Project Updates

September 2015 saw Alexander Shelley make the highly anticipated move to Music Director of the NAC Orchestra. Meanwhile, he also continues in his role as Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, as well as adding the title of Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London to his clutch of positions.

Since being awarded first prize at the 2005 Leeds Conducting Competition, Mr. Shelley has been in demand from orchestras around the world, including the Philharmonia, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg, DSO Berlin, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Czech Philharmonic, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Orchestra Svizzera Italiana, Stockholm Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, Simón Bolívar, Seattle and Houston Symphony Orchestras. Further afield, he is a regular guest with the top Asian and Australasian orchestras.

Alexander Shelley’s operatic en- gagements in Europe and North America have included The Merry Widow, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, La bohème, Iolanta, Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro.

His first recording for Deutsche Grammophon, an album with Daniel Hope and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, was released in September 2014.

Donna Feore is one of Canada’s most versatile creative talents and has been highly praised for her work with the Stratford Festival. This season Ms. Feore has directed and choreographed a completely reimagined version of A Chorus Line. This comes on the heels of last season’s smash hit, The Sound of Music. Other Festival productions include the critical hit Crazy for You, and the hugely acclaimed production of Fiddler on the Roof. She returns to the NAC, having recently acted as Creative Producer & Director for the NAC-commissioned Dear Life and I Lost My Talk and Director for Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Other directing credits include Tom Stoppard’s Rock & Roll and It’s a Wonderful Life for Canadian Stage, and Lecture on the Weather by John Cage and A Soldier’s Tale with F. Murray Abraham for the Detroit Symphony. Selected opera credits include staging and choreography for the Canadian Opera Company’s Siegfried, which she remounted for the Opera National de Lyon. Also for the COC: Tosca, Red Emma and Oedipus Rex, which earned her a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Choreography. Selected film and television credits include Mean Girls, Eloise, Treading Water, Politics is Cruel, Martin and Lewis and Stormy Weather.

Zosha Di Castri is a Canadian composer/ pianist living in New York. Her work (which has been performed in Canada, the U.S., South America and Europe) extends beyond purely concert music, including projects with electronics, sound arts, and collaborations with video and dance.

Ms. Di Castri’s orchestral compositions have been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony and Esprit Orchestra, and have been featured by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Amazonas Philharmonic and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, among others. She has also worked with many leading new music groups including Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink and the NEM.

Zosha Di Castri was the recipient of the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for her work Cortège in 2012. She completed a Bachelor of Music at McGill University, and in 2009, participated in the NAC Composer Program as part of the Summer Music Institute. She has a doctorate from Columbia University in composition. She is now Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia.

JUNO Award-nominated composer Jocelyn Morlock is one of Canada’s most distinctive voices, and she has a successful history of composing compelling commissions. Cobalt, a concerto for two violins and orchestra, was her first commission for the National Arts Centre Orchestra in 2009. In September 2014, she became the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’snewestComposerinResidence.

Jocelyn Morlock’s music has received numerous accolades, including: Top 10 at the 2002 International Rostrum of Composers; winner of the 2003 CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composers competition; winner of the Mayor’s Arts Awards in Vancouver (2008); three nominations for Best Classical Composition at the Western Canadian Music Awards (2006, 2010, 2014) and a JUNO Award nomination for Classical Composition of the Year.

She also launched an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign to support the creation of her first full length CD, also titled Cobalt, in 2014.

Called a “brilliant musical scientist,” composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and

integrates them into live performance. Nicole Lizée’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre, she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision. Her commission list of over 40 works is varied and distinguished (the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, CBC, Radio-Canada, ECM+,).

In 2013, Nicole Lizée was awarded the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music and in 2015, she was selected by acclaimed composer and conductor Howard Shore to be his protégée as part of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Mentorship Program. Nicole Lizée received a Master of Music degree from McGill University in 2001.

John Estacio ranks as one of Canada’s most frequently commissioned and performed composers. Over the past two decades he has served as composer-in-residence at the Edmonton Symphony, the Calgary Philharmonic and Calgary Opera. In 2003, Calgary Opera gave the world premiere of his first opera, Filumena, to a libretto by Canadian playwright John Murrell. Calgary Opera likewise premiered his second opera, Frobisher, in 2007, and his third opera, Lillian Alling, was premiered by Vancouver Opera in 2010. Among his many successful orchestral works, Frenergy has become one of his most often-performed compositions.

John Estacio recently finished a full- length ballet score for the Cincinnati Ballet and his fourth opera, Ours, is to be premiered July 2016. He has also composed for the Toronto Symphony, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Vancouver Symphony, the Victoria Symphony and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, as well as composing a score for the film The Secret of the Nutcracker. At the 2015 JUNO awards, Mr. Estacio was nominated in the category of Classical Composition of the Year.

In 2009, John Estacio was one of three composers to receive the $75,000 National Arts Centre Award for Canadian Composers. The award involved three commissioned works to be written for the Orchestra, beginning with Brio (2011), continuing with the Sinfonietta for Woodwind Quintet (2014), and concluding with the work we hear tonight, I Lost My Talk.