Offered in partnership with Sheridan College’s Animation Program, the New Generation Composers’ Program at the SPO pairs emerging composers with a recently completed animated short for an exercise in film composition.
COREY LYLE GEMMELL: Corey is a native of Hamilton, Ontario. He has distinguished himself as a soloist and chamber musician with performances in Canada, Germany, the United States, and China. Concerto appearances include performances of such works as Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, Brahms’ Violin Concerto, and Brahms’ Concerto for Violin and Cello. 20th Century solos with orchestra include Mozetich’s Affairs of the Heart for Violin and Orchestra and Vaughn Williams’ The Lark Ascending.
Mr. Gemmell is concertmaster of the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra, Mississauga Symphony Orchestra, and Symphony Hamilton Orchestra. He has also performed in this role with the Boris Brott National Academy Orchestra, Toronto Mendelssohn Choir Orchestra, and Esprit Orchestra. He performs frequently with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra.
Corey Gemmell was concertmaster for the fall CBC television production of Over the Rainbow with Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber. He has performed as concertmaster for a number of musicals including recent productions of Beauty and the Beast, The Hugh Jackman Show, and Next to Normal. He has worked with such pop icons as Hugh Jackman and Chantal Kreviazuk. Mr. Gemmell was concertmaster for the 2010 production of Miss Saigon at the Four Seasons Centre and the 2009/2010 production of The Sound of Music at the Princess of Wales. He is also active in commercial studio work in Toronto and has recorded for numerous movies and commercials.
Mr. Gemmell can be heard on compact disc in recordings of sonatas by Brahms, Ravel, Robert A. Baker, David Eagle, and Hope Lee. He was one of the contributing artists to record the Royal Conservatory of Music’s violin syllabus on compact disc.
Much in demand as a teacher, Mr. Gemmell’s students have distinguished themselves at provincial and national competitions. He is presently on faculty at the Western University, the National Music Camp of Canada, and is a member of the Royal College of Examiners.
Featuring music composed by Emily Suzanne Shapiro and words by Edward Gorey, “Utter Zoo” is wonderfully strange and intriguing. Contributing artists include declaimist, Megalodipticus, and two talented musicians, Elizabeth Brown (oboe, english horn), and Emily Shapiro (clarinet, bass clarinet). The movements are: Ampoo / Boggerslosh / Epitwee / Fidknop / Humglum. Mixing and mastering was done by Alexis Hählen.
Program notes from Emily:
When I started writing Utter Zoo in 2008, I’d long been wanting to start composing more actively but was at a loss about how to begin. I found a lucky perfect combination of inspirations in my obsession with Edward Gorey, my friendship with Elizabeth and Meghan, and another collection of short pieces (17 one minute pieces for bass clarinet and casio mt750 by Christopher Hobbs). I loved the idea of minute-long pieces as a fun and lighthearted way to play with different ideas. Oboe and bass clarinet seemed like the ideal mix of sounds to match Edward Gorey’s work, although I’ve taken advantage of the doubling potential of both players to add some variety to the sonic pallet and give me more flexibility to express the different characters. Elizabeth and Meghan had the right skills and could (and twelve years later, still can) be counted on to be up for a strange and silly creative project.
Edward Gorey’s Utter Zoo is a collection of very short poems about imaginary animals- one for every letter of the alphabet. At first I imagined that I could write all 26 pieces in one go, but that proved extremely over-ambitious. I wrote and premiered the first six pieces in 2008 (at a farewell concert in a cafe called Our Town in East Vancouver the day before I moved to Montreal) and wrote another four in 2018. My hope is to keep chipping away at this project, and one day finish all 26. The four new pieces (Boggerslosh, Epitwee, Mork and Posby) have never been performed so this project is their world premiere.
