The ARC Ensemble has appeared at major festivals and series, including the Budapest Spring Festival, the Enescu Festival (Bucharest), New York's Lincoln Center Festival, Canada's Stratford Festival, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, London's Wigmore and Cadogan Halls and Washington's Kennedy Center. The ARC Ensemble's “Music in Exile” series has been presented in Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Toronto, New York and London, and its performances and recordings (on Sony's RCA Red Seal and Chandos labels) continue to earn unanimous critical acclaim and frequent broadcasts on stations around the world.
Comprised of the senior faculty of The Royal Conservatory's Glenn Gould School, with special guests drawn from the organization's most accomplished students and alumni, the ARC Ensemble's core group consists of piano, string quartet and clarinet with additional forces as repertoire demands. The ARC Ensemble has collaborated with a range of artists, including the late Leon Fleisher, piano, the novelist Yann Martel, actors Saul Rubinek and R.H. Thompson, and composers R. Murray Schafer, Omar Daniel and Vincent Ho.
EXIT: MUSIC, a documentary exploring the ensemble's work, premiered in November 2016 at Toronto’s Hot Docs Cinema. Subsequent screenings at international festivals led to distribution deals with First Run Features for the USA and EuroArts for the rest of the world. The ARC Ensemble's most recent release is devoted to the music of the Auschwitz survivor and onetime conductor of the camp's orchestra, Szymon Laks. The recording was nominated for a 2018 Juno Award. Highlights of ARC's 2019 season included concerts at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Ferrara Musica, and UCLA's Schoenberg Hall. Its seventh recording, of premieres by the Czech / American composer Walter Kaufmann will be released in August 2020.
James Conlon, Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera and a pioneer in the recovery of lost twentieth century repertoire, is the ARC Ensemble's Honorary Chairman, its Artistic Director is Simon Wynberg.