Congratulations to Québec violinist Daphné Bourbonnais who has won the competition to join Sinfonia Toronto as a member of the first violins. Daphne currently holds the WMCT Glenn Gould School scholarship. See the complete report in Ludwig Van Toronto.
Alex Hetherington (2019 U of T Scholarship) and Vlad Soloviev (2021 U of T Graduate Fellowship) have joined this year’s edition of the Studio. Joseph So reviewed their first concert, which re-opened the Free Concert Series at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre.
Mezzo-soprano Alex Hetherington, WMCT 2018-19 Scholarship Winner, will perform as a soloist next season with the University of Toronto Student Orchestra. Watch the Concerto Competition on the UTFM YouTube channel.
Her performance of the Neruda Songs by Peter Lieberson begins at the 48:56 mark in the video.
Vladimir Soloviev, who completed his studies at the U of T with the support of the WMCT 2020-21 Graduate Fellowship, has joined the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble for 2021-22. In his letter of appreciation of the WMCT award, he wrote:
For more, see the announcement in LudwigVan
Emily Bosenius currently studies violin with Jonathan Crow, in her third year at the University of Toronto‘s Faculty of Music, where she holds Principal and Concertmaster positions in the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Emily has performed under the baton of Jonathan Darlington, Anton Kuerti and Peter Oundjian, participated in the Orford Music Academy and Domaine Forget’s International Academy, and toured Germany and Scotland with the 2018 National Youth Orchestra of Canada. The COVID shutdown cancelled her planned engagements this year with the Guelph Symphony Orchestra, the Oakville Chamber Orchestra, and UTSO, and her planned attendance at the 2020 Aspen Music Festival. Coronavirus restrictions also prevented the winner of the WMCT Centennial Scholarship from performing at our AGM, but you can sample her artistry in this video.
With degrees from the New England Conservatory and the Juilliard School, violinist Hee-Soo Yoon is a new student at the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, supported by the WMCT and WMCTF 110th Anniversary Scholarship. Hee-Soo Yoon began playing violin at age 3. An avid chamber musician, she has performed with members of the Borromeo and Cleveland Quartets and has worked with members of the Brentano, Miró, and Juilliard Quartets. She made her solo debut performing Vivaldi’s Spring with the Vancouver Symphony with maestro Bramwell Tovey. She has collaborated with Sofia Gubaidulina, Julian Anderson, Stephen Chatman, and Eduardo Caballero. Here is a video excerpt of her April graduation recital, held in confined quarters because of COVID-19.
I am so incredibly honoured to be a recipient of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto and the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto Foundation 110th Anniversary Scholarship! It was so wonderful to meet you earlier this month, and I wanted to write to you to express my gratitude for your generosity, and share a bit about my background and why this scholarship is so important to me.
As you know, I just recently moved back to Canada to start the Artist Diploma Program at The Glenn Gould School to study with Mayumi Seiler. I was born in Victoria and grew up near Vancouver, but much of my musical education took place in the US. Even throughout high school, I found myself taking lessons and attending festivals across the border. Despite this, I have been wanting to return home to Canada and refamiliarize myself with the diverse musical scene here. GGS is the perfect place for young musicians like myself to explore our own artistry, and here it is easy to find inspiration from my colleagues and the city itself. Much of the curriculum is online for now, but I already feel like I am part of the community and I look forward to being a part of it in person! Currently, in addition to attending school I am working on a couple of personal musical projects, all collaborative in nature. While COVID-19 has made the execution of these projects a bit tricky, I hope to see them come to fruition soon.
Thank you so much for your gift and for supporting my education. It means so much to have this opportunity to be a part of the musical community in Toronto and at The Glenn Gould School, and I am very grateful to you for making this possible. I look forward to seeing how my career evolves from here!
Sincerely,
Hee-Soo Yoon
The project, described in this Globe & Mail article, involves a newly commissioned suite of piano quartets by 14 Canadian composers, each inspired by a particular region of Canada, a national concert tour throughout the 2018-2020 season, and a specially designed website that showcases audience-generated artwork inspired by the musical commission.
Violinist Elissa Lee won the WMCT U of T Entrance Scholarship in 1993; cellist Rachel Mercer won the first WMCT Centennial Scholarship in 1997, and pianist Angela Park won in 2000. EMIC performed for Music in the Afternoon on May 7, 2015.
WMCT supported cellist Fiona Robson as a Chamber Music Institute Fellow of the 2019 Toronto Summer Music Academy. WMCT Archivist Susan Johnston (left) attended one of her reGENERATION concerts performances. Fiona was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in 2016.
Katherine Moffat, trumpet; Frances Armstrong, piano; Alex Hetherington, mezzo-soprano; and Abigail Bachelor, harp, performed at the Annual General Meeting, September 27, 2018.
