Demarre McGill is a celebrated flutist known for his lyrical expressiveness and technical mastery. Winner of the Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, he has performed as soloist with top orchestras including the Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco Symphonies. He currently serves as Principal Flute of the Seattle Symphony.

Demarre McGill’s 2026–27 season features a performance of Billy Childs’s double concerto, A More Perfect Union, with his brother Anthony McGill and the New World Symphony. Additional highlights include engagements in Tahoe, Chicago, and Cincinnati, as well as performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

A founding member of the Myriad Trio and McGill/McHale Trio, he champions inclusivity in classical music. McGill studied at Curtis and Juilliard and is a Yamaha Performing Artist.

Stockholm Chamber Brass was founded in 1988 by five young Swedish musicians to play chamber music together. In 1988, with funding from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, SCB decided to travel to Narbonne, France, to perform at the International Competition for Brass Quintets. The group won 1st Prize and began its over 35 year career as one of the world’s leading Brass Ensembles. 

SCB are committed to developing new and original repertoire for brass quintet and have commissioned over 50 compositions, many of which have gone on to become the most frequently performed original works for brass quintet around the world. 

To date, SCB has recorded 6 critically acclaimed CDs including the classics of the quintet genre, a selection of their commissions and their most recent album THEN, a collection of renaissance songs and dances. The American Record Guide wrote of the album CLOCKWORKS, “I cannot imagine that a better brass quintet has ever existed.” 

SCB regularly perform around the world, playing in major festivals such as the Bad Kissingen Sommer and Schleswig-Holstein Festival. They are passionate educators and regularly give masterclasses at leading music conservatoires as well as running their own Stockholm Chamber Brass Academy. 

New York City-based, JUNO-nominated composer Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis hails from Montreal. "Dreamy yet rhythmic" (NY Times), with a “terrible luminosity” and “ferociously expressive” (Times Colonist), his concert music is “an amalgamation of the classical music tradition and the soul and grime of heavy metal” (I Care If You Listen), “favoring doomsday chords and jackhammer rhythms” (The New Yorker). 

Stafylakis has collaborated with artists and ensembles including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Roomful of Teeth, JACK Quartet, and orchestras around the world. Between 2016–2026, he was the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Composer-in-Residence and Curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival.  

He has collaborated with progressive metal pioneers Animals As Leaders on the adaptation of their music for metal band & orchestra. Hard Rubber Orchestra’s 2022 album Iguana earned Stafylakis a JUNO nomination for his metal–big band fusion composition Source Code. CC Duo & collectif 9’s 2025 album Re/String earned Stafylakis a third JUNO nomination for his double guitar concerto To wake and find the world still burning. 

His 2023 album Calibrating Friction (New Amsterdam Records) has garnered recognition from progressive metal/rock and classical media alike for its deeply integrated fusion of metal and classical idioms and was nominated for the 2024 JUNO Awards’ Instrumental Album of the Year. 

In fall 2026, Stafylakis releases the collaborative prog metal & chamber music EP dontwaitforme with vocalist-composer Courtney Swain, featuring members of Bent Knee and ShoutHouse. 

Recognitions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Fellowship, ASCAP’s Leonard Bernstein Award, and SOCAN’s Classical Composer of the Year Award. He is a founding member of the NYC composer collective ICEBERG New Music. Recordings of his works appear on New Amsterdam Records, Naxos, Analekta, Leaf Music, Contrastes, Redshift, and Sono Luminus. 

Stafylakis teaches composition & production at SUNY Purchase in New York, serves on the faculty of the ICEBERG Institute in Orlando, Florida, and in 2027 will be Co-Head Faculty of the Chamber Music program at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity.

Min-Jeong Koh enjoys a dynamic career as a concert violinist, violist, and educator. As first violinist of the Cecilia String Quartet, she received awards at major international competitions, including First Prize at Banff, Second Prize at Osaka, and the Prix de la Sacem at Bordeaux. Their recording of Dvořák was acclaimed for its “deeply felt imperativeness” (The Strad), and their 2013 recording featuring music by Janáček, Berg, and Webern was applauded for “unleashing the ecstasy and angst” (Gramophone). The Quartet’s recording of Felix Mendelssohn was selected as a Gramophone “Editor’s Choice” and one of its “Top 10 Mendelssohn Recordings,” and was nominated for a JUNO Award for Best Classical Album. With the ensemble, she has performed on such celebrated stages as Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw, the Berlin Konzerthaus, Beethoven-Haus, Prague’s Rudolfinum, the Library of Congress, La Jolla Music Society, and Stanford Live, among many others.

