Chad Louwerse, baritone 

 

Canadian Bass-Baritone Chad Louwerse debuted in Europe with l’Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg as Bernadino in Berlioz’ Benvenuto Cellini. In Canada he has been heard from Quebec to British Columbia. With Montreal Opera, he starred as Buonafede in Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna, sang Talpa in Il Tabarro, and covered Leporello in Don Giovanni. As a member of Montreal Opera’s Atelier Lyrique, he was singled out in Chabrier’s l’Étoile by Claude Gingras of La Presse, who wrote “for pure comedy, first distinction goes to Chad Louwerse”. In past seasons Dr. Louwerse has sung Alidoro in Rossini’s La Cenerentola and Palémon in Thaïs for Pacific Opera Victoria, Capulet in Roméo et Juliette with Montreal Opera, and Hortensius in Edmonton Opera’s La Fille De Régiment. He has appeared with Vancouver Opera as The Nazarene in Salome, The Bailiff in Werther, Zaretsky and Captain Petrovich in Eugene Onegin, and as Monterone in Rigoletto. He was also featured in the Lanaudière Festival’s Der Vampyr conducted by Jean Marie Zeitouni. He is a winner of both the CBC Westcoast Performance Pacific Spotlight competition and the Début competition and has given recitals broadcast on CBC Radio Two. On CD, he can be heard in excerpts of Robert Turner’s opera Vile Shadows and Sylvia Rickard’s song-cycle Three Chinese Songs Of Autumn for the Canadian Music Centre. He was named to the Jeunes Ambassadeurs Lyriques in 2005 and received the Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold award. An active oratorio singer and recitalist, Mr. Louwerse’s concert repertoire includes Handel’s Messiah, the Bach Mass in B-minor, the Brahms, Verdi, and Mozart Requiem, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Dr. Louwerse teaches voice at Western University.

Sharon Kahan, flute 

Sharon Kahan is a native of Regina, Saskatchewan, where she became a faculty member at the Regina Conservatory of Music and principal flutist of the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra. Subsequently, she attended the University of Western Ontario where she earned a Master of Music in Literature and Performance. Concurrently, she studied with a number of distinguished artists, such as Jeanne Baxtresser, formerly of the New York Philharmonic, and Timothy Hutchins of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
Currently, she is a Lecturer at Western University's Don Wright Faculty of Music. Active as a teacher, clinician, and adjudicator, she is also principal flute and piccolo for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where she has been performing since 1994 both in the orchestra and onstage for productions such as The Hypochondriac (2016) and The Music Man (2018).
Ms. Kahan performs regularly with ensembles throughout Ontario including the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. She has appeared as a soloist with many orchestras, including the International Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra London, as well as the Ontario Festival Symphony Orchestra where she was both soloist and principal flute for the 2012 tour of China. In addition, she has been heard in recital and in chamber performances throughout Canada and in Western Europe.

Shelley Heron, oboe 

Shelley Heron brings a wealth of experience to Western University’s Faculty of Music. During her almost three decades as a member of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s oboe section, Shelley was fortunate to work alongside, and learn from, top orchestral musicians, international soloists and preeminent conductors. With a thorough knowledge of performance practice, she designed an effective and successful, systematic approach for audition preparation. Shelley participated in more than forty recordings with the DSO and the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings on the Chandos, Naxos and DSO Live labels and has toured the United States, Europe and Japan on numerous occasions.

Shelley developed and continues to teach a method of reed making now practiced by many oboists. She enjoys repairing oboes and English horns and has acquired the knowledge and precision machinery necessary to grind gouger blades and set-up oboe/English horn gouging machines.

Shelley has extensive experience working with students of all ages and abilities in private lessons, master classes and sectionals. She has conducted classes at The Glenn Gould School of Music, Interlochen Arts Camp, Western Michigan University, Michigan State University, University of Michigan, Detroit Symphony Civic Youth Ensembles and the Banff International Festival of Youth Orchestras and Wind Ensembles.

In addition, Shelley co-founded and organized AVANTI Summer MusicFest, a week-long workshop for Metro Detroit students (13-18 yrs old) coached by Detroit Symphony musicians. For more than a decade she also collaborated with Sarnia high school music teachers resulting in over 400 students attending summer music camp.

Shelley’s formative oboe teachers are Richard Killmer (Eastman School of Music) John Mack (Cleveland Orchestra) and Jonathan Dlouhy (Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.) Shelley received a Bachelor of Music in Performance degree from the University of Toronto and Master of Music from Western University.

For more information, see: http://shelleyheron.ca/

Kyoko Hashimoto, piano 

 

