An “intelligent musician with an uncommonly lovely voice,” Canadian soprano Phoebe MacRae enjoys a busy and varied musical career. Ms MacRae marries her musical excellence with her love for the theatre, engaging the world of opera, recital and modern music with flair and humour. A versatile and dynamic artist, Ms. MacRae is equally adept at performing the standard classical repertoire as well as comedic and contemporary roles. Included in her repertoire is a solo recital of unaccompanied vocal works: truly a musical “high wire” event.
In 1999, Ms. MacRae formed LEAVE IT TO DIVA with fellow soprano and comedienne Karen Ydenberg. Joined by collaborative pianist Erika Switzer, LEAVE IT TO DIVA combines musical prowess with a gift for quirky humour, creating a rollicking theatrical experience.
Phoebe’s latest comic creation is the acclaimed Animal Passions: Romping the Romantic Realms with renowned collaborative pianist Rena Sharon, with whom Ms. MacRae has worked closely for many years. Animal Passions debuted at the Vancouver International Song Institute in 2007. It has been charming audiences across British Columbia and in the United States of America ever since. Animal Passions combines musical Masterclasses and Lecturesy with high entertainment value. Using carefully chosen songs (such as Ravel’s “The Peacock”, Cole Porter’s “The Tale of the Oyster”, and Richard Pearson Thomas’ “Spider Legs”) and clever dialogue, the program documents the joys and disappointments of a budding young romantic.
Ms. MacRae is regularly engaged for opera, chamber music, oratorio and recital performances. With a Masterclasses and Lecturesy of the 17th – 21st century repertoire, she has performed throughout North America and Europe, and is frequently heard on regional and national CBC Radio 2 broadcasts. In standard operatic repertoire, Ms. MacRae has appeared in works by R. Strauss, J. Strauss, Rossini, and Mozart. She created the role of Pélagie in the world premiere of 120 Songs for the Marquis de Sade, by Peter Hannon and Peter Hinton. Phoebe made her European debut singing Mozart’s most acclaimed virtuosic role of the “Die Königin der Nacht” in Opava, Czech Republic. She was an Artistic Associate of the Modern Baroque Opera Company, and performed leading roles in all of their productions.
In oratorio repertoire, Ms. MacRae also shows her versatility- from Monteverdi’s Vespers to Haydn’s Creation to Orff’s Carmina Burana. With the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Ms. MacRae has twice appeared as the guest soloist on its tours of Western Canada. Together with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra she performed in the memorial concert for Canada’s beloved Otto Lowy, a broadcast legend on CBC Radio. In contemporary offerings, Phoebe has premiered works with orchestra by Canadians Michael Oesterle, Jocelyn Morlock and Bradshaw Pack.
As soloist, Ms. MacRae has performed under the batons of Julius Rudel, Jeanne Lamon, Owen Underhill, Georg Tintner, Timothy Vernon, Steven Stubbs, Simon Preston, Bruce Pullan, Charles Barber, Leslie Dala, Leslie Uyeda, James Fankhauser, Simon Carrington, Laurent Phillippe, Marc Destrubé, Giorgio Magnanensi and Bramwell Tovey. She has appeared with such companies and organisations as Vancouver Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, Modern Baroque Opera, City Opera Vancouver, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Vancouver New Music, Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver Cantata Singers, Vancouver Bach Choir, Festival Vancouver and the Symphonies of Nova Scotia, Victoria and Vancouver. Ms. MacRae has shared the chamber music/recital stage with Rena Sharon, Margo Garrett, Colin Tilney, Erika Switzer, Laura Loewen, Tyler Duncan, Marc Destrubé, Alexander Dunn and renowned children’s performer Rick Scott. She has performed for the Regina Musical Society, Winnipeg’s Virtuosi Concerts, Vancouver International Song Institute, Victoria Summer Music Festival, Vancouver Early Music, and on recital tours throughout BC.
