Corcoran Concerto Competition

Preliminary & Semi-Finals Rounds only

For more than three decades, cellist and producer Roman Borys has distinguished himself as one of Canada’s leading artistic voices. A founding member of the three-time Juno Award-winning Gryphon Trio, he has performed internationally since 1993 and recorded 22 acclaimed albums on Analekta, Naxos, and other labels. Renowned for his commitment to chamber music and artistic innovation, Roman has championed cross-genre collaborations, new commissions, and multimedia projects. He is currently the Artistic and Executive Director of Music Toronto, where he leads the organization’s artistic vision while expanding its community engagement and artist-development initiatives.

Juno winner James Campbell has been called “Canada’s pre-eminent clarinetist and wind soloist, by the Toronto Star, "Canada's premiere clarinetist" by the Ottawa Citizen, “a national treasure” by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and “one of the top half-dozen clarinetists in the world today” by Fanfare Magazine. He has performed as soloist and chamber musician in over 35 countries with over 65 orchestras including the Boston Pops, Montreal Symphony and the London Symphony. He has collaborated with Glenn Gould and Aaron Copland and toured with over 35 string quartets, including the Guarneri, Amadeus (when he replaced an ailing Benny Goodman on a tour of California) and Vermeer. Of his over 60 recordings, the BBC and The Times of London rated his recording of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet as the best available. He has been named Canada’s Artist of the Year, awarded the Queen’s Gold and Diamond Jubilee Medal, an Honourary Doctor of Laws, and Canada’s highest honour, the Order of Canada. He has recently been inducted into the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Classical Music Hall of Fame. James was Professor of Music at the famed Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University from 1988-2019 and continues to give concerts and masterclasses throughout the world.

James has been Artistic Director of the Festival of the Sound since 1985. Under his direction the Festival has traveled to England, Japan, and the Netherlands and it has been the subject of documentaries by BBC Television, CBC Television and TV Ontario.

Pianist Jane Coop, one of Canada’s most prominent and distinguished artists, was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and grew up in Calgary, Alberta. For advanced studies her principal teachers were Anton Kuerti in Toronto and Leon Fleisher in Baltimore.

At the age of nineteen she won First Prize in the CBC’s national radio competition, and this, along with First Prize at the Washington International Competition, launched her career. In the early years she made recital debuts at Wigmore Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall (now called Weill Hall) and was invited to tour the New England States as soloist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Mario Bernardi in 1976.

Subsequently she has played in over twenty countries, in such eminent halls as Wigmore Hall, the Bolshoi Hall in St. Petersburg, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, Roy Thomson Hall, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, the Beijing Concert Hall and Salle Gaveau (Paris). In her own country she has given concerts from north to south: Whitehorse (Yukon) and Niagara Falls (ON), and from west to east: Tofino (BC) and St. John’s (Nfld) and many, many cities, towns and communities in between. She is in fact one of the few who has remained resident in Canada throughout her career.

Coop’s love of chamber music has led her to collaborate with artists from many parts of the world. Her longtime association with violinist Andrew Dawes, and her more recent partnership with cellist Henry Shapard have given her the opportunity to delve into the sonata literature of Beethoven, a body of music to which she feels particularly drawn. Summer festivals in North America and Europe have provided venues for performances with the Manhattan, Miami, Audubon, Orford, Lafayette, Colorado, Seattle, Angeles and Pacifica String Quartets, and such luminaries as Barry Tuckwell, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi and Antonio Lysy. For the past thirty years Coop has been a cherished faculty artist at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, collaborating with members of the Juilliard String Quartet and other renowned string players.

Her commitment to teaching is centred around her long-time position at the University of British Columbia’s School of Music in Vancouver, where she was a senior professor and more recently Head of the Piano Division. In 2003 she was designated Distinguished University Scholar by the university’s president, and in 2007 she received a Killam Teaching Award. In 1992 she was the founding Artistic Director of the Young Artists’ Experience – a summer chamber music program for young students which took place in Whistler, BC. Its mandate was to give the participants a wide exposure to art and life, thus offering in the daily schedule yoga, singing, composition, poetry, and visual art as well as music.

Coop’s reputation has inspired international competition organizers to invite her to judge the Cliburn, Kapell, Dublin, Hilton Head, Honens, Bachauer and Beijing Piano Competitions. She has also been a jury member for the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards, the Glenn Gould Prize, the Hnatyshyn Foundation Developing Artists Grants and various Canada Council grant awards. Her eighteen recordings, three of which have been nominated for Juno awards, have garnered glowing reviews and have been heard on classical radio programs in many countries.

