Alumni and Student News

April 24, 2017

Current choral conducting students Hannah Carr and Simon Lee were announced as semifinalists of the graduate conducting competition at the national conference of the American Choral Directors Association in March. Nathan Reiff gave a poster presentation on Schnittke at the same conference.

Mindy Ella Chu, M.M. ’15, sang with the Voices of Ascension Chorus and Orchestra in January, performing Hadyn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Mozart’s Ave verum corpus and Exultate Jubilate.

Paul Jacobs (at left), M.M. ’02 and A.D. ’03, premiered Christopher Rouse’s Organ Concerto on the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ in Philadelphia’s Verizon Hall late last year, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s organ. The work was written for Jacobs, who also performed Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”) on the program.

Mark Vuorinen, M.M. ’07, was awarded the 2016 Leslie Bell Prize for choral conducting by the Ontario Arts Council. The jury praised Vuorinen as “an impressive musical communicator… and a strong leader in supporting two very different choirs with excellent results, {enhancing] the presence of choral repertoire in Kitchener-Waterloo, both inside and outside of the concert hall.”

Current and former ISM organists were honored in Diapason Magazine’s 2017 “20 under 30” competition: Nathaniel Gumbs, M.M. ’11; Joshua Stafford, M.M. ’12; Weston Jennings, M.M. ’17; Nicholas Quardokus, M.M. ’18; and Janet Yieh, M.M. ’17. Congratulations to all!