Mezzo-soprano Michelle Milenkovic is a dynamic performer. After a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Saskatchewan, Michelle went on to the Banff Centre for the Arts (as student, performer and teaching assistant) under the mentors: Director Keith Turnbull and Extended Vocal Technique specialist Richard Armstrong.

Michelle is known as an integral stylist with a boundless palette. She has performed with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, the NOWAge Orchestra and is the lead singer for Regina’s blues/rock band Frog’s Back. Select credits include Weill in Weimar (Edmonton Opera), UBU: the Opera (Banff Centre) and The Star Catalogues (Vancouver New Music); the plays Kafka’s Amerika and Silence (Northern Light Theatre), and the musical Spitfire Grill (Leave it to Jane Theatre Company).

“…the two pieces described above were hardly a match for the absolutely phenomenal Michelle Milenkovic…  She performed two parts (9 and 10b; 1978) from a vast cycle of Récitations written by the French-Greek composer, Georges Aperghis…  Michelle Milenkovic presented Récitations with absolute, almost humiliating virtuosity – she is a total performer, capable of turning even the simplest phrases into treasures of meaning.”

The Alberta New Music & Arts Review

 

 

Dancer Gerry Morita is interested in performance art, and how it values honesty towards the body and communication with the audience. She is constantly interested in blurring the boundaries between performance art and dance, since both fundamentally use the body as medium.

Choreographically, Gerry has been highly influenced by contact improvisation, and Japanese contemporary dance forms (butoh and Noguchi taiso). Her technical training encompasses ballet, modern, pow wow, Highland, jazz and high jump. The vocabulary for each piece she creates is distinct to the artistic or intrinsic message of the work, and Morita is known for a wide-ranging style.

Collaboration is key to her way of working.  She flourishes in an environment in which she is able to communicate her artistic goals to others who are able to develop them in parallel artistic directions. Morita feels that this helps to create meaningful layers within the final work.

Physically Morita incorporates Noguchi Taiso based movements into her works. This style, which she studied intensively in Japan with Mari Osanai and Hideo Arai, is used to move bodies in extreme ways, but in the most natural manner possible, using imagery from nature.  This connects the dancer to the larger natural world and universe.  The movement vocabulary involves growing, extending, and Noguchi taiso concepts such as “blowing in the wind”, “figure 8’s with the joints while walking”, and “slow melting” and “2-point reaching/extending with a partner”.  These games and structures are used as a point of departure from which anything can happen.  Often the Noguchi Taiso is practised very slowly, but it also allows for extremely quick and spontaneous motions, gestures, and jumps.

“Morita has been a contemporary dance power-house.”

The Edmonton Journal

“Weird and wonderful.”

The Edmonton Journal

 

 

Born in Poland and living in Canada since 1989, composer, educator and pianist Piotr Grella-Możejko holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, AB; an M.Mus. in Composition degree from the same university; and an M.A. degree in Political Sciences from the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.  While in Poland, he also took private composition courses with the late Prof. Edward Boguslawski and Prof. Boguslaw Schaeffer.  In 1994, Dr Grella-Mozejko was the only Canadian selected to participate in the prestigious “June in Buffalo” Festival and Conference, where he attended lectures by and master classes with Milton Babbitt, Donald Erb, David Felder, Lukas Foss, Roger Reynolds, and Charles Wuorinen.

Described by the German press as demonstrating “uncompromising honesty” (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik), praised for his unorthodox aesthetics (Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung), and whose work is called “brawny, high-contrast… full of rich counterpoint and compelling textural changes” (The New York Times), “strikingly individual” (The Toronto Star), and “wonderful-sounding” (The Buffalo News), Dr Grella-Mozejko has written on commissions from, among others, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, The Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Polish Congress, Edmonton Arts Council/Clifford E. Lee Fund, Ensemble MW2, International Conversatorium of Organ Music, Polish Ministry of Culture and Art, as well as Polish Radio, Canadian Music Centre, and The Flanders Festival.

Presented in twenty-two countries in centres such as Antwerp, Athens, Basel, Berlin, Bilbao, Geneva, Ghent, Kaunas, Kraków, London, Los Angeles, Lausanne, Mexico City, Montréal, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Princeton, St. Petersburg, Seoul, Toronto, Turin, Utrecht, Vancouver, Vienna, Warszawa and Zürich, in recent years Dr Grella-Mozejko’s music has been commissioned, played and recorded by over a dozen symphony and chamber orchestras in Canada and abroad as well as by many outstanding chamber groups and soloists.

His works have appeared on Acte Préalable, Arktos, ATMA Classique, Centrediscs, Clef Records, CML, Eclectra, New Music North, Prairie Sounds and zeitklang labels, have been broadcast and published in Canada, Europe and USA, and performed at numerous festivals and concert series across North America, Europe and Asia. Voting member of the Canadian Music Centre, Artistic Director/General Manager of the Edmonton Composers’ Concert Society, Grella-Mozejko is also producer of the New Music Alberta concert series, and current editor of The Alberta New Music & Arts Review (which he founded in 1997). As a CD producer, he has over a dozen releases to his credit, featuring works by almost seventy Canadian composers.