Ms. MacRae is a founding core faculty member of the Vancouver International Song Institute, a yearly summer festival and program designed for young singers and collaborative pianists; she teaches and performs there.
Phoebe MacRae holds a Masterclasses and Lectures of Music from the University of British Columbia and received further training at Queen of Puddings’ Artist Training Program in Toronto, at the Aspen Opera Theater Center, the Vancouver Early Music Programme, and the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts.
Ms. MacRae currently lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two children.
Described as “a force of nature” (Toronto Star) and “an actress of immense talent” (Opera Canada), mezzo-soprano Lynne McMurtry has performed across Canada and the U.S. Recent performances include her debut with Calgary Opera as Marthe in Faust, her debut with the Aldeburgh Connection recital series in Toronto, the Old Lady in Candide with Manitoba Opera, and a return to the Winnipeg Symphony for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Other highlights include Mistress Quickly in Falstaff with Edmonton Opera, the title role in Tamerlano with Opera in Concert, Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass with the Edmonton Symphony, and a solo recital at the State University of New York College at Fredonia with pianist Alison d’Amato.
Lynne’s rich, generous instrument and keen musical intelligence have brought her acclaim in a wealth of repertoire, such as Handel’s Messiah with both the Charleston Symphony Orchestra and the Kitchener Waterloo Philharmonic Chorus, Raminsh’s Magnificat with Chorus Niagara, and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the Eastman Faculty Players. Other credits include appearances with the Boston Symphony (the Slave in Salome), Opera Ontario (Gertrude in Romeo et Juliette), and the Winnipeg Symphony (Mahler’s Rückert Lieder).
Lynne is an active recitalist and has sung at many distinguished song venues, including Tanglewood, Ravinia, and the Vancouver International Song Institute. Her recital with pianist Alison d’Amato exploring settings of the poetry of Walt Whitman earned her a rave review in the Toronto Star, which stated that “Art doesn’t get any more moving than this.”
Her performances have been broadcast on CBC Radio, and her most recent recording for Naxos of Vivaldi sacred music with Aradia Ensemble received a four-star review in BBC Music Magazine. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Voice at the State University of New York College at Fredonia.
Native to Vancouver, Michael Robert-Broder has established himself as one of Canada's most versatile young baritones. Equally at home with art song, oratorio, and opera, he has gained a reputation for engaging performances that perfectly join poet’s text with composer’s music, with the dramatic essence of a piece.
As a strong advocate of contemporary music, Michael has been invited to première a number of pieces in the past year. Among them was Cameron Wilson’s The Oratorio to end all Oratorios, the role of The Jester in George Austin’s The King Who Wouldn’t Sing, and a concert of excerpts from Timothy-Benton Rorak’s dramatic cantata based on the writings of W.B. Yeats, Crazy Jane. Michael has presented recitals of staged “non-dramatic” works, which have included scenes from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, using the art songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf. On the lyric stage, Robert-Broder has recently portrayed the roles of l’hotelier, and un marchant d’elixir in Massenet’s Manon, Sprecher in Mozart’s masterpiece Die Zauberflöte, Bob in Menotti's The Old Maid and the Thief, Ben in Menotti's The Telephone, and Il Conte in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.
Michael’s principle training has been under the guidance of Bruce Pullan, and Gary Relyea. Upcoming engagements include Donizetti's Don Pasquale and L'elisir d'amore, Bach's Johannes-Passion, Brahms's German Requiem, Schubert's Schwanengesang and Die Schöne Müllerin, Handel’s Athalia and several recitals of German, French and American Cabaret music.
Dr. Corey Hamm is both an internationally performing pianist and Assistant Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He is Director of the UBC Contemporary Players and joined the faculty of UBC in Fall 2005.
