Tom Allen wanted to be a professional trombone player. That was the plan and it stayed the dream until he turned 30. Let him tell it. "I started as a musician. I worked hard at it, but it became pretty clear to me that by the time
The pianist Hinrich Alpers is a prize winning German musician with a long connection to Chamberfest in Ottawa and to Canada. He is a laureate of the Honens Prize. In the past he has tackled some big subjects such as the music of the filmmaker
As long as Rob Kapilow has been coming to Ottawa, he's wanted to do a Duke Ellington program. "To me," Kapilow said, in an interview with ARTSFILE, "Duke Ellington is the best of America. If anyone was welcoming to anything and everyone it was Duke Ellington.
Chamberfest kicked off its 25th anniversary season Thursday night with the first of several concerts by the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Founded in Toronto just a few years before Chamberfest, the SLSQ has been part of the festival from the very beginning, and the ensemble’s
A proposal for a new national portrait gallery is back on the table largely thanks to Ottawa lawyer Lawson Hunter, who was the driving force in realizing the decades-long dream of the new Ottawa Art Gallery. Hunter supported locating a portrait gallery in the former U.S. embassy at 100 Wellington
The recent Ontario cabinet shuffle seemed to have worked a miracle for the Ottawa Jazz Festival. The festival has announced that it will now receive a grant of $250,000 from the Celebrate Ontario program. The program had originally turned the festival down in a decision that was
About 350 years ago J.S. and the boys would gather at Zimmerman's Coffee House in Leipzig, Germany to drink a little java and jam together as the Collegium Musicum. J.S. — Bach that is — even wrote a short comic opera about the evils of
When we spoke James Campbell had just come in from a cool dip in a lake near Georgian Bay. It's one of the perks available to the artistic director of the now 40 year old Festival of the Sound in the hometown of No. 4,
In 2016, Mervon Mehta was puzzling over a problem: How was the Royal Conservatory of Music to participate in the celebrations around the 150th anniversary of Confederation? "I was actually watching one of the federal election leaders' debates and Justin Trudeau had said something that was
Four hundred years ago this year, a remarkable women was born in Venice, Italy. Barbara Strozzi was the illegitimate daughter of a famous poet of the day named Giulio Strozzi. She was adopted by her father and raised in his home which was a sort of
