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Artists
Sri Lankan-born Dinuk Wijeratne is a JUNO, ECMA and SOCAN award-winning composer/conductor/pianist described as “exuberantly creative” (New York Times) and as “an artist who reflects a positive vision of our cultural future” (Toronto Star). He is a lively disrupter who crosses traditionally held musical boundaries, equally at home with symphony orchestras and string quartets, Tabla players and DJs. He has worked in international venues as poles apart as the Berlin Philharmonie and Amsterdam’s North Sea Jazz Festival.
Dinuk has twice performed in Carnegie Hall with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble and alongside tabla legend Zakir Hussain. Dinuk has also appeared at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Opera Bastille, The Lincoln Center, Teatro Colón, and in venues in Sri Lanka, Japan, and the Middle East. He was featured as a main character in What Would Beethoven Do? – the documentary about innovation in classical music featuring Eric Whitacre, Bobby McFerrin, and Ben Zander. Dinuk has composed specially for almost all of the artists and ensembles with whom he has performed, to name a few: Suzie LeBlanc, Kinan Azmeh, David Jalbert, Sandeep Das, Ramesh Misra, Ed Hanley, Eric Vloeimans, Buck 65, the Gryphon Trio, the Apollo Saxophone Quartet, the Afiara and Cecilia String Quartets, and the symphony orchestras of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Nova Scotia, Buffalo, and KwaZulu Natal (South Africa).
Dinuk grew up in Dubai and then studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music (U.K.). He subsequently joined the Juilliard studio of Oscar-winner composer John Corigliano. Conducting studies followed at Mannes College under David Hayes, and doctoral studies with composer Christos Hatzis at the University of Toronto.
He is the recipient of the Canada Council Jean-Marie Beaudet award for orchestral conducting; the NS Established Artist Award; NS Masterworks nominations for his Tabla Concerto and piano trio Love Triangle; double Merritt Award nominations; Juilliard, Mannes & Countess of Munster scholarships; the Sema Jazz Improvisation Prize; the Soroptimist International Award for Composer-Conductors; and the Sir John Manduell Prize – the RNCM’s highest student honor. His music and collaborative work embrace the great diversity of his international background and influences.
Gabriel Dharmoo is a composer, vocalist, improviser, interdisciplinary artist and researcher.
After studying with Éric Morin at Université Laval, he completed studies in composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with Serge Provost, graduating with two "Prix avec grande distinction", the highest honour to be awarded. His works have been performed in Canada, the USA, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Singapore, and South Africa. He has received many awards for his compositions, including recently the Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for his chamber work Wanmansho (2017) and the Conseil Québécois de la Musique Opus Award for his opera À chaque ventre son monstre (2018). He was also awarded the Canadian Music Centre’s Harry Freedman Recording Award (2018).
Having researched Carnatic music with four renowned masters in Chennai (India) in 2008 and 2011, his personal musical style encourages the fluidity of ideas between tradition and innovation. He has participated in many cross-cultural and inter-traditional musical projects, many being led by Sandeep Bhagwati in Montreal (Sound of Montreal, Ville étrange) and in Berlin (Zungenmusiken, Miyagi Haikus).
As a vocalist and interdisciplinary artist, his career has led him around the globe, notably with his solo show Anthropologies imaginaires, which was awarded at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival (2015) and the SummerWorks Performance Festival (2016). They also explore queer arts and drag artistry as Bijuriya (@bijuriya.drag).
He is an associate composer at the Canadian Music Centre as well as a member of SOCAN, the Canadian New Music Network and the Canadian League of Composers. Since 2015, Gabriel is a PhD candidate at Concordia University's PhD "Individualized Program" with Sandeep Bhagwati (Music), Noah Drew (Theatre) and David Howes (Anthropology).
“A two year residency that allows composers to work closely with Alexander Shelley and the National Arts Centre Orchestra is such an invaluable and exciting opportunity. Having meaningful access to musicians, the artistic direction, and the entire NAC team offers an immediate, rich, and personal approach to expanding, learning, and challenging myself as a composer for which I am immensely grateful.”
Keiko Devaux (b. 1982) is a contemporary music composer based in Montreal.
Her works have been performed in Canada, France, Germany, and Italy by various ensembles including Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble musica assoluta, Ensemble Arkea, Quartetto Prometeo, and Ensemble Wapiti among others. She composes regularly for diverse ensembles, as well as collaborating with choreographers and filmmakers.
Her approach embraces a love of electroacoustic sounds and methodology by manipulating and distorting acoustic sound with digital tools, and then transcribing or re-translating these interpretations back into musical notation and the acoustic realm. Her interests include emotional experience and affect, auto-organizational phenomena in nature and living beings, as well as “genre-blurring” by layering and juxtaposing contrasting melodic/harmonic skeletal elements of highly contrasting sonic sources. The distortion of the temporal, frequency, and timbral attributes allows the blurring between traditional tonal sounds and more electroacoustic-inspired “noise” gestures.
