Chamber Music 2027

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Born in Korea, Sung-Won Yang graduated from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and was assistant to Janos Starker at Indiana University in the United States. He is regularly invited to be in the jury of the International Competitions such as International String Quartet competition in Banff, Canada, the International Cello Competition André Navarra in France, the International Cello Competition Cassado Japan and the Tongyeong International Competition in Korea. Recipient of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, he is currently a professor of cello at the School of Music Yonsei University in Seoul, visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music and Artistic Director of the Festival Beethoven à Beaune, in France, as well as Music In PyeongChang Festival.

Winner of a Naumburg International Violin Competition Prize and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, featured in the Smithsonian Museum for African-American History, and as New York Times “New Yorker of the Year,” Ms. Hall-Tompkins is a violin soloist entrepreneur appearing with numerous orchestras including St. Louis, Baltimore, Dallas and Oakland, conductors Leonard Slatkin, Keith Lockhart and Michael Morgan, as featured artist in residence with the Cincinnati Symphony and New York City’s WQXR and on Broadway as "Fiddler"/Violin Soloist of the Grammy and Tony-nominated production of Fiddler on the Roof. A collaboration with 5-time Emmy-winning composer Jeff Beal features a new violin concerto, Body in Motion, written for her. The collaboration also features celebrated conductor Leonard Slatkin; Ms. Hall-Tompkins and Maestro Slatkin performed the Sold-Out world premiere with the St. Louis Symphony to critical acclaim: “The world premiere was a treat even by the rarified standards of world premieres…masterful… “ Kelly Hall-Tompkins and Maestro Slatkin also gave the European premiere with the Orquesta of Gran Canaria, Spain this spring. As the first soloist to perform the Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto after the dedicatée, Kelly Hall-Tompkins has been a champion of the work in 25 performances so far, including the Lucerne Festival Premiere in Switzerland and a tour across the Netherlands. The first American artist to perform in China after the pandemic, Ms. Hall-Tompkins received a Chinese “Rare Talent Visa” to perform as soloist with the Shanghai Symphony. As founder of Music Kitchen-Food for the Soul, Kelly Hall-Tompkins is a pioneer of social justice, bringing top artists in over 100 concerts coast to coast in homeless shelters and presenting the World Premiere of Forgotten Voices Song Cycle in Association with Carnegie Hall. Ms. Hall-Tompkins is also a published author contributor to Music and Human Rights on Routledge Press. 

Joe Kelly has been part of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as the Assistant Principal Timpanist/Section percussionist since 2018.  Before that he was a member of the percussion section at the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida. Mr. Kelly has performed with the Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Malaysia Philharmonic, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and Fort Worth Symphony.  Joe also holds the position of Percussion Coach for the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra and is on Faculty at the University of Toronto.

In 2013 and 2014, Mr. Kelly was selected to be a member of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, where he performed orchestral and chamber works and was the soloist in Evan Antonellis’s Multiple Histories. In 2014, Joe joined the Lucerne Festival Academy and toured Europe under the direction of Matthias Pintscher, performing works by Lachenmann, Berio, and Pintscher. When he returned to Lucerne in 2015 as a member of the Academy, he was also invited to perform as an Alumni Guest at the Tanglewood Festival during its Festival of Contemporary Music. The following summer, Joseph was invited to be the solo percussionist of the Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble. This included being the resident ensemble for a composer workshop run by Wolfgang Rihm, as well as the set group for a large commissioning project from the festival. The Alumni Ensemble gave 21 world premières during the 2016 Lucerne Festival.

Mr. Kelly received his bachelor’s degree in percussion performance and master’s degree in orchestral performance from the Manhattan School of Music, where he was a recipient of the Elizabeth Beineke Scholarship and the Outreach Award at the 2015 Commencement. He was awarded the 2012 Kerope Zildjian Concert Percussion Scholarship. Mr. Kelly holds a professional diploma in orchestral studies from Roosevelt University and was a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Former teachers include Christopher Lamb, Duncan Patton, She-e Wu, Erik Charlston, Vadim Karpinos, and Ed Harrison. 

Eric Le Sage is established as a famous representative of the French piano school, regularly boasted for his very subtle sound, his real sense of structure and poetic phrasing. Already when he was 20 years old, the Financial Times had described him as “an extremely cultivated disciple of the great French tradition of Schumann piano”. In 2010, die Zeit, praised his “ideal French piano aesthetics and clarity”.

Eric is invited to perform as a soloist with orchestras at the highest level such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Saint-Louis Symphony Orchestra, Berlin’s Konzerthaus Orchester, SWR Symphony Orchestra, Bremer Philharmoniker, Dresden Philharmonie, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Göteborg Symphony Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra, Münchner Kammer Orchester, Dresdner Philharmonie, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, with conductors like Edo de Waart, Stéphane Denève, Pablo Gonzalez, Fabien Gabel, Sir Jeffrey Tate, François Leleux, Alexander Liebreich, Kazuki Yamada, Alondra de la Parra, Lionel Bringuier, François Leleux, Michael Stern, Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, Sir Simon Rattle and Yannick Nézet-Seguin.

