The 2011 What Next? Festival features acclaimed artists and groups from Hamilton and across Canada including:
James Sommerville is Music Director of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Horn of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Sommerville has conducted many first-rate professional orchestras and ensembles throughout Canada and the USA. He has led the Hamilton Philharmonic to great critical acclaim in his three years as Music Director. Recent engagements include appearances with Symphony Nova Scotia and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; 2011 and 2012 will bring performances leading the Edmonton, London (Ontario) and Québec Symphony Orchestras.
The winner of the highest prizes at the Munich, Toulon and CBC competitions, Mr. Sommerville has pursued a career as a French horn player that has spanned 25 years and has brought immensely successful appearances with major orchestras throughout North America and Europe. His disc of the Mozart Horn Concertos with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra won the JUNO Award for Best Classical Recording in Canada. Other award-winning CBC recordings include the Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings and Britten’s Canticle. Mr. Sommerville has recorded chamber music for the Deutsche Gramophon, Telarc, CBC, Summit, and Marquis labels. He is a member of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, with whom he tours and records regularly.
Mr. Sommerville has been a member of the Toronto and Montreal Symphony Orchestras, the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia and was acting solo horn of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He has toured and recorded extensively as an orchestral player. He is heard regularly on the CBC network and has recorded all of the standard solo horn repertoire for broadcast.
As a guest artist and faculty member, Mr. Sommerville has performed at many chamber music festivals throughout Canada, the USA, Europe and Japan. Recent solo performances of note include the world premiere of Christos Hatzis’ Winter Solstice in Yellowknife, NWT; the North American premiere of Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto with the BSO; and the John Williams Horn Concerto. In recent seasons, Mr. Sommerville has appeared as a soloist in London (with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields), and in Costa Rica, Holland, Quebec, Ottawa and Italy. In 2007, he performed the world premiere of Elliot Carter’s Horn Concerto, commissioned for him by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Sommerville also tours as a member of Osvaldo Golijov’s Andalucian Dogs. In April 2010, he stepped in on 48 hours’ notice to perform Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 2 with Bernard Haitink and the Boston Symphony. In his spare time, Mr. Sommerville enjoys golfing, cycling, eating and riding his Ducati.
“I don’t think I realised the radio had more than one station til I was 11 or 12,” Basia Bulat says. At the family home in Toronto, the dial was always fixed to the local oldies station: Motown, Stax, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Sam Cooke. While her mother hunted for someone to do the dishes, Basia and her younger brother Bobby would hide with a radio or tape player, happily rattled by all that song.
Since the age of three, Basia has been sitting on piano stools and trying to hammer things out. It started with her piano-teacher mum, but along the way Basia’s picked up guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukelele, sax and flute. In high-school her instrument was the upright bass – a lone girl among “eight-foot-tall guys, goofing off with the tubas”. There’s a sense of play that still suffuses her music, jostling under the songs of regret and love, want and joy. When her brother began in his teens to play drums with punk bands, Basia would be there with her demerara voice, joining happily in the jam. When she left for university in London, Ontario, musicians began to drop by her downtown apartment. Many nights were spent with these classically-trained friends, laughing and singing, and together they made a glad, bright noise.
For the summer of 2006, Basia went to live in Montreal. Through friends she met Howard Bilerman, an engineer and co-owner of the famed Hotel 2 Tango studio. Basia cashed some student loans to record with Bilerman in one of the final sessions at the original H2T site, but by the third day she had lost her voice. It was ultimately these rough early takes, hoarse with excitement, that formed the bulk of Oh My Darling. Initially the recordings were meant only as an “audible memory” of the time Basia spent with friends in London and Montreal: ”We liked playing together so much, and I just wanted to remember that.” But Bilerman was smitten with the songs, with Basia and her band, and he began to write to friends at labels, friends with music-blogs, anyone who might pay attention. For despite the original intention, these tracks are breathless, thirsty, dislodged from dreary nostalgia. There are strings, yes, and acoustic guitar, but also a frantic drum-kit gallop; the influence of the spirits of wild Jeff Magnum, big-voiced Odetta, Emily Dickinson and all those boisterous soul-music singles. It’s this spark that sets Basia Bulat apart from the raft of typical singer-songwriters, and also what attracted the interest of Geoff Travis and Britain’s legendary Rough Trade label – who released Oh My Darling in Europe and Japan in the spring of 2007. The album was released in North America shortly thereafter, and has since gone on to worldwide acclaim. It garnered a Polaris Prize nomination in 2008, and rave reviews from everyone from NPR and Q.
