FEATURED GUEST FACULTY

Born in Montreal and Toronto respectively, Canadian pianists Anne Louise-Turgeon and Edward Turgeon have been playing together since 1988, and performing professionally since 1996. Critically acclaimed as one of the top piano duos of our time, the Turgeons have given hundreds of performances, including a European debut at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, and a New York debut at Weill Recital Hall, to name a few. Festival appearances include Sanibel Chamber Music, San Francisco International Chamber Music, Montreal International Duo Piano, Duettissimo (Minsk), Novosibirsk International Duo Piano, Festival Miami, New York Summer Music Festival, Austin Chamber Music, Algoma Fall Festival, Chicago International Two Piano Festival, Norfolk Chamber and the World Piano Conference (Serbia), to name a few.

View Duo Turgeon’s website to find out more.

RESIDENT FACULTY

Corey Lyle Gemmell, violinist, is a native of Hamilton, Ontario. He has distinguished himself as a soloist and chamber musician with performances in Canada, Germany, the United States and China. He has performed much of the standard concerto repertoire with orchestra. Mr. Gemmell is concertmaster of Orchestra Toronto, Mississauga Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir Orchestra, the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra, and Symphony on the Bay in Hamilton. He has also performed in this role with the Boris Brott National Academy Orchestra, Elora Festival Orchestra, the Toronto Concert Orchestra and Esprit Orchestra.

An avid chamber musician, Mr. Gemmell is the violinist for Ensemble Vivant. He is also a member of the Elgin String Quartet as well as the National Piano Trio. He is a frequent guest at New Music Concerts, with whom he went on tour to Beijing in 2016, performing and leading workshops at the national Conservatory of Beijing, as well as a guest with the Chamber Music Society of Mississauga, Array Music, the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society as well as
chamber series across Ontario and Canada. Mr. Gemmell has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and is a member of the Royal College of Examiners. He is presently on faculty at the National Music Camp of Canada. His students have competed successfully in regional festivals as well as the CMC and have attended universities across Canada and the United States. He adjudicates many regional music festivals across Ontario and has served in this capacity for the Provincials and the Canadian Music Competition.

Mr. Gemmell most recently completed several recordings for the series “The Mozart Effect” at the Glenn Gould Studio in solo, chamber and orchestral works of W.A. Mozart and can also be heard in recordings with Ensemble Vivant. He has also recorded sonatas by Brahms, Ravel, Robert A. Baker and Mozart and works by David Eagle and Hope Lee. He was one of the contributing artists to record the Royal Conservatory of Music’s 2013 release of their violin syllabus on compact disc.

Mr. Gemmell performs on a violin made for him in 2005 by renowned Toronto luthier, Hratch Armenious and another made by the Italian violin maker, Cipriano Briani, made in Milan in 1907.

FEATURED GUEST FACULTY

Canadian-born violinist Lara St. John has been described as “something of a phenomenon” by The Strad and as a “high-powered soloist” by The New York Times.

She has performed as a soloist with the orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, and with the Boston Pops, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, NDR Symphony, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Ireland, Amsterdam Symphony, Brazilian Symphony, Sao Paulo Symphony, China Philharmonic, Hong Kong Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, Kyoto Symphony, and the orchestras of Brisbane, Adelaide, and Auckland, among many others.

St. John has traveled to Latin America for appearances with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the Sao Paulo Symphony, Rio de Janeiro’s Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira, SODRE in Montevideo, and the Sociedad Filarmónica de Lima in Peru.

The Los Angeles Times wrote “Lara St. John happens to be a volcanic violinist with a huge, fabulous tone that pours out of her like molten lava. She has technique to burn and plays at a constant high heat.”

St. John created her own label, Ancalagon, in 1999, and has recorded with the Royal Philharmonic, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and The Knights, for which she won the Juno award in 2011 for her Mozart album. Her Bach: The Six Sonatas and Partitas album was the best-selling double album on iTunes in 2007.

In 2014, her Schubert album with Berlin Philharmonic harpist Marie- Pierre Langlamet, cellist Ludwig Quandt, and soprano Anna Prohaska was chosen as one of The Best CDs of Spring by Der Tagsesspiegel. MDR Figaro recommended the album for its “boundless enchantment.” Her 2015 album: Shiksa, had All About Jazz saying “Music like this is beyond imagination and talent. It exists only in the loosely-held molecules found on the razor’s edge of Creation.”

