Fall 2016

I've been enjoying a very fruitful and inspiring year of music making. The August series of concerts with the Cygnus Trio proved to be a lot of work and a *great* deal of fun! The high point for us was premiering AMALGAM by Charles Zoll, which was written for us. Charles came to Montreal from Arizona for the premier on August 14, and we got to spend the next weekend together as he attended the next two performances of the piece. A huge thanks to Charles for being not only a top-notch composer but for sharing time with us and really enjoying ourselves! Other memorable events we had were playing for a room full of kiddies and taking a trip together down to Syracuse NY. We certainly felt tired after our final concert which was at St Barnabas in St. Lambert, which closed up a month of 12 performances (with a lot of diverse repertoire!) 
The Cygnus Trio will be continuing to perform, and dream up new and wild ideas! Our next performance will be December 1st in Kingston, Ontario. We are also busy collaborating with more composers to create new repertoire for our ensemble.

Some other new projects for me this fall have included reprising the Triptych guitar project, which was an artistic endeavour by Montreal Luthier Jeremy Clark in 2012. He built three absolutely gorgeous guitars, each with a unique blend of woods, and a special sound. He asked Mark Charles Smith to write a piece, Triptych, for these instruments, which was performed and recorded in 2012. This September I have, along with Josephina Lee and Daniel Karrasch, become a part of the Triptych story! We performed "Triptych" on September 30 as part of the Journées de la Culture festival and have been enjoying these instruments. We will doing our recording of Triptych in November. 
I would highly recommend checking out some of Jeremy's work. He is a fine luthier and really has a unique artistic approach to his instruments. We love playing his guitars. 

http://52instruments.com

I'm also working hard on some new solo repertoire, including the enormous First Sonata on Shakespearean Characters by Hans Werner Henze. I will be giving a solo recital on November the 20th at St George's Place du Canada where you can see me perform excerpts from this sonata along with some other fantastic music.

Another new project I've taken on is the Baroque Guitar. I've been interested in early music instruments for a while, and this fall have started taking lessons with lutenist Sylvain Bergeron on the Baroque Guitar. I'm having a great time learning this instrument as well as continuo techniques. Expect to see me perform with this instrument in the future!

That's all for today. Make sure to come to my website to keep up to date on my performances and my musical endeavours!

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