Appearing: Thursday, February 3: Basia Bulat with the HPO
Born in Victoria, B.C., in 1964, pianist Eve Egoyan has been interpreting new works since 1994. Eve’s intense focus, command of the instrument, insightful interpretations, and unique programmes welcome audiences into unknown territory, bridging the gap between them and contemporary composers.
Eve has performed the world première and North American premières of many works by Canadian and international composers including Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, Alvin Curran, Maria de Alvear, José Evangelista, Michael Finnissy, Rudolf Komorous, Jo Kondo, Michael Longton, Juliet Palmer, Stephen Parkinson, James Rolfe, Linda C. Smith, Ann Southam, Karen Tanaka, James Tenney, Judith Weir and Gayle Young. Many of these works were commissioned through the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Laidlaw Foundation, CBC, Japan-Canada Fund and the British Council.
She has appeared as a solo recitalist in Canada, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Japan, and the U.S. including performances at in the Huddersfield Contemporary Festival, (Huddersfield, U.K.), the Other Minds Festival (San Francisco), the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Kobe International Modern Music Festival (Kobe, Japan), and the Sound Symposium (St. Johns). In 2001 she made her debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, playing the world première of Figures by Ann Southam for the Massey Hall New Music Festival. Eve has released seven critically acclaimed solo discs, six of works by living composers and one disc of works by Erik Satie. She has acted as soloist and executive producer on all these discs. Her first solo CD, “thethingsinbetween”, was included in the Globe and Mail’s 1999 “Top Ten” list. Her most recent disc, "Simple Lines of Enquiry", a one-hour long piano solo by Ann Southam written for Eve, was selected as one of the New Yorker magazine’s ten top of 2009 discs by Alex Ross, music critic and author of the critically acclaimed “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century”.
Honours include numerous commissions and awards from the Canada Council, Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils, FACTOR, a University of Victoria Distinguished Alumna Award, a K.M. Hunter Award, and a Chalmers Award. Recently she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and was one of fifty Canadian performers and conductors given and designation of “CMC Ambassador” by the Canadian Music Centre.
Eve trained in standard repertoire at the Victoria Conservatory of Music with Anne Brayshaw and Winifred Scott Wood, the University of Victoria with Eva Solar-Kinderman, the Banff Centre of Fine Arts with György Sebök, the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin with Georg Sava (German Academic Exchange Scholarship), the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, with Hamish Milne (Commonwealth Scholarship), and in Toronto where she completed her M.Mus. at the University of Toronto with Patricia Parr (Chalmers Award). www.eveegoyan.com
Appearing: Friday, February 4: Surface Tension
Brian MacMillan is a visual artist, software developer and writer from Winnipeg. Current projects include Glass Dance, an effort to algorithmically create “cubist video”; When We All Have Brains, a collection of science fiction stories; and The Apocalypse Review, a satirical political news web site. He currently divides his time between NY and Toronto. Samples of his work can be found at brianmacmillan.com.
David Rokeby has won acclaim in both artistic and technical fields for his new media artworks. A pioneer in interactive art and an acknowledged innovator in interactive technologies, Rokeby has achieved international recognition as an artist and seen the technologies which he develops for his work given unique applications by a broad range of arts practitioners and medical scientists.
The Toronto artist, who was born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1960 and studied at the Ontario College of Art, uses technology to reflect on human issues. Rokeby's best known work, Very Nervous System (1986-90) premiered at the Venice Biennale in 1996, won the first Petro-Canada Award for Media Arts (1988) and is permanently installed in several museums around the world. The work uses video cameras, computers, and synthesizers to create an interactive space in which body movements are translated into music. The technology Rokeby developed for this work is widely used by composers, choreographers, musicians, and artists. It is also used in music therapy applications and is currently being tested as an activity enabler for victims of Parkinson's Disease.
Several of his works have addressed issues of digital surveillance. Watched and Measured (2000) was awarded the first BAFTA award for interactive art from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Guardian Angel (2001) received the award for best installation at the Images Festival in 2001.
Other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names (1991-) and n-cha(n)t (2001) are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud.
Rokeby has twice been honored with Austria's Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction (1991 and 1997). He has been an invited speaker at events around the world, and has published two papers that are required reading in the new media arts faculties of many universities. He recently received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Appearing: Friday, February 4: Surface Tension
Coming soon.
Appearing: Friday, February 4: A Musical Gallery
Jeremy Flower is a multi-instrumentalist and composer of acoustic and electronic music. His work with electronics has landed him on stage as a guest artist with the Atlanta and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the Santa Fe Opera, LA Philharmonic, Curtis Institute, American Composers Orchestra as well as with world-renowned electronic producers in experimental, ambient and minimal techno genres.
