Adjudicators

Since coming to Canada in 1998, Irina has been on the faculty of Alberta College Conservatory of Music. Many of her students, which include international students from Hong Kong and China, have received awards in Fall and Kiwanis Festivals and now work as piano teachers.

Irina has performed numerous solo recitals and chamber concerts in Russia, Israel, and Canada. Recent performances include an appearance with the Kemerovo Symphony Orchestra.

Irina Konovalov is frequently invited to conduct master classes in Canada and abroad, and to adjudicate at music festivals and competitions. Recent adjudicating experience includes the North Shore Festival in North Vancouver and the Richmond Festival. Many of Irina’s students continue to be involved in the music scene even after graduating from Irina’s studio. Former Irina’s student Anders Muskens has organized several annual Mozart Festivals in Edmonton, AB.

Irina released four solo CDs.

In 2013 Nino joined the faculty of Music Fest Perugia, Italy. Having debuted at age nine with the Georgia State Philharmonic, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488 in A Major, she has since gone on to perform with the major orchestras in her native country, and has toured extensively as both soloist and chamber musician in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, performing under the baton of famous conductors such as Roman Koffman, Vitali Kataev, Yuri Dadiani, Vladimir Ponkin, Jansug Kahidze, and many others.

Nino’s solo performances won her great acclaim. Today she is in-demand soloist and chamber musician in this country and abroad, who has collaborated with many of the world’s great artists including Stanislav Neuhaus, Byron Janis, Yakov Milsteinand George Edelman.

Debut venues include Great Hall of Tbilisi State Conservatory, Tbilisi Opera House, Small Hall of Moscow State Conservatory, Great Hall of Sverdlovsk Conservatory, Symphony Hall in Tbilisi, Great Hall of Liszt’s Music Academy in Budapest and Concert Hall Estonia in Tallinn.

Nino has been a featured performer on chamber music concerts at Seattle’s Benaroya Nordstrom Recital Hall, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, Second City Chamber Music Festival, Music Fest Perugia and continues to maintain a regular teaching and performance schedule.

Dr. Michel Fournier toured extensively with world class musicians and ensembles (Quartango, Les Chambristes de Montreal, violin and piano duo with Hungarian-born violinist Gyorgy Terebesi); he has several Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) recordings, many albums and movie soundtracks to his credit (The colors of my father: portrait of Sam Borenstein, André Mathieu musicien). His numerous CD’s have won public and critical acclaim all over Canada.

Highly appreciated as an educator, Michel Fournier has provided guidance to thousands of musicians, teaching masterclasses, coaching and adjudicating national and international competitions for young musicians across North America, Europe, and Asia. As a teacher, many of his students are award-winners in national and international competitions (Tureck International Bach Competition, American Protégé, Thousand Islands International Chopin Competition, Canadian Music Competition, National Music Festival in Canada and others).

His music studio in Montreal welcomes students from around the world for artist residency. Each summer, he is invited to join the faculty of Camp Musical des Laurentides in Quebec.

Michel is also co-owner, artistic director and advisor for the classical music division of St-André Management Inc., which is responsible for developing and promoting the talent of promising young musicians.

Michel is also passionate about photography, and likes to share his love of nature and life through the pictures he takes during his many travels around the world.

In the 2015/2016 season, Dulu toured across the Maritime provinces of Canada as a Debut Atlantic artist. He has performed in Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. He is equally at home as a soloist as well as chamber musician, collaborative pianist, coach, or public speaker, with appearances on NHK Tokyo, YLE Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, Romanian Radio Corporation, KING FM Seattle, and planned recording projects with the CBC.

Dulu was born and raised in Romania, where he received a rigorous foundation in the fundamentals of music. After intense private piano studies with Ana Pitiş during his undergraduate training in Bucharest, Dulu continued his graduate studies in New York City with Irina Morozova at Mannes School of Music (Master of Music) and later in Vancouver as Jane Coop’s last graduate student at the University of British Columbia (Doctor of Musical Arts).

In masterclasses, he has played for Yefim Bronfman, Richard Goode, and Stephen Hough, and worked with soprano Dawn Upshaw at the Banff Centre.