The inspirations and composition processes for each individual piece varied widely. Ampoo and Quingawaga came about in very organic ways and were composed almost exclusively by ear. I was stuck on how to end Ampoo for a long time and was extremely frustrated, but one day the answer came to me, seemingly out of the blue, while I was sitting on the bus. Others were almost formulaic – for Yawfle, I decided that a relentlessly repeating rhythmic cell was the right way to express the absurd repeating “and stares” in the poem. I picked a tonality that went with character and picked a rhythm and the piece almost wrote itself. For Ulp I imagined a waltz in the style of the Amelie soundtrack, but I gave it a twist by laying down a melody in 5/4 time over the 3/4 accompaniment, adding a little quirky crunch to the nostalgic sweetness.
In addition to the 99 B-line bus in Vancouver and the usual practice rooms/home studios, I’ve worked on this piece in the dressing room before performing in a Balinese gamelan concert and at least six cafes spread between Vancouver and London
Born in Japan and raised in Vancouver, Dr. Lisa Tahara is a classical pianist and lecturer at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. Over the past 20 years, she has appeared in solo and chamber concerts throughout Europe, Mexico, Canada and the United States. Lisa has also performed as a soloist with several orchestras across Canada and Europe such as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec and the Danube Symphony Orchestra. In 2020, Lisa was added to the artist roster for Piano Island Management as a result of winning First Prize at the 2019 International Piano Concerto Competition in Budapest, Hungary. Dr. Tahara was our SPO Artist-in-Residence for our 2020/2021 Season.
Discover more about Lisa on her website https://lisatahara.com/.
Angela Gibbon is a full lyric soprano who holds a Master’s of Vocal Literature and Performance at Western, where she studied with Brian McIntosh. In June 2018, Angela performed the role of Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte with Long Reach Opera, directed by Anne-Marie Donovan. Angela was also a soloist in excerpts from Mozart’s Requiem with the Richmond Hill Philharmonic Orchestra in June. In July of 2018, Angela participated in the Saarburg Festival in Saarburg, Germany, where she sang the role of Gladys in an English adaptation of Edmund Eysler’s Blue Paradise. Angela performed the role of Micaëla in the Western University Opera Workshop’s production of Bizet’s Carmen in November 2017. Angela sang the role of Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni in July 2017 at the Accademia Europea Dell’Opera in Lucca, Italy. This year, Angela will be a member of the Contemporary Music Studio at Western, directed by John Hess and Dárine Ní Mheadhra. Angela was an Arcady Emerging Artist for the 2018/2019 Season.
“Well, that brought me back!! I used to walk around the lake every day for exercise. The pictures were very beautiful and worked great with the music. This video is a nostalgic experience, seeing the pictures. Wascana Park is indeed a beautiful place to go for walks. We used to be able to skate on the lake in the winter and once a week, the fire department would come and smooth out the surface. It was the Waskimo Festival with ice sculptures and various other activities, but then we had a couple of warm winters where the lake wasn’t safe although I gather it’s been pretty cold there lately. I just looked it up and it did start up again.”
Night Music for piano (2021) was created during the Covid-19 pandemic. Feeling nostalgic, I was drawn to night themes and music from the past. The composition is in the form of a piano sonata, but each of the four movements also functions as an independent character piece. Night Music was written for and dedicated to the wonderful Argentinian/Canadian pianist Alexander Panizza. Due to Toronto’s restrictions concerning live concerts, it was composed to be premiered on the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra’s YouTube channel. Echoes of Film Noir was inspired by the dramatic, gripping, and multi-layered music commonly found in this genre. Film noir was commonly set in dark locations and shot in black and white. In creating music for my fantasy nighttime crime drama, I used a traditional sonata allegro form for the structure. The movement starts with a first theme representing a hardboiled detective, followed by a second theme representing a “femme fatale”. The rest of the movement allows for the music (and the story) to develop, build to a climax, and come to a conclusion. I invite listeners to create their own stories.
I have followed an unusual path in my musical training. There was no prodigious start or discovery of talent at a young age – in fact, I resisted any attempt to be educated musically. One thing I remember is trying out one of the very early musical-notation programs for my Commodore 64, drawing pictures with musical notes and listening to the resulting sounds. Little did I realize that work would have qualified for an arts council grant. It was not until I was a teenager when my parents brought home a synthesizer (Ensoniq ESQ-1) that I discovered the value of having some musical training. However, soon after starting piano lessons, I discarded the synthesizer and schmaltzy pop songs, and became fascinated with classical music.