St. John began playing the violin when she was two years old. She made her first appearance as soloist with orchestra at age four, and her European debut with the Gulbenkian Orchestra when she was 10. She toured Spain, France, Portugal, and Hungary at ages 12 and 13, entered the Curtis Institute at 13, and spent her first summer at Marlboro three years later. Her teachers have included Felix Galimir and Joey Corpus.

She performs on the 1779 “Salabue” Guadagnini thanks to an anonymous donor.

www.larastjohn.com

FEATURED GUEST FACULTY

Pianist Corey Hamm is establishing a unique musical profile performing widely in North America and in Asia as both a soloist and as a chamber musician. His CD of Frederic Rzewski’s hour-long solo piano epic The People United Will Never Be Defeated! won Spotify’s Best Classical Recording 2014, and Best Classical Recording at the 2014 Western Canadian Music Awards. Further recording plans include the complete works for piano by Henri Dutilleux, and a CD of solo works written for him by Canadian composers.

Corey Hamm has commissioned, premiered and recorded over 200 works by composers from all over the world. His most extensive collection of commissioned works includes over 60 pieces for PEP (Piano and Erhu Project). Some of these works are already released on two volumes of PEP CDs with two more to come in 2017 and 2018.

He has also commissioned dozens of works for The Nu:BC Collective and for Hammerhead Consort. As a founding member of Hammerhead Consort, he received the 1993 Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award, and was winner of the 1992 National Chamber Music Competition. Dr. Hamm is an award-winning Associate Professor of Piano at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is on the Piano Faculty of the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at NEC in Boston. His beloved teachers include Lydia Artymiw, Marek Jablonski, Stéphane Lemelin, Ernesto Lejano, and Thelma Johannes O’Neill.

www.coreyhammpiano.com

Described as a violinist with ‘chops to burn, and rock solid musicianship’ (The Whole Note, TORONTO), Canadian violinist Véronique Mathieu enjoys an exciting career as a soloist, chamber musician, and music educator. Recent engagements have taken her throughout Europe and Asia, and she continues to work extensively with composers. Her CD ARGOT was recently featured on a BBC series dedicated to the music of Lutoslawski, and receives frequent airplay in the US. Recent highlights include the Canadian premiere of Marc-André Dalbavie’s violin concerto with Esprit Orchestra, a performance of John Corigliano’s Chaconne during the composer’s 80th birthday celebrations, the release of a second CD with pianist Stephanie Chua, and numerous recitals throughout North America.

Véronique has performed as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America, and the United States. She is a prizewinner of the 2012 Eckhardt-Gramatté Contemporary Music Competition, the 2010 Krakow International Contemporary Music Competition, and a three-time winner of the Canada Council Bank of Instruments Competition. Ms. Mathieu holds the David L. Kaplan Chair in Music at the University of Saskatchewan where she serves as an Associate Professor of Violin. She previously served on the faculty at the
University of Kansas and State University of New York, in Buffalo. An avid contemporary music performer, Véronique commissioned and premiered many works by American and Canadian composers, and recorded for the CD series New Music at Indiana University, the label of Radio-Canada, Centrediscs, PARMA, Naxos, and Pheromone.

https://www.veroniquemathieu.net

FEATURED GUEST FACULTY

In July 1986, four young musicians, based in Detroit and just beginning their professional careers, performed together for the first time as the Lafayette String Quartet. Today the LSQ continues to flourish with its original personnel: violinists Ann Elliott-Goldschmid and Sharon Stanis, violist Joanna Hood, and cellist Pamela Highbaugh Aloni. For five years, the LSQ remained in Detroit, where its members taught at the Center for Creative Studies/Institute of Music and Dance and at nearby Oakland University. Meanwhile, the LSQ itself received coaching from two of the world’s most esteemed quartets—the Amadeus and the Alban Berg—and from the violinist Rostislav Dubinsky, of the legendary Borodin Quartet, who served as the women’s “musical mentor” until his death in 1997. The LSQ’s extraordinary musicianship was recognized early on. Already in 1988, it was ranked among the magazine Musical America’s “Young Artists to Watch,” and in its first years it won the Grand prize at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and prizes at the Portsmouth (now City of London) International String Quartet Competition, and the Chicago Discovery Competition. As winners of the 1988 Cleveland String Quartet Competition, the LSQ had the opportunity to study for two years with the Cleveland Quartet at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York. In 1991, the four women became artists-in-residence at the University of Victoria’s School of Music, in British Columbia— positions they still hold today. They received honorary doctorates from University Canada West and were honored with the inaugural Craigdarroch Award for Excellence in Artistic Expression in 2010 from the University of Victoria. Besides teaching and performing (alone and with many colleagues) at the university, the LSQ makes a significant impact on the city of Victoria, through concerts—for instance, serving as section leaders of the Galiano Ensemble—and outreach activities, including 

