TOGETHERNESS

My pride and joy! The Aja Trio celebrates its first place in Senior Chamber Music at the Canadian National Festival of Music. The trio went on to win first place in Friends of Chamber Music.

Preparing Eileen Padgett’s Resilience for Vetta Chamber Music Concert.

Piano students can't just count, they have to listen and be aware of length/duration. These principles need to be present in every piece a student learns but nothing will illustrate it better than if a piano student is introduced to the collaborative world of sonatas, trios, quartets and quintets.

I was introduced to the joys of chamber music in university thanks to my piano professor Patricia Parr and violin professor Lorand Fenyves. And what transpired in my playing was a real appreciation for the actual compositional form and timbre. Of course, there is a "piano" sound but the piano can do so much more - it can 'bow' , it can sound like an oboe, a clarinet, a trombone. Then there is rhythm. As the great bass player Gary Karr said to me at a summer music festival in Victoria "Your sense of rhythm is only as good as your sense of duration".