A passionate educator, she is on the faculty of The Glenn Gould School and The Taylor Academy at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. She is also co-founder of Xenia Concerts, which presents adaptive concerts across Canada designed for people who face social and systemic barriers to inclusion. This summer, she is eager to return to Banff, a place that played an important role in her formative years as a musician and where she later returned with the Cecilia String Quartet as both a participant and visiting faculty member.

Nicolas Namoradze is a visionary pianist and composer known for his innovative artistry. He came to international attention in 2018 upon winning the triennial Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, Canada. A Musical America New Artist, BBC Music Magazine Rising Star and Gramophone One to Watch, he was bestowed the Pianist of the Year Award by the UK Critics’ Circle in 2022. His recordings have received accolades including the Choc de Classica, Instrumental Disc of the Month in BBC Music Magazine, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and Presto Classical. Now an exclusive Ondine recording artist, his first album with the label features Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and his own solo piano arrangement of the Grosse Fuge.

Highlights of the 2026/27 season include recitals at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, Wigmore Hall, Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Tokyo’s Triphony Hall and Taipei’s National Concert Hall, residencies at the Banff Centre and the Sarasota, Honens and Tonebase Festivals. The season also sees major composition premieres, including a co-commission by Wigmore Hall and the BBC.
Recent seasons have included recitals at Carnegie Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, residencies with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Verbier Festival and Dresdner Philharmonie, and concerto performances with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Sinfonieorchester Basel and RAI Symphony Orchestra.
Born in Tbilisi, Georgia and raised in Budapest, Namoradze studied in Budapest, Vienna, Florence, New York and London. He now serves on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center and deputizes at The Juilliard School.
 

Carmen Braden is a creator and performer of new, beautiful and sometimes weird music.

She is a two-time JUNO nominated force in the world of new music, hailing proudly from the Northwest Territories. Moving smoothly between genres of composing and songwriting, Carmen is recognized as a “brilliant, young Yellowknife-based composer” (Ottawa Citizen) an “acoustic ambassador of the Canadian Subarctic” (Musicworks). Carmen’s work in music, theatre, songwriting and dance has been performed across Canada and beyond, from Atlin BC to Helsinki, Finland. Her work has a special focus on northern themes as well as the influences of play and parenthood.
 

Carmen has released four albums to national acclaim. Her contemporary classical compositions are regularly commissioned and performed across Canada, and are being increasingly recorded across Canada and beyond. Carmen is an Associate Composer with the Canadian Music Centre, and is signed to Truant Artist Management for representing her compositional work. She is actively engaged as a contemporary classical composer as well as a performer of her original quirky songs throughout Canada.
 

About her music: 
 

“a spacious and rich journey into how we as humans internalize and connect to our 
environment (The Sound Cafe - for Seed Songs) 
 

“Braden’s music is clear, and it is bright…this recording is captured psychogeography.” 
(Whole Note - for Songs of the Invisible Summer Stars); 

About her songwriting: “quirky and clever…à la Joni Mitchell” (The WholeNote - for 
Ravens).

Socials links: 

Website: https://www.carmenbraden.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CarmenBradenMusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackicesounds/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarmenBrade

Jacques Neatby is an international advisor, author, and executive educator specializing in leadership team alignment and corporate strategy.

Over more than 25 years, he has worked with leadership teams in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, including at global industry leaders such as Marriott, Holcim, Randstad, Sanofi, Ubisoft, and LVMH.

Jacques has taught executive education in North America and Europe since 2012. From 2015 to 2021, he taught leadership-team effectiveness in the Financial Times–ranked number-one EMBA program, where he was among the top-rated faculty. He taught in the McGill–HEC Montréal EMBA from 2012 to 2026 and now teaches at INSEAD.

He writes on executive teams and strategy, including for the Harvard Business Review. With INSEAD professor Frédéric Godart, he co-authored Leadership Team Alignment: From Conflict to Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 2023), which became an Amazon Top New Release in business management shortly after publication. He also created The Leadership Team Minute, a video series for senior executives and aspiring C-suite leaders

Vincent Mons began his musical journey playing classical guitar and went on to study audio recording at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional d’Annecy. Further studies at the École Louis-Lumière in Paris introduced him to the world of film and radio. At the same time, he developed his concert-recording skills working with KaliSon, a French recording company, for numerous orchestras and festivals such as the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. A stint in Canada with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s audio programme confirmed his desire to continue in this direction. On his return to France, he joined the ranks of independent sound engineers specializing in classical recordings, founding his own company, F13 Audio. Since then, he has worked across Europe on CD productions for a number of labels, both as a recording egineer and producer, adding artistic direction to his work. This year, he is happily back at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional d’Annecy as an instructor.