“[Grella-Mozejko's] music shows qualities similar to those one finds in the works by Eric Satie, Charles Ives, John Cage or Hans-Joachim Hespos… [He] is an outsider…”

Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)

“I see [his] compositions as a model for all composers working in the contemporary field.”

Ruch Muzyczny (Poland)

 

 

Music has always been the passion and life of Jerry Ozipko, a native Edmontonian, who began his musical career with violin lessons from the age of seven.  A graduate of the University of Alberta (B.Mus. in Violin Performance, 1968) and Truman State University (M.A. in Education, 1970), he has been a supporter of contemporary music from his student days at the U. of A., where he was involved in performances of works by the likes of John Lewis, Vernon Murgatroyd and other budding student composers. He studied composition variously with Violet Archer (U. of A.), Frederick Kirchberger (Truman State) and Joan Panetti (Yale).

His first exposure to Avant-garde Music came during his Graduate Studies in 1968 and 1969 – both involving concerts by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.  The first was a performance by the seminal Moog synthesist, Walter Carlos, which opened up new sound vistas to his still young musical ears.  However, it was the second concert that was a sort of “musical epiphany” with respect to contemporary music.  At that concert, the only one he has ever attended where the audience “booed,” featured two works in particular which had a deep impression on his musical mind: Threnody to the Victims of Hi-roshima by Krzysztof Penderecki, Pithoprakta by Iannis Xenakis, and Ionisation by Edgar Varèse.  During the summer of 1971, while attending the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, CA, he performed Quatuor de la fin du temps by Olivier Messiaen.

Upon his return to Edmonton, he began bringing this music to Canadian audiences between 1975 and 1982, with the formation of the Synapse: New Music Ensemble in 1972.  During the all-too-brief existence of the group, many Avant-garde works were presented in a series of concerts.  The composers included, among others, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Anestis Logothesis, and Anton von Webern.

In 1977, flautist Jonathan Bayley; composer,organist,pianist Reinhard von Berg; and sound poet and artist Oliver Botar founded Otherwise, an ensemble “devoted to performing group improvisations in non-jazz contemporary idiom.”  Jerry was invited to perform with them on several separate occasions between 1977 and 1980, which he did with great enthusiasm.  Since 1993, Jerry Ozipko has been teaching violin at his studio at Sherwood Park School of Music.

“Ozipko’s playing is well controlled, with sharp attacks and smooth glissandi…”

The Calgary Herald

“…the first advocate of the avant-garde in our province…”

Alberta Views

 

 

Christopher Payne obtained a BFA Specialization in Film Production from Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in 2007 (Montréal) and a certificate in Arts and Cultural Management from Grant MacEwan Community College in 2008 (Edmonton).

As a media artist Christopher is particularly interested in film, video, custom programmed video installation, digital and analogue photography and brief forays into robotics. The majority of his film based work focuses on camera-less animation where images are created by manipulating directly the surface of the film.

Since September 2008 he has been employed as Production Coordinator at FAVA (the Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta).

Christopher currently lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta.

 

 

Charles Stolte is Associate Professor of Music Theory, Composition and Saxophone at The King’s University College in Edmonton, Alberta and Instructor of Saxophone at Alberta College Conservatory of Music. CBC radio has broadcast his performances and compositions across Canada and his music enjoys performances across North America and in Europe.

Stolte has presented his music, and music written for him, at conferences throughout North America and he was a featured composer and performer at World Saxophone Congress XII in Montréal and XIII in Minneapolis. He can be heard on a variety of recordings as a saxophone soloist, as alto saxophonist with the Edmonton Saxophone Quartet and as tenor saxophonist with IMPULS Saxophone Quartet. In 2006, along with pianist Joachim Segger, Dr. Stolte toured Europe playing contemporary Canadian repertoire, appearing in such centres as Berlin, Łódź and Szczecin (the latter two in Poland).

He has had the benefit of glowing review in the Chicago Tribune (for his performance of Ned Rorem’s Picnic on the Marne), and in Classical Music Magazine (whose reviewer praised him for his versatility).

In 2000, The Canada Council for the Arts awarded Charles an Outreach Grant for the première in Montréal of Last Transfer, his large work for saxophone quartet, two pianos and two percussion, and The Alberta Foundation for the Arts has funded commissions for several recent works. Dr Stolte has served on the faculties of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Roosevelt University and the University of Alberta.

He holds a Doctor of Music degree in Saxophone Performance from Northwestern University, where he was the first Canadian accepted to the doctoral program for study with renowned saxophonist and pedagogue, Dr. Frederick L. Hemke. Dr Stolte also holds degrees from University of Alberta and The King’s University College. His teachers include Frederick L. Hemke, William H. Street, Howard Bashaw, Malcolm Forsyth, M. William Karlins and Jay Alan Yim.

With his wife Natalie and their daughter Brigid, he enjoys living in Edmonton where the season is short, but the golf is cheap.

“…talented performer with glossy technique and bluesy charm.”

Chicago Tribune

“…talented and versatile musician.”

Classical Music Magazine