Piano: Corey Hamm
Vocal: Kimberley Denis
Winds: John McPherson
Dr. Corey Hamm is both an internationally performing pianist and Assistant Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He is Director of the UBC Contemporary Players and joined the faculty of UBC in Fall 2005.Dr. Hamm is honoured to be nominated for and winner of the 2008/2009 UBC Killam Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching.In June 2009 Dr. Hamm was on the Piano Faculty of The Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at the New England Conservatory in Boston.
Highlights of Dr. Hamm’s busy 2008 and 2009 concert seasons include international tours with over twenty performances of Frederic Rzewski's hour-long piano masterpiece, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
In recent seasons, Hamm has given many new music performances (including numerous World, Canadian and Vancouver Premieres) of works by György Ligeti, György Kurtag, Salvatore, and Howard Bashaw, among many others.
Hamm has been involved in the commissioning of over sixty solo, chamber and concerto works. Hamm's performances as soloist and chamber musician have been broadcast on CBC Radio, NPR and Polish Radio in Canada, the USA, and Europe. He has performed with the Vancouver Symphony, Lethbridge Symphony, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and The Symphonic Wind Ensemble of the University of Minnesota.
Hamm is pianist with the prominent new music ensemble The Nu:BC Collective. With Nu:BC he has performed multimedia concerts of works by Gyorgy Ligeti, Howard Bashaw, George Crumb, and many others.
Hamm is also a founding member of the Canadian two-piano, two-percussion ensemble Hammerhead Consort, formed in 1990, and winners of such important Canadian awards as the Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award (1992), and the CIBC National Music Competition (1991), as well as the 1993 ARIA Award for Best Classical Recording. Their second CD, Traffic, was released on Arktos Recordings in 1999.
Corey Hamm won first prize in the 2004 Elinor Bell Piano Fellowship Competition in Minnesota, was a semi-finalist in the 5th Orleans International Contemporary Piano Competition in Orleans, France 2002, and was the second prizewinner at the 1995 Eckhardt-Gramatte Competition for Contemporary Piano Music. Corey Hamm's beloved teachers include pianists Dr. Stephane Lemelin, Dr. Ernesto Lejano, Thelma Johannes O'Neill, and Marek Jablonski, and he completed his Doctoral degree (Dissertation: György Ligeti's Piano Etudes: A Performer's Analysis) at the University of Minnesota in 2005 with Distinguished McKnight Professor Lydia Artymiw. Two consecutive scholarships from the Johann Strauss Foundation have taken Hamm to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria for summer study with Claude Helffer, Sergio Perticaroli and Karl-Heinz Kammerling. He was on the piano faculty of the Alberta College Conservatory of Music in Edmonton from 1994 to 2001, and is a frequent adjudicator in Canada, Asia, and the USA.
Shumayela's director, Kimberley Denis is known for her energy and enthusiasm both on stage and off, and is sought after as both a soloist and as a vocal clinician for high school, community, church and children's choirs. Upon completion of both her commerce and music undergraduate degrees at Mount Allison University, she returned to Alberta where she completed a double masters degree in choral conducting and voice at the University of Alberta. She has won many accolades for her work as a soprano soloist and conductor, and has also received a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her thesis work on regionalism and nationalism in Canada as portrayed through choral arrangements of Eastern Canadian folk songs. She had her recording debut as the soloist for Antonín Dvo?ák's Te Deum and is often asked to write choral arrangements for choirs of all shapes and sizes. She currently directs the Mount Royal Youth Choir in Calgary, the Kokopelli Apprentice Choir, Shumayela, in Edmonton, and the Nota Bene Youth Choir in Red Deer. She is also currently the music director at Knox Presbyterian Church and is employed by Quest Theatre Projects and Themes and Variations Music Publishing.
Since 1980 John McPherson has been Principal Trombone of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. A native Edmontonian, John has been both a trombone and euphonium soloist with the ESO. In addition, the orchestra has performed many of his compositions.
An active musician in many areas, John has played with the Tommy Banks Band, the New Orleans Connection, the Canadian Hot Stars Dixieland Band, the Alberta Jazz Repertory Orchestra, the Bad for Business Big Band and many others. As a chamber musician John has performed and recorded as a member of the Canadian Chamber Ensemble, the Malcolm Forsyth Trombone Ensemble, the Albertasauras Tuba Quartet, the Old Strathcona Town Band, and the Plumbers Union. He is a founding member of E-SWAT, a tactical musical strike team of the ESO which launches surgical attacks of music where it’s least expected.
As an educator John has been part of the ESO’s Adopt a Player program, taught at numerous music camps, and since 1985 has been Visiting Assistant Professor of Trombone and Euphonium at the University of Alberta.
Composition has become an increasingly important part of John’s career. He has received commissions from Grande Prairie Regional College, the Wild Rose String Quartet and the Alberta Foundation for the Performing Arts.
His works have been performed by such groups as the Edmonton Symphony, the Hammerhead Consort, Take 3, the NOWage Orchestra, the Beau String Quartet of Calgary, Basstiality of Toronto, and the Festival City Pops Orchestra. Many of these performances have been recorded and broadcast on programs such as Arts National, Two New Hours and Alberta In Concert.
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