Eric has performed recitals and chamber music concerts in major venues across the world such as Wigmore Hall, Suntory Hall, Carnegie Hall, Hamburg’s Laeiszhalle, Paris Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Radio France, Cologne Philharmonie, Essen Philharmonie, Dresden Philharmonie, Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Schwartzenberg’s Schubertiade, Salzburg Mozarteum, Ludwigsburg Festival, Prague’s Rudolfinium, Taipei National Concert Hall, Konzerthaus Vienna, Luxembourg Philharmonie, Dublin’s celebrity series, Edinburgh International Festival, Düsseldorf Tonhalle, la Roque d’Anthéron Festival, Potsdam Sanssouci, Brussels’ Bozar, Berlin’s Boulezsaal, Konzerthaus Berlin, Berlin Philharmonie.

Eric Le Sage released many albums, all of which were critically acclaimed and received multiple awards. Besides his world-famous Schumann cycle in 2010 that were awarded the very prestigious Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, other milestones include Francis Poulenc's complete chamber works with piano (BMG, 1998), Fauré¹s complete works for chamber music with piano, and Brahms complete chamber music works (B-Records, 2021).

Two magnificent albums were released in 2022: A Mozart album under the baton of his longtime stage partner François Leleux and the Gävle Symphony Orchestra on Alpha (concertos n° 17&24) and a solo album on Sony Classical featuring rare French repertoire from the beginning of the 20th century. In the last few years Eric released Fauré’s complete Nocturnes on Alpha (2019) and Beethoven's last 3 Sonatas (2014). Other recent chamber music recordings include collaborations with such artists as tenor Julian Pregardien for a Schumann album (2019) or Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Daishin Kashimoto, Aurélien Pascal and more for albums around repertoire from Vienna in the 1900s, and works by Nino Rota.

A true chamber music lover, Eric regularly plays with friends like Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Quatuor Ebène, François Leleux, Jean-Guihen Queyras, les Vents Français, François Salque, Lise Berthaud, Daishin Kashimoto, Claudio Bohorquez, Julian Prégardien, Sandrine Piau, Olivier Latry and many other musicians.

Born in Aix en Provence, Eric Le Sage was the winner of major international competitions such as Porto in 1985 and the Robert Schumann competition in Zwickau, in 1989. He was also a prize-winner at Leeds International competition the same year, which allowed him to perform under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle. Eric Le Sage is Professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany.

Paul Meyer made his debut in 1982 by winning the prestigious Eurovision Competition at just 17 years old. He was appointed Solo Clarinet at the Lyon Opera Orchestra in 1983, then at the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1984 and at the Paris Opera in 1985. Very quickly, he left the orchestra for an international soloist career with performances in major international venues with world renowned orchestras (Orchestre National de France, Orchestre de Paris, Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, NHK Tokyo, Russian State Orchestra, …) and alongside the world’s finest musicians such as Benny Goodman, Isaac Stern, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Martha Argerich, Yuri Bashmet, Gidon Kremer, Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma or Emmanuel Ax. 

Passionate with chamber music, he has founded the ensemble Les Vents Français and is co-founder with Eric Le Sage and Emmanuel Pahud of the Festival International de Musique de Salon de Provence. 

For his contribution to the Arts in France and throughout the world, Paul Meyer has been awarded Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honour.
 

Renowned for her “rich and deep sound as well as her virtuosity and exceptional enthusiasm” (The Strad), violist Marina Thibeault invests the musical scene with an ever renewed fervor as a chamber musician, concert artist and soloist. Convinced that one must “undergo everything, experience everything, face all obstacles, all contradictions” (Pierre Perrault), she sails through the sometimes tumultuous waves of a carefully curated repertoire, approaching old and new works with the same commitment. Through her practice, she constantly questions the traditional place of the performer in order to embody a poetic approach as well as a quest to surpass herself physically and spiritually.

Marina Thibeault plays an English viola made by Gordon Kerr (2020) and wishes to thank the anonymous donor of the instrument.

Alex Clark is a composer, arranger, and creative producer whose work bridges orchestral tradition, digital media, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on a background in composition, conducting, and multi-instrumental performance, Alex creates music that moves fluidly between concert hall and studio, blending acoustic craft with contemporary production. 
 

Through Aseosa Productions, he develops original works and arrangements for orchestras, chamber groups, and cross-disciplinary projects, often integrating technology and visual elements to expand the concert experience. His career has evolved from orchestral librarianship into a broader creative practice encompassing concert design, digital performance, and new music development. Alex’s recent work focuses on immersive, collaborative approaches to composition 
that invite dialogue between artists, audiences, and environments.