She has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Jan V. Matejcek Award for New Classical Music (2019), the Rotary Club Siena Award for distinction in her master courses with Salvatore Sciarrino (2018), the OUM composition prize (2016 and 2018), and the Jury and Public prizes of the Accès Arkea competition (2017). Her composition Ebb, premiered by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, was nominated as Création de l’année for the 2017-2018 Opus awards, and her work Ombra was a finalist for the Prix du CALQ - Œuvre de la relève à Montréal in the same year. In 2019, she won the inaugural Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music, at $50,000, the largest of its kind in Canada and one of the largest in the world.
From 2016 to 2018, she was the composer in residence with Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. She is an associate composer with the Canadian Music Centre, president of the board of directors of Codes d’accès, and past organizer of the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab.
Originally from British Columbia, she began her musical career in piano performance studies as well as composing, touring, and recording several albums in independent rock bands. She holds a Bachelor of Music (Écriture) and a Master of Music in instrumental composition from the Université de Montréal. She has also studied with Maestro Salvatore Sciarrino at L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy (2017-19). She is currently completing her doctorate in music composition and creation at Université de Montréal under the direction of Ana Sokolović and Pierre Michaud.
“The Carrefour residency is a one-of-a-kind orchestral training ground. As an emerging composer who aspires to write music for the orchestra, I am truly honoured and thrilled to be one of the Carrefour composers in residence. I look forward to my upcoming collaborations with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and its music director Alexander Shelley, and hope to create meaningful works by learning from and exchanging ideas with musicians of this amazing Canadian orchestra as a Canadian artist.”
Chinese-Canadian composer Alison Yun-Fei Jiang (b. 1992) explores the intersections of genres and cultural ideologies by drawing inspirations and influences from an array of sources such as Chinese traditional folk music, film music, popular music, literature, Canadian landscapes, and Buddhism, creating music with epic melodic gestures in a lyrical, dynamic and colourful nature.
She has collaborated with ensembles such as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Esprit Orchestra, JACK Quartet, the Wet Ink Ensemble, Imani Winds, Molinari Quartet, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, American String Quartet, Quartetto Apeiron and FearNoMusic. Her music has been broadcast on CBC Radio 2 and performed in venues including Symphony Center (Chicago), Koerner Hall (Toronto), and the DiMenna Center for Classical Music (New York), featured in the Royal Conservatory of Music 21C Festival and the University of Toronto New Music Festival. Awards and recognitions come from ASCAP, the SOCAN Foundation, the Graham Sommer Competition for Young Composers, the American Prize and International Alliance for Women in Music.
Alison is a current Ph.D. candidate and Division of Humanities Fellow at the University of Chicago. She holds degrees in music composition from Manhattan School of Music (B.M.) and New York University (M.M.).
John Kameel Farah is a pianist and composer who shares his time between Berlin and Toronto. His work embraces aspects of early and contemporary music, improvisation, middle-eastern music and forms of electronic music.
Farah was born in Brampton, Ontario, to Palestinian parents who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s. He studied piano and composition at the University of Toronto, where he was a two-time recipient of the Glenn Gould Composition Award. After graduating, he took private lessons with minimalist composer Terry Riley in California, and focussed on performing 20th-century and contemporary music, as well as performing the complete solo piano works of Arnold Schönberg.
After many years playing in Toronto’s classical, jazz and experimental music scenes, he became fascinated with electronic dance music and started incorporating synthesizers, beats and samples into his work. In performance, he integrates the piano with synthesizers and computer effects processing and also incorporates elements of Middle Eastern tuning systems, scales and rhythms. He occasionally presents his side-project, “Music for Organ and Synthesizers,” looping and altering the pipe organ’s sound in combination with analog and digital synths in churches throughout Europe. While he primarily plays live solo concerts, he has lately taken to writing for larger ensembles, recently performing his own works with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.
John is also a visual artist, creating intricate line drawings with ink, which he sometimes incorporates into his performances in projected animations and slideshows.
Collaborations have included several scores for Canadian choreographer Peggy Baker, Berlin’s early music choir Vox Nostra, as well as with astrophysicist John Dubinski, composing for animations of galaxy formations and collisions. In 2009, he became a member of the Canadian Electronic Esemble. Farah has casually described to his musical approach as “Baroque-Middle-Eastern-Cyberpunk” in reference to the myriad of styles he draws upon.
THANK YOU TO OUR DONORS
The National Arts Centre Foundation would like to thank the RBC Foundation, Presenting Partner of the NAC Orchestra Mentorship Program. Thank you also to lead donor Dasha Shenkman, OBE, Hon RCM, and The Azrieli Foundation, The Crabtree Foundation, The Vered Family, and the Council for Canadian American Relations Young Artist Scholarship for their generous support.
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Presenting Partners
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Major Partner
