TERENCE DAWSON
Pianist

Pianist TERENCE DAWSON has built a reputation as one of Vancouver’s most active and respected musicians. A versatile artist, his career spans that of solo pianist, orchestral pianist, chamber musician and teacher. He has performed as concerto soloist with the Vancouver Symphony and National Arts Centre Orchestras and has collaborated with numerous artists and ensembles for many series including the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, Vetta Chamber Music and as principal pianist for the widely recorded CBC Curio Ensemble. From 1992–1999 he was Artistic Director and pianist of Vancouver’s celebrated Masterpiece Chamber Music Series. His solo and chamber performances in Canada, the USA, England and Asia have been described as “lucid” (Globe and Mail), “stunning” (Vancouver Sun), and possessing “trademark elegance and technical flair” (Georgia Straight). He can be heard frequently on CBC Radio and has recorded for EMI Virgin Classics, Bravura Discs and Skylark labels. For ten years he was member of the ensemble “Piano Power,” performing throughout BC. He also performs piano duo repertoire regularly with Linda Lee Thomas, Sara Davