The Carleton Music Department and the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra (OSO) have partnered to allow classical music students to train and perform alongside experienced musicians.
The collaborative agreement, which begins in fall 2021, will give students experience with intimate chamber ensemble and larger orchestra settings. Students will hone technical skills and gain performance experience with professional musicians in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre (CDCC).
“CDCC literally sets the stage for this new collaboration between Carleton Music and the OSO,” said Alexis Luko, assistant director of Carleton Music. “We’re excited to launch our collaboration with a focus on performance, mentorship and experiential learning.”
The OSO has called the CDCC its performance home since 2019, shortly after Carleton acquired the downtown Ottawa building. The hope was that the placement would lead to learning and professional performance opportunities for music students.
Of the OSO’s 48 core musicians, five experienced wind players will be available to mentor and teach Carleton students.
The Carleton-OSO Ensemble in Residence members will include clarinetist Shauna Barker, oboist Susan Morris, bassoonist Ben Glossop, flutist Lara Deutsch and French horn player Olivier Brisson.
Deutsch relishes the challenge of instruction and finding ways to address the individual issues from student to student.
“I know that this experience will be as much of a learning experience for me as it will be for the students,” said Deutsch.
All members of the wind quintet in the Carleton-OSO Ensemble in Residence have been invited to serve as performance instructors in the Carleton Music program. One will serve as the director of the Carleton-OSO Student Chamber Ensemble, which will play in a new Sunday concert series alongside the quintet, as long as it is safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To launch the partnership, members of the ensemble recorded a series of small concerts, from duets to trios, at CDCC in September.
The first concert will be broadcast on Rogers tv Ottawa on Nov. 20, 2020, featuring Butler Morris playing Three Dialogues for Oboe and Piano by Robert Fleming, a composer who previously taught at Carleton in the 1970s. These performances will also be aired subsequently online in the OSO’s ReJOYce series.
“Arts, education and community beautifully collide in the Carleton Music and OSO partnership,” said Mara Brown, director of CDCC. “This is a fantastic example of the university and community collaborative programming that CDCC aims to continuously foster.”
The partnership represents a deepening of connections with the Ottawa community, one of the OSO’s biggest goals and a response to Carleton’s Strategic Integrated Plan, which calls for the university to “Serve Ottawa.”
The OSO regularly recruits more musicians as positions become available. Up to five Carleton Bachelor of Music students who audition and are accepted into the OSO will have their chairs in the orchestra sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and the CDCC, thanks to Brown and FASS Dean Pauline Rankin.
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Monday, November 2, 2020 in News Releases
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