In December 2012 Jane Coop was appointed to the Order of Canada, our country’s highest honour for lifetime achievement. In addition, in 2019 she was appointed to the Order of British Columbia.

Ms. Coop is a Steinway Artist.

Canadian soprano and Grammy nominee Karina Gauvin has impressed audiences and critics the world over from La Scala in Milan to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw to Carnegie Hall in New York with her luscious timbre, profound musicality and wide vocal range.

Described by Opera News as “a queen of Baroque opera”, Ms. Gauvin has sung with the world’s leading orchestras including the San Francisco, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto Symphonies, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Venice Baroque Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Les Violons du Roy, Musica Antiqua Köln, Accademia Bizantina and Il Complesso Barocco.

Ms. Gauvin has worked with conductors such as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Ivor Bolton, Teodor Currentzis, Bernard Labadie, Sir Roger Norrington, Kent Nagano, Fabien Gabel, Semyon Bychkov, Michael Tilson Thomas, Christopher Hogwood, Andrea Marcon, Helmuth Rilling and Christophe Rousset. Also active as a recitalist, Gauvin has collaborated with pianists Marc-André Hamelin, Michael McMahon and Roger Vignoles.

During the pandemic, Karina Gauvin was privileged to participate in a recording project, the complete songs of late 19th century composer Jules Massenet. Her extensive discography – over 50 titles – has won her numerous awards, including a “Chamber Music America Award” for her “Fête Galante” disc with pianist Marc-André Hamelin, 3 Grammy nominations for her recordings with the Boston Early Music Orchestra and several Opus Prizes. Recent projects have included Merab in Handel’s Saul at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and Paris Théâtre du Châtelet, Giunone in Cavalli’s La Calisto at the Staatsoper München and at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

Among the numerous distinctions she received in her early career, Ms. Gauvin was named soloist of the year for the International French Radio Community, won first prize for the CBC Radio National Competition for Young performers, the Virginia Parker Prize as well as the Maggie Teyte Memorial Prize in London and the Lieder and Public’s prize at the ‘s-Hertogenbosch International Competition.

Final Round only

Raphael Wallfisch is one of the most celebrated cellists performing on the international stage. He was born in London into a family of distinguished musicians, his mother the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and his father the pianist Peter Wallfisch.

At an early age, Raphael was greatly inspired by hearing Zara Nelsova play, and, guided by a succession of fine teachers including Amaryllis Fleming, Amadeo Baldovino and Derek Simpson, it became apparent that the cello was to be his life’s work. While studying with the great Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky in California, he was chosen to perform chamber music with Jascha Heifetz in the informal recitals that Piatigorsky held at his home.

At the age of 24 he won the Gaspar Cassadó International Cello Competition in Florence. Since then he has enjoyed a world-wide career playing with such orchestras as the London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, BBC Symphony, English Chamber Orchestra, Hallé, City of Birmingham Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Berlin Symphony, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic and many others.

He is regularly invited to play at major festivals such as the BBC Proms, Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Spoleto, Prades, Oslo and Schleswig Holstein.

Teaching is one of Raphael’s passions. He is in demand as a teacher all over the world and holds the position of professor of cello in Switzerland at the Zürich Hochschule der Kunst.

Raphael has recorded nearly every major work for his instrument. His extensive discography on EMI, Chandos, Black Box, ASV, Naxos and Nimbus explores both the mainstream concerto repertoire and countless lesser-known works by Dohnanyi, Respighi, Barber, Hindemith and Martinu, as well as Richard Strauss, Dvorak, Kabalevsky and Khachaturian. He has recorded a wide range of British cello concertos, including works by MacMillan, Finzi, Delius, Bax, Bliss, Britten, Moeran and Kenneth Leighton. For the Chandos Walton Edition he was privileged to record the composer’s Cello Concerto, originally written for his master, Piatigorsky.

Britain’s leading composers have worked closely with Raphael, many having written works especially for him. These include Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Kenneth Leighton, James MacMillan, John Metcalf, Paul Patterson, Robert Simpson, Robert Saxton, Roger Smalley, Giles Swayne, John Tavener and Adrian Williams.

Raphael plays a 1760 Gennaro Gagliano, the 1733 Montagnana “Ex-Romberg” and an exquisite modern cello built for Raphael by Patrick Robin.