He has collaborated extensively with Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov helping to create electronic parts for the Grammy-nominated song cycle Ayre (2006) and one-act opera Ainadamar which won two Grammys (2007). Both of these works have been recorded for and released by Deutsche Grammophon. Flower and Golijov recently completed the film score for Francis Ford Coppola’s 2007 film, Youth Without Youth, and are now collaborating on a new composition for WNYC Radio, and the score for Coppola’s 2009 film Tetro.
Flower is currently working on chamber commissions from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Weill Music Institute at Cargnegie Hall.
Appearing: Saturday, February 5: Switched On
O/H is a collaboration between some of Hamilton's most well known and accomplished experimental musicians. David Foster has been creating innovative electronic music for over two decades, producing milestones in the minimal techno genre during the early 1990s and going on to develop more extreme and confrontational music under the name Huren. Inspired in part by David's early work, Richard Oddie and Christina Sealey have been creating electronic music together for almost as many years. Under the Orphx moniker, they have produced a large body of work that brings together industrial music, techno, and electro-acoustics. All three artists are recognized as pioneers of "rhythmic noise"; a fusion of harsh, experimental sounds with the rhythmic elements of dance music.
O/H began in 2010 as an open space for improvised, collaborative performances utilizing modular synthesizers, drum machines, chains of effects pedals, circuit bent instruments, microphones, guitars, and whatever else is at hand. Inspired by the Vienesse Aktionist and Fluxus movements, O/H performances range from fields of droning harmonics to pummeling waves of rhythm and noise, with an emphasis on confrontational volume and aesthetics.
www.soundcloud.com/o-h
www.soundcloud.com/huren
www.soundcloud.com/orphx
Appearing: Saturday, February 5: Switched On
Described as “one of Canada’s most original and compelling artists”, violinist Parmela Attariwala has been active in genre‐bending music and performance since moving to Toronto in 1994. She has toured and recorded with an array of musicians that includes Carla Bley, Ravi Naimpally, James Campbell, Anthony Braxton, Ed Hanley and Quinsin Natchov. She has also collaborated extensively – as composer, musician and movement artist – with a diverse range of choreographers, including Keiko Kitano, Claudia Wittmann and Karen Kaeja. An ardent improviser and proponent of improvisational pedagogy as a tool for cross‐genre musical communication, Parmela performs regularly at AIMToronto events. In addition to traditional symphonic work, she also performs contemporary music with the Esprit Orchestra, Toca Loca, New Music Concerts and the Queen of Puddings Theatre Company. Parmela finds her creative home, though, in the Attar Project. Conceived as a vehicle to integrate the eclectic strands of her own musical background, the Attar Project engages artists across musical genres and artistic practices in virtuousic collaborations that maintain the essence of each while challenging the boundaries between them. Neither a fixed ensemble nor an “ad hoc” one, the Attar Project has unfolded as a series of dedicated partnerships, resulting in a body of work that, while beyond common definition, unfailingly awakens the eye and ear. Parmela’s current collaborators include Montreal‐based tabla player Shawn Mativetsky and Toronto choreographers Gitanjali Kolanad and Kelly Arnsby.
Hailing from Calgary, Parmela received her formal training at Indiana University and the Bern Conservatory in Switzerland. She holds a Masters degree in ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (London, UK). Parmela is currently on faculty at the University of Toronto in its jazz department, and is also pursuing an ethnomusicology Ph.D., her studies concerning the effects of official multiculturalism on Canadian music‐making and its funding. Parmela has released two critically acclaimed recordings: Beauty Enthralled (1997), described as “a cross‐cultural handshake to set the mind spinning” (NOW magazine); and Sapphire Skies (2003), which features her own compositions and was called “a recording to treasure” (Wholenote magazine). February 2010 marks the release of Parmela’s third Attar Project album, The Road Ahead… featuring new and commissioned Canadian works for violin and tabla performed in collaboration with Shawn Mativetsky.
Appearing: Sunday, February 6: The Attar Project
Versatile percussionist Shawn Mativetsky performs in a variety of musical genres with dynamism and skill. Equally at home in Western classical and contemporary/new music, Indian classical music, and world music, Shawn also composes and performs music for dance and theatre. He is active in the promotion of the tabla and North Indian classical music through lectures, workshops, and performances across Canada and internationally. Based in Montreal, Shawn teaches tabla and percussion at McGill University.
Shawn Mativetsky is a ganda-band disciple of Pandit Sharda Sahai of the Benares tabla gharana. Shawn holds a Master's degree in music from McGill University and has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Basia Bulat
Eve Egoyan
David Rokeby
Parmela Attariwala
Jeremy Flower
Brian MacMillan