Dulu is the first pianist to have written a doctoral dissertation on Marc-André Hamelin’s piano Études, researched under the personal guidance of the Canadian composer-pianist. It was during his doctoral studies that he developed a keen interest in the music of this legendary artist, with whom he worked closely during the final stages of the degree.

Bogdan Dulu is on faculty at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra School of Music and the Vancouver Academy of Music | S.K. Lee College, where he teaches piano and chamber music. He makes his home in Vancouver, where he proudly (yet humbly) becomes a little more Canadian by the day.

He has also commissioned dozens of works for The Nu: BC Collective and for Hammerhead Consort. As a founding member of Hammerhead Consort, he received the 1993 Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award, and was winner of the 1992 National Chamber Music Competition.

In recent years, Corey Hamm has, recorded and toured one of the great piano works of the last decades, Frederic Rzewski’s monumental The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Redshift TK431). He is planning further concerts of this masterpiece, notably for Rzewski’s 80th birthday in 2018.

Dr. Hamm is an award-winning Associate Professor of Piano at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is on the Piano Faculty of the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at NEC in Boston. His beloved teachers include Lydia Artymiw, Marek Jablonski, Stéphane Lemelin, Ernesto Lejano, and Thelma Johannes O’Neill.

September, 2016

An enthusiastic recitalist, Ian Parker has performed across the United States, Western Europe, Israel, and throughout Canada on tours with Debut Atlantic and Jeunesses Musicales du Canada. He made his Lincoln Center recital debut at the Walter Reade Theater in 2004. Recent and upcoming appearances include recitals presented by the North Okanagan Concerts Association, UCLA, the University of British Columbia, and collaborative performances with the Hawaii International Music Festival, the Morgan LIbrary, and multiple appearances on a new chamber music series at North Vancouver’s Kay Meek Centre, for which he has recently become Artistic Director.

Ian Parker was invited to collaborate with the internationally renowned Vogler Quartet during its twentieth anniversary tour in 2005-06 throughout the U.S. and Canada. Following the tour’s tremendous success, he was invited to join them again for several concerts in the spring of 2006, and has continued to tour with them regularly ever since. They have also invited him to perform as part of their Vogler Springs Festival in Sligo, Ireland and the Kammermusik Festival in Hamburg, Germany. He has also begun appearing with the up-and-coming Attacca Quartet. He has also collaborated with violinist Augustin Hadelich in numerous venues in both the U.S. and Canada.

Ian Parker is also an active recording artist. In the fall of 2010, a CD of concerti (Ravel Concerto in G, Stravinsky Capriccio, and Gershwin Concerto in F), recorded with the London Symphony under Michael Francis, was released by ATMA Classique. An all-fantasy solo CD on Azica Records, including the fantasies of Chopin, Schumann, and Beethoven (Op. 27, Nos. 1 and 2 “Quasi una Fantasia”), was released in the summer of 2010.

First Prize winner at the 2001 CBC National Radio Competition, Ian Parker has also won the Grand Prize at the Canadian National Music Festival, the Corpus Christie International Competition and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra Competition. At The Juilliard School, he received the 2002 William Petschek Piano Debut Award and, on two occasions, was the winner of the Gina Bachauer Piano Scholarship Competition. Heard regularly on CBC Radio, Mr. Parker has also performed live on WQXR (hosted by Robert Sherman) in New York.

Born in Vancouver to a family of pianists, Ian Parker began his piano studies at age three with his father, Edward Parker. He holds both the Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where he was a student of Yoheved Kaplinsky. While at Juilliard, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded him the Sylva Gelber Career Grant, which is given annually to the “most talented Canadian artist.”

Rebecca plays regularly with great musicians in all kinds of musical groups in and around Vancouver, including the Vancouver New Music Society, the Babayaga String Quartet, the New Orchestra Workshop, the NU:BC ensemble, Tango Paradiso, the Hard Rubber Orchestra, and the Tony Wilson Sextet.

She has appeared as a soloist with the Vancouver Philharmonic, the Semiahmoo Strings, Prince George Symphony Orchestra and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.