The Glenn Gould School Chamber Competition is a free annual event and an outstanding opportunity to hear classical music performed by small ensembles comprised of the next generation of artists – students of The Glenn Gould School. The finals take place in the stunning acoustics of The Royal Conservatory's Koerner Hall with over $11,000 in prizes available to be won!
Chamber Groups (three or more):
Duos:
The 2026 Grand Prize Winners were the Aura Duo, who received an additional $1,000 award.
The adjudicators for our 2026 GGS Chamber Competition were:
David Deveau has enjoyed a substantial career of over five decades, with appearances on four continents. He has performed as soloist with major orchestras including the Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Houston, Minnesota and Miami symphony orchestras with such conductors as Bernard Haitink, Herbert Blomstedt, John Williams, Michel Plasson, Oliver Knussen, John Harbison and Jose Serebrier.
Abroad he has appeared with L’Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse (France) and the Qingdao Symphony (China). His recital appearances include New York’s Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall, San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, Washington’s Kennedy Center and Phillips Collection, the Shanghai Theater Academy, Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, and at venues in Japan and Taiwan.
He served as Artistic Director of the Rockport (MA) Chamber Music Festival from 1995-2017 and was on the music faculty of MIT for over thirty years. He resides in midcoast Maine.
A Steinway recording artist, Mr. Deveau released his fifth recording of Schumann's Fantasy, Op. 17 and selections from Kinderszenen, Op. 15 on March 6, 2026. His 2015 recording, Siegfried Idyll, was critically acclaimed in the New York Times and Gramophone, and was listed as one of that year’s ten best classical albums by the Boston Globe.
Hailed for his “exquisitely songlike phrasing” (New York Times), Hank Dutt is a champion of the viola repertoire, focusing on both established contemporary compositions and new works by today’s most exciting and forward-looking composers. The violist of the world-renowned Kronos Quartet for nearly 50 years (1977–2024), Dutt has appeared on more than 70 Kronos recordings, including three Grammy Award–winners. He has also shared in numerous other national and international honors, including the Polar Music Prize, Avery Fisher Award, and "Musicians of the Year" from Musical America.
With Kronos, Dutt premiered more than 1,100 newly commissioned compositions and arrangements from a diverse array of composers, including Americans John Adams, Laurie Anderson, inti figgis-vizueta, Philip Glass, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Missy Mazzoli, Angélica Negrón, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Henry Threadgill, and John Zorn; Argentina's Osvaldo Golijov; Azerbaijan's Franghiz Ali-Zadeh; Canada’s Nicole Lizée and Tanya Tagaq; Egypt’s Hamza El Din; Finland’s Kaija Saariaho; Poland's Henryk Górecki; Russia’s Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke; and Serbia’s Aleksandra Vrebalov. He also toured the world hundreds of times, appearing in many of music’s most revered venues and festivals and sharing the stage with artists as diverse as Asha Bhosle, David Bowie, Eiko and Koma, Rhiannon Giddens, Allen Ginsberg, Angélique Kidjo, k.d. lang, Paul McCartney, Van Dyke Parks, Rokia Traoré, Dawn Upshaw, Caetano Veloso, Tom Waits, Tony Williams, and Wu Man.
Since leaving Kronos, Dutt has embraced a new path of musical innovation as a soloist and duo member, moving from what had been a frequent supporting role to the challenge of being “front and center” much or all of the time. Building upon his long Kronos experience, he is also exploring new uses of electronics in music. Guiding all his work is a quest for emotional authenticity and connection.
“I am addicted to the elevated feeling I get when I perform,” Dutt said. “It’s similar to a ‘runner’s high’—when all your work in rehearsal comes together, and you connect with the audience and your colleagues, and magic happens. You’re inspired to go to new heights you somehow never achieved before. That is what I’m always striving for.”
The San Francisco Classical Voice echoed this sentiment in its review of a 2019 Dutt solo/duo performance—essentially a preview of his post-Kronos pursuits: “The [ideas] of honed phrasings and of music as an immersive experience applied well to Dutt, the Kronos violist…. Dutt, who played a few works with the spirited and absorbing pianist Hadley McCarroll, inhabited each to a transporting effect. Dutt has a way of imbuing even the microscopic gradations of a phrase with character, and the program supported his deft interpretative skills.” Or, in the words of the Santa Barbara News Press, Dutt “offers one of the most humanly haunting viola sounds around.”
Hank Dutt began his musical studies at age 10 in Quincy, Illinois. He continued his work under the inspirational tutelage of David Dawson at Indiana University, where he earned successive bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music. As Dutt once told the online magazine Bachtrack.com, he’s never forgotten Dawson’s signature words of encouragement: “Keep vibrating.” “This seems like such good advice on so many levels,” Dutt said. “Keep vibrating!”