A legendary pianist and a teacher, Gyögy Sebök described Kyoko Hashimoto's “extraordinary musical talent” as “one of the finest of her generation”.
Kyoko Hashimoto was born in Tokyo and began to study the piano at the age of three. After graduating from the Toho-Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, she studied at the International Menuhin Music Academy, Indiana University and the Juilliard School. She received full scholarships from the Menuhin Academy and the Juilliard School. Among her teachers were György Sebök, Menahem Pressler, György Janzer, William Masselos, György Sandor, Felix Galimir, György Kurtág and Ferenc Rados.
She has been regularly performing throughout the world, so far in more than 30 countries, including many major cities and halls such as the Wigmore Hall in London, the Lincoln Center and the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, etc. She has been invited to many important festivals including the Prague Spring Festival, the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival, the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, the Pacific Music Festival and the Saito Kinen Festival. Besides performing Solo recitals in many countries in Europe, North America and Asia, she has performed Concertos with distinguished orchestras such as the Prague Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra and the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra with extensive repertoire, such as Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Litolf, Rachmaninoff, Husa, Messiaen (including Turangalila Symphony and Oiseaux Exotiques) and many contemporary compositions. She has performed over 1000 works from pre-Baroque to pieces written very recently such as the performance of a work by Jörg Widmann with the composer himself (Cl). She has performed on Harpsichord, Fortepiano and other keyboard instruments in addition to modern piano. She has performed many duo recitals with the world's top musicians such as Ruggiero Ricci (Vn), Thomas Zehetmair (Vn) and Antonio Meneses (Vc), and duo and chamber music concerts with artists such as Sandor Vegh (Vn), Mischa Maisky (Vc), Jean-Jacques Kantorow (Vn), Ralph Kirshbaum(Vc), Steven Isserlis (Vc), András Adorján (Fl), Patrick Gallois (Fl), Maurice Bourgue (Ob), Alfred Prinz (Cl), Michael Collins (Cl), Hansjörg Schellenberger (Ob), Barry Tuckwell (Hr), Atar Arad (Va), Anthony Marwood (Vn), Nobuko Imai (Va), Yuzuko Horigome (Vn), Nai-Yuan Hu (Vn), Sergio Azzolini (Fg), Isabelle van Keulen (Vn), Chantal Juillet (Vn), Isabelle Faust (Vn), Hermann Baumann (Hr), Regis Pasquier (Vn), Matt Haimovitz (Vc), Philippe Hirschhorn (Vn), Gil Shaham (Vn), Berl Senofsky (Vn), Phil Myers (Hr), Robert Mann (Vn), Ivan Ženatý (Vn), Paul Neubauer (Va), Samuel Rhodes (Va), Franco Petracchi (Cb), and Bruno Giuranna (Va).
Ms. Hashimoto was awarded numerous prizes such as the 1st grand prize and the public prize at the Concours International de Musique Française, the top prize at the Concours Musical de France, and the special prizes at the Budapest International Music Competition and at the Spohr International Competition. She has recorded many times for TV and radio all over the world including a series of 20 works by Beethoven for Dutch radio. She has been a frequent performer for CBC (Canada) and BBC (UK) and in 2012, her concert performance of a Schubert Impromptu was selected alongside recordings by Edwin Fischer, William Kapell and Wilhelm Backhaus for a programme of 'Great Schubert Performances' in the BBC “Spirit of Schubert" marathon. She has also made more than twenty CD-recordings, including the early piano pieces (all the Preludes+4 pieces) by Messiaen, 34 piano pieces by Schumann, the 24 Preludes, Op. 11 by Scriabin combined with the 24 Preludes, Op. 34 of Shostakovich, 4 Impromptus, D.935 by Schubert, 12 Preludes Book II by Debussy as well as a disc containing the C minor Partita by Bach, variations by Beethoven, 16 Waltzes by Brahms, the Dance Suite by Bartók and Mazurkas by Blumenfeld, and one presenting 8 Mozart solo pieces which was highly acclaimed by critics and chosen for the "critics' choice" by the magazine 'Record Geijutsu' in Japan.
She is Professor of Piano and Coordinator of Piano Area at McGill University in Montreal , Canada , and was on the piano faculty and the chamber music faculty of the Utrecht Conservatory in Holland for 12 years. She has been invited many times as a visiting professor at the European Mozart Academy in Poland and in the Czech Republic and at the International Chamber Music Academy in the Czech Republic . Many of her students are pursuing active career in performance and teaching all over the world, and in chamber music, she has coached world's notable artists such as Janine Jansen (Vn), Alexei Ogrintchouk ( Ob ) and Charles Richard-Hamelin (Pf). She has been invited as an International Jury member for many competitions such as the Gina Bachauer International Piano Artists Competition (USA), CMC Stepping Stone Competition (Canada), Montreal International Piano Competition (Canada), Piana del Cavaliere International Piano Competition (President of the Jury, Italy), YAMAHA Benelux Competition (the Netherlands) and International Maj Lind Piano Competition (Finland) . She has been the Artistic Director of the International Music Workshop and Festival (IMWF) in the Czech Republic , Germany and Portugal since 2004. She has also given master classes in France , Austria (including Universität Wien, Mozarteum, Salzburg ), Switzerland (including Haute Ecole Genève, Hochschule der Künste Bern ), Canada (including UBC, University of Calgary , etc.) , the Czech Republic , the U.S.A. (including the Castleman Quartet Program every year since 2002, Carnegie Mellon University . Depaul University, University of Nevada, University of Miami, etc.), Belgium (including Royal Conservatory Brussels), Holland, Germany (Including Universität der Künste, Berlin, Hochschule f'ür Musik Hans Eisler Berlin, Hochschule Köln, Freiburg, Lübeck, Freiburg, Trossingen and most of major schools), Taiwan (including Taipei National University of the Arts and National Taiwan Normal University), Brazil, China (including Beijing Central Conservatory of Music), UK (including Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama), Mongolia (Mongolian State Conservatory), Malaysia, Finland (including Sibelius Academy, Savonlinna Academy), Thailand (Mahidol University), Portugal, Montenegro, Israel (including Jerusalem Academy), Korea and Japan.
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