Hamm is pianist with the prominent new music ensemble The Nu:BC Collective. With Nu:BC ("a delightfully diverse evening of sights and sounds" - Georgia Straight) he has performed multimedia concerts of works by Gyorgy Ligeti, Howard Bashaw, George Crumb, Gyorgy Kurtag, and many others. The Nu:BC Collective is proud to have been a part of Vancouver Pro Musica’s Sonic Boom new music festival for the last three years, premiering dozens of works by Vancouver composers.
Hamm is also a founding member of the Canadian two-piano, two-percussion ensemble Hammerhead Consort, formed in 1990, and winners of such important Canadian awards as the Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award (1992), and the CIBC National Music Competition (1991), as well as the 1993 ARIA Award for Best Classical Recording.
Hailed in the press as a "keyboard virtuoso" (Georgia Straight) with the “emotional intensity” to take a piece “from notes on a page to a stunning work of art” (Victoria Times Colonist), pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa has performed as soloist and chamber musician in Canada, the United States and Germany. Known for bold and innovative concerts, Rachel combines her warmth and curiosity to touch the hearts and minds of audiences, whether she is playing Beethoven and Schumann or Ligeti and Saariaho. Rachel has appeared for Music TORONTO, Vancouver New Music, CONTACT contemporary music (Toronto), New Works Calgary, Groundswell New Music (Winnipeg), the Victoria Symphony, the Aventa Ensemble (Victoria), Music on Main, Redshift, the Western Front, and Vancouver Pro Musica. Rachel’s debut solo CD,Cosmophony, nominated for a Western Canadian Music Award, has been praised for “great mastery” (Whole Note); and for “the passion, intensity and the nuanced playing she's acclaimed for … she manages to instill a sense of dynamic tension and pull to every note” (The Province). Visit her online at Iwaasa.com.
Betsy Warland trained as a
painter, is the author of 11 books, and would be a composer if she were
not a writer. A distinguishing feature of her writing is the
un-inscribes space on the page as a resonating field of pacing and
meaning; of the inferred, the not-said.
A number of Warland
suite of poems have been the textual source for song cycles composed by
Elizabeth Raum and Lloyd Burritt. Raum’s CD featuring one of these
collaborative cycles won the Western Music Award in 2007. Burritt’s
collaborative cycle, Yellow the Sweet Ache was premiered at VISI in
2010. Warland has also written an operatic play based on Vivaldi’s
operas and papal ban. Her well-received 2010 book, Breathing the Page –
Reading the Act of Writing, is a collection of twenty-four essays on the
forces that lie beneath the language of craft.
Born in Latvia, composer Imant Raminsh came to Canada in 1948. After completing his ARCT diploma in violin at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and a Bachelor of Music at the University of Toronto, he spent two years at the “Akademie Mozarteum” in Salzburg, studying composition, violin, and conducting. Imant is the founding conductor of the Prince George Symphony, the Youth Symphony of the Okanagan, NOVA Children’s Choir, and the AURA Chamber Choir.
His compositions are widely performed throughout the world, in venues including Carnegie Hall (New York), Tchaikovsky Hall (Moscow), the Orpheum (Vancouver), Notre Dame de Paris, Canterbury Cathedral, and Santa Marie del Fiore. Imant had his conducting debut at Carnegie Hall in 2006 in performance of hisMagnificat and Missa Brevis with a massed choir and orchestra.
In October 2006 Imant was presented with the “Distinguished Visiting Alumnus Medal” by Dean Gage Averill of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. He was made an officer of the Three Stars of the Republic of Latvia in 2007. His immense contribution to the arts in the Okanagan was recognized when he received the 2011 Okanagan Music Award.
LIFE I
There used to be a hospital called Grace here in Vancouver, in which I was lucky enough to be born. My parents, with others equally idealistic, moved to Hornby Island then, and built a home in a place where I could run wild. Both worked with their hands, my father as a boat builder and my mother as a doctor. When their relationship ended, I moved in with my mother and visited my father, following her as she moved to Vancouver with my stepfather. I lived on a street called Princess, in Chinatown, and thought I had arrived. And then we left, to Anacortes, Washington. My Anacortes grew me, town of churches and horses and fishermen, town of lost girls.