In 1977, immediately after completing his master’s at Indiana, Dutt landed the Kronos viola chair and moved to San Francisco to join the group. In a true rarity for a contemporary musician—not to mention most other fields of endeavor—he continued to hold the same position for the next 47 years. He stepped down from the quartet at the conclusion of its milestone “Kronos Five Decades” season in June 2024 and remains the second longest-tenured Kronos member since its founding in 1973.
Violinist/violist Yura Lee is a multifaceted musician, as a soloist and as a chamber musician, and one of the very few in the world who is equally virtuosic on both violin and viola. Her career spans through various musical mediums, captivating audiences with music from baroque to modern, and enjoying a career that spans more than three decades that takes her all over the world. She has performed with major orchestras including those of New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She has given recitals in Wigmore Hall London, Musikverein Vienna, Mozarteum Salzburg, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, and Concertgebouw Amsterdam. At age 12, Yura Lee became the youngest artist ever to receive the Debut Artist of the Year prize at the Performance Today awards given by National Public Radio. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2007. Yura Lee was the only first prize winner awarded across four categories at the 2013 ARD Competition in Germany; also, she won top prizes in major competitions including Violinwettbewerb Leopold Mozart (Augsburg, Germany), Joseph Joachim Violinwettbewerb (Hannover, Germany), Fritz Kreisler Violinwettbewerb (Vienna, Austria), Premio Paganini (Genoa, Italy), and Indianapolis Competition (USA). Her CD Mozart in Paris, with Reinhard Goebel and the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie, received the prestigious Diapason d’Or Award in France. As a chamber musician, she regularly takes part in the festivals of Seattle, Marlboro, Salzburg, Verbier, La Jolla, Caramoor, to name a few. Yura Lee plays Giovanni Grancino violin kindly loaned to her through the Beares International Violin Society by generous sponsors. For viola, she plays an instrument made in 2002 by Douglas Cox, who resides in Vermont. Yura Lee is a professor at the University of Southern California, Thornton School of Music, holding the Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld Endowed Chair. She divides her time between Los Angeles (USA) and Copenhagen (Denmark), with her dog Nugget.
Hailed "Queen of the flute" by New York Magazine, flutist Carol Wincenc was first prize winner of the (sole) Naumburg Solo Flute Competition, as well as the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Flute Associations of the USA and China, the National Society of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Music, and Distinguished Alumni Award from the Brevard Music Festival Center and Manhattan School of Music. She continues to celebrate more than half a century as an international concertizing artist and legendary pedagogue at both the Juilliard School and Stony Brook University.
The muse of hundreds of celebrated composers, she's commissioned and premiered over 70 works—now staples in the flute canon—by luminaries Rouse, Foss, Tower, Gorecki, Schoenfeld, Schickele, Heggie, Jalbert, Sirota, Smith, Uebayashi, Gabriela Lena Frank, Sato Matsui and Valerie Coleman. She's had the privilege to work closely with such legends as Copland, Messiaen, Takemitsu, Carter, Corigliano, Rampal, Maazel, Paul Simon, Philip Glass and Tilson Thomas.
She has appeared as soloist with the Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and London symphonies, the BBC, Warsaw, and Buffalo Philharmonics; the Los Angeles, and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras. Wincenc has appeared with Mostly Mozart, Aldeburgh, Budapest, Frankfurt, Santa Fe, Spoleto, Music at Menlo, Aspen, Yale/Norfolk, Sarasota, Banff, and Marlboro Festivals. A Grammy nominee, and most recently recipient of the Martha Graham Dance Company: "Five Fearless Women Award", she has received a Diapason d'Or Award for her recording of the Rouse Flute Concerto with the Houston Symphony, a Recording of Special Merit Award with pianist András Schiff, Gramophone magazine's "Pick of the Month" with the Buffalo Philharmonic, and NPR's 10 Best Classical Albums of 2023 for her recording of the Joan Tower Flute Concerto.
A devotee of chamber music, she is a member of the New York Woodwind Quintet, and founding member of Les Amies, Trio Calore and Gossamer Trio. Wincenc is renowned for her series with Lauren Keiser Music Publishers, the Carol Wincenc 21st Century Flute. She is the founder and Director of flute symposiums in the USA and Europe: Creating Resonance Retreat "CRR" in the Finger Lakes, NY, and with composer Yuko Uebayashi in France at "La Melodieuse”. Nothing gives her greater pleasure than to collaborate with former students now holding prominent positions as soloists, university professors and orchestral players, worldwide.