advocating for music in public schools and administering the annual Lafayette Health Awareness Forum, founded in 2006. The LSQ has performed across Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe, with concerts often allied with masterclasses and workshops; they had a close and lasting relationship with the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon while playing on the set of Amatis owned by the institution. They have collaborated with distinguished colleagues including bassist Gary Karr, clarinetist James Campbell, flutist Eugenia Zukerman, violinists Andrew Dawes and Gary Levinson, violists James Dunham, Atar Arad, and Yariv Aloni, Cellists Paul Katz, and the late Tanya Prochazka. Pianists including Luba Edlina Dubinsky, Jane Coop, Robert Silverman, Ronald Turini, Stéphane Lemelin, Alexander Tselyakov, Baya Kakouberi and Flavio Varani. They often collaborate with other string quartets including the Saguenay (Alcan), the New Zealand, the Penderecki, the Molinari, the Emily Carr, and the Quarteto Latinoamericano. The four women also maintain separate careers as solo and chamber-music performers, teachers, and adjudicators. The LSQ carries a large, wide-ranging repertoire, from the classical period to the present, and has commissioned music from (and in some cases collaborated closely with) composers including Murray Adaskin, John Burke, Justin Haynes, David Jaffe, R. Murray Schafer, Eugene Weigel, and Kelly Marie Murphy. They have performed the complete Beethoven Cycle, during the 2000-2001 season, the quartets of the Second Viennese school with the Molinari Quartet in 2013, and in celebration of their thirty years together, the quartet performed the complete cycle of string quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich in the 2016-17 season. Since 1990, the LSQ has released CDs on the Dorian, Centrediscs, and other labels (including its own). Its discography includes major quartets by Borodin, Debussy, Grieg, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovsky; Dvořák’s piano quintets (with Antonin Kubalek); and four CDs of music by Adaskin, for his AdLar label. Its 2002 CBC 

Records disc Death and the Maiden, featuring music by Schubert, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, and Rebecca Clarke, won the Western Canadian Music Award for Outstanding Classical Recording. It recorded Michael Longton’s Almost Nothing Like Purple Haze for the 2011 CD Jimi Hendrix Uncovered, and has recently released a CD together with Alexander Tselyakov of the quintets of Dmitri Shostakovich and the newly commissioned quintet Motion and Distance, by Canadian composer Kelly- Marie Murphy. The LSQ is the subject of David Rounds’ book The Four and the One: In Praise of String Quartets, and a documentary film to be released in the new year entitled Creating Harmony. 

‘Cellist Tom Mueller earned a Bachelor degree from the Manhattan School of Music and a Masters degree from the University of Illinois, and gained notoriety as a versatile musician with a distinctively melodic approach.

Foremost a chamber musician, Mueller is a founding member of both the Allendale and Elgin String Quartets. His playing has been featured on CBC’s Two New Hours and The Music Around Us. As well as serving as Principal ‘Cello for
the Casa Loma Orchestra, Orchestra Toronto, Toronto Concert Orchestra, Mandle Philharmonic and the Symphony on the Bay (Burlington), he is in demand as a studio musician, most recently recording the complete Mozart Effect, available on Spotify.

Well known as a musical theatre musician, he has performed in the Livent and Mirvish Toronto productions of Show Boat, Ragtime, Sunset Boulevard, Beauty and the Beast, The Phantom of the Opera, The Sound of Music, Hugh Jackman, The Wizard of Oz, Disney’s Aladdin, Mrs. Henderson Presents and Dear Evan Hanson.