When I got thoroughly lost, we moved to Seattle and I finally got a chance to sink my teeth into books, to find the friends I still count as my dearest. Canadian? American? I cast my vote when I went to Montreal to study. Brick oven bagels and blood-dripping lambs. A new language. Winter for half the year and a summer that blazed and sweated. A woman I loved who spoke three languages and wore a fine gold chain around her throat. A mountain that was really a hill with an angel on it. Beautiful women and wise professors and all those nights of slick confusion as I found my way and got lost again. Washed up in Japan, adrift, I submitted to Judo, to being alone with no company but my dog, to being an adult, learned to love persimmons, jellyfish, bewilderment. Coming home to the woman in Montreal and learning to live in her language, make a home with her. The world cracked open: a son, slim volume of poems. Back to Vancouver with my lover, our child. A garden, a daughter, another collection of poetry. No, we’re not married, and yes, she is the love of my life, and I know I’ve been lucky. A second baby son now, hauled around laughing by the older two, the dog sleeping out her twilight years on the front porch, and another manuscript about to be born.
LIFE II
Born in Vancouver, Canada, Rachel Rose holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship. She grew up on Hornby Island, in Vancouver’s Chinatown on Princess Street, in Anacortes, WA, and Seattle, and has also lived in Montreal and Maebashi, Japan. Her work has appeared in various journals in both countries, including The Malahat Review, Verse, Arc, Black Warrior Review, Poetry and The Best American Poetry. Her first book, Giving My Body to Science, (McGill/Queen’s University Press) was a finalist for The Gerald Lampert Award, The Pat Lowther Award, and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal, and won the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Award. Her second book, Notes on Arrival and Departure, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2005. She holds a BA in English from McGill University and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Two essays appeared in anthologies about mothering in 2008, in Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood, and in Double Lives. Other work has been anthologized in Uncharted Lines: Poems from the Journal of the American Medical Association, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Rocksalt, Open Wide a Wilderness, and Letters to the World. Rachel is the poetry and lyric prose mentor at Simon Fraser University’s The Writers Studio.
Leslie Uyeda was born in Montreal, and is a composer, conductor and pianist. She is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre. Uyeda’s many songs and song cycles have been performed by Martha Guth, Erika Switzer, Robyn Driedger-Klassen, Terence Dawson, Wendy Nielsen, Rena Sharon, Kathryn Cernauskas, Ari Barnes, Heather Pawsey, and Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa. Her choral music has been commissioned and performed by musica intima, chor leoni, the Phoenix Chamber Choir, and the Elektra Women’s Choir. Premieres in 2011 have included new songs for soprano Heather Pawsey, and baritone Doug MacNaughton. She has also composed song cycles for mezzo-soprano Jean Stilwell, and baritone Brett Polegato. Uyeda’s instrumental music is heard throughout Canada and the U.S.
Leslie’s most beloved poet is Lorna Crozier (OC) whose remarkable poems she has worked with to produce The First Woman (sop/piano), The Sex Lives of Vegetables (sop/clarinet/piano), White Cat Blues (sop/piano), Plato’s Angel (baritone/piano), A Summer’s Singing (SATB), and One Willow Grows (sop/piano). To pay tribute to her Japanese-Canadian heritage, Leslie chose the exquisite, evocative poetry of Joy Kogawa (OC), to create Offerings (sop/piano), Stations of Angels (sop/flute), and Flower Arranger (baritone/guitar). This year she is composing When The Sun Comes Out – a chamber opera for three singers and piano, commissioned by the Queer Arts Festival for production in August of 2012. The librettist is the talented Vancouver poet Rachel Rose.
Leslie’s compositions are published by The Avondale Press and Classica Music.
