Thirteen Strings is a chamber orchestra in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1976 by Brian Law, then conductor of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, who led the ensemble until 1991. Its initial members were drawn from the National Arts Centre Orchestra. After Law left in 1991, various guest conductors directed the ensemble, including Calvin Sieb. [1] Jean-François Rivest was the Artistic Director from 1999 to 2006. The Artistic Director in 2012 was Kevin Mallon. The performances are often supplemented by vocal or instrumental soloists. The ensemble performs in such venues as St Andrew's Presbyterian Church and Dominion-Chalmers United Church. [2]
Thirteen strings also organizes Junior Thirteen Strings, which consists of Ottawa region string players aged 12–17 selected to play with the Thirteen Strings in a concert during their regular season.
In 2012 the Thirteen Strings' members were Martine Dubé, Andréa Armijo Fortrin and Manuela Milani as violin I; Brigitte Amyot, Maria Nenoiu, David Thies-Thompson and Solange Tremblay as violin II; Guylaine Lamaire and Peter Webster on viola; Julian Armour and Thaddeus Morden on cello; and Hilda Cowie on bass, with additional non-string members Louis-Pierre Bergeron (horn), Marie Bouchard (harpsichord), Julie Paul (oboe), and Camille Churchfield and Christian Paquette (flute).
An orchestra is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments:
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
Trevor David Pinnock is a British harpsichordist and conductor.
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Walter Prystawski, CM is a Canadian classical violinist, conductor and teacher. For many years he was the concertmaster of the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa.
Carl Edward Vine, is an Australian composer of contemporary classical music.
The Ottawa Chamberfest summer festival is a music festival held by Ottawa Chamberfest, also known as Chamberfest, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This year's edition will be held between July 25 and August 8, 2019.
The Ottawa Symphony Orchestra (OSO) is a full size orchestra in Ottawa, Canada, including professional, student and amateur musicians. With around 100 musicians, the OSO is Ottawa's largest orchestra, which allows it to perform large symphonic repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries, including works by Canadian composers.
Marjan Mozetich is a Canadian composer who has written music for theatre, film and dance, as well as many symphonic works, chamber music, and solo pieces. He has written compulsory competition pieces for the 1992 Banff String Quartet Competition and the 1995 Montreal International Music Competition. Co-founder of Arraymusic in Toronto, Mozetich served as their artistic director from 1976 to 1978. After his work with Array, he worked for some time at the University of Toronto music library, and then became a freelance composer. Mozetich moved to Howe Island, near Kingston, Ontario, and taught composition at Queen's University in Kingston from 1991 to 2010. He has won several awards, including the first prize in the CAPAC (SOCAN)-Sir Ernest MacMillan Award. His major compositions include Fantasia... sul linguaggio perduto, and Postcards from the Sky.
David Eaton is an American composer and conductor who has been the music director of the New York City Symphony since 1985. He has also been an active composer and arranger, with 100 original compositions and over 900 arrangements and original songs to his credit. He has appeared as a guest conductor with orchestras in Asia, Canada, Israel, Europe, Central and South America, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. His compositions and arrangements have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the United Nations and by orchestras in the United States, Asia, Israel, South America and Europe. He also served at the conductor of the historic Goldman Band from 1998 to 2000 conducting the ensemble in concerts throughout the New York metropolitan area including performances at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In 2022 he self-published his first book, What Music Tells Me: Beauty, Truth and Goodness and Our Cultural Inheritance.
The Dubuque Symphony Orchestra is a non-union, fully professional orchestra located in Dubuque, Iowa. It serves the residents of Dubuque and its surrounding tri-state area which includes 12 counties in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin. Under Music Director William Intriligator, over 75 professional musicians perform a repertoire of classical, chamber, opera and pops concerts each year. The DSO performs an average of 12 different concerts a year with a total of 25 performances.
Jeffrey Alan Kahane is an American classical concert pianist and conductor. He was music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for 20 years, the longest of any music director in the orchestra's history. He is the music director of the Sarasota Music Festival, a program of the Sarasota Orchestra, and a professor of keyboard studies (Piano) at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, California
Gary Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002. He currently teaches on the music faculty at the University of Toronto.
The conductorless orchestra, sometimes referred to as a self-conducted orchestra or unconducted orchestra, is an instrumental ensemble that functions as an orchestra but is not led or directed by a conductor. Most conductorless orchestras are smaller in size, and generally perform chamber orchestra repertoire. Several conductorless orchestras are made up of only strings and focus primarily on string orchestra repertoire. Conductorless orchestras generally come from the classical music tradition and perform standard repertoire, but many conductorless orchestras promote or specialise in contemporary classical music repertoire. Many contemporary classical music ensembles also regularly perform without a conductor.
Music and Beyond is a Canadian summer music festival, featuring classical music in its varying formations as well as a spectrum of art forms and cultural disciplines. Music and Beyond is also a not-for-profit organization with charitable status. First held in 2010, it has since become an annual event, taking place at local venues in Ottawa, Ontario. The 2018 festival took take place from July 4–17.
Gábor Takács-Nagy is a Hungarian violinist and conductor. He began violin studies at age 8. He attended the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he won the Jenő Hubay prize. His teachers at the Liszt Academy included Ferenc Rados, András Mihály, and György Kurtág.
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"While having a formidable technique, she is not a virtuoso phenomenon, but something different that has to do intimately with music."