My introduction to classical music came from two sources. My parents would listen to Choral Concert on CBC radio every Sunday morning – a program I continued listening to until the retirement of Howard Dyck. The other source was the musical soundtracks to Looney Tunes cartoons. Alas, do the youth of today have pictures of Bugs and Elmer dancing in their heads when they hear Rossini’s Barber of Seville or listen to Wagner’s Tannhauser?
Throughout high school, I diligently worked on my piano studies and became interested in composition under the encouraging eye of James Carswell. Despite progressing rapidly, by the time of graduation I was still of modest ability, leading me to choose a scientific path for my university studies. At the University of Toronto I completed a degree in physics – my other lifelong interest – and then set off to teacher’s college to become a high school science teacher. It was there that I met Ronald Royer.
Ron has nurtured many young musical talents under his guidance at the University of Toronto Schools. From him I took a few composition, counterpoint and orchestration lessons, which marked the end of my “formal” musical education.
Passionate about chamber music, the Toronto-based Odin Quartet represents the diversity and the promise of youth in Canada. Named after the one-eyed Norse god, seeker of knowledge and holder of the wisdom of the world, the Odin Quartet explores the role of classical music in modern-day storytelling. Since 2015, the ensemble is also dedicated to making classical music accessible to new generations of listeners, by promoting modern Canadian compositions, including those of cellist Samuel Bisson, alongside classical music literature.
In June 2015, the Odin Quartet took part in the Luminato Festival’s epic production of R Murray Schafer’s 1980 oratorio Apocalypsis. Since their 2017 debut at the opening gala of the Music Niagara Festival, the Quartet has been a recurring performer at the summer festival, in 2019 and 2021. Other festival appearances include the University of Toronto’s New Music Festival, Midday Music with Shigeru, the Ottawa Valley Music Festival, Guelph Connections, and Music Mondays Toronto.
The Odin Quartet has enjoyed multiple collaborations with the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra as its ensemble-in-residence since 2018; most recently, the quartet premiered a new piece for string quartet and symphony orchestra by Samuel Bisson, under the baton of Maestro Ron Royer.
The Quartet has recorded numerous film scores both locally and internationally and is regularly featured in musical projects by other Toronto artists.
Acclaimed by the specialized press and public alike, Canadian-Argentinian Alexander Panizza developed his musical education in Toronto, Buenos Aires, Geneva, Paris, Barcelona, and London, where he completed a post-graduate diploma at the Royal College of Music.
His mastery of pianistic sonorities and powerful sound allow him to shine in the grand piano concerti repertoire, including those by Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Beethoven and Schumann. His discography features Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas, Alberto Ginastera’s complete piano compositions, and works by Carlos Guastavino, Muzzio Clementi and David Winkler (Naxos, American Composers Series).
Alexander Panizza has performed in over twenty-five countries worldwide including prestigious venues such as the Barbican Hall in London, Herkulessaal in Munich, Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires, Richelieu Amphitheatre in Paris, Palas Theatre in Athens, Nanning’s Guangxi Concert Hall in China, National Theatre in Panama City, Solis Theatre in Montevideo, and Prince Mahidol Hall in Bangkok.
With a special interest in collaborative piano, Alexander participates in chamber music series including the Soesterberg Music Festival (Holland), Long Island Mozart Festival (USA) and Seven Lakes Festival, in Patagonia (Argentina), where he mentors young musicians. An active pedagogue, he is a faculty member at the Catholic University in Buenos Aires and has led masterclasses at the University of Toronto, Lynn University, Lakehead University , and other higher education institutions in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
During the 2020/2021 season, due to the unique circumstances regarding public concertizing, Alexander has been actively developing his musical activities in the digital space. Aside from online teaching internationally, he has been experimenting with recordings that combine music with other expressive mediums (visual arts, literature, and video) sharing the results through his website and various social media platforms.
Learn more on his website http://www.alexanderpanizza.com, and on his YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, and SoundCloud pages.
