neither has Zelermyer.

The concert took shape after a meeting with Tucker’s son Barry in New York and months of research, drawn from Zelermyer’s operatic knowledge; Stephen Glass’s stagecraft turned it into an evening. It moved between operatic, cantorial, liturgical, Israeli, Broadway and popular repertoire, cut with archival footage of Tucker on The Voice of Firestone, The Bell Telephone Hour and The Ed Sullivan Show.

The older generation, Zelermyer said at the time, already knows the name. The younger one needs the legacy.

Barry Tucker lent him his father's cantor's hat and tallit, and he sang the evening in them.

The research and materials assembled for that evening have since travelled. In December 2022 the programme formed the basis of Richard Tucker's Legacy: A Chicago Celebration at Anshe Emet Synagogue — the 20th Annual Dr. Arnold H. Kaplan Concert — with soprano Angel Blue and tenor Matthew Polenzani, hosted by Roger Pines of Lyric Opera of Chicago, and with Barry Tucker again in the room.

Sixty years of the State of Israel, marked with a full orchestra, two choirs and a screen the width of the sanctuary. The congregation stood for it.

Zelermyer sang alongside Cantor Alisa Pomerantz-Boro and Cantor Chaim David Berson, with the McGill Chamber Orchestra under Boris Brott and Stephen Glass directing the music.

The first of them, two years into his tenure — and the evening that established the form every concert on this page has followed since: symphony orchestra and chorus in the main sanctuary, a screen above the ark, and a congregation filling the room to the back of the balcony. Produced and musically directed by Stephen Glass, who shared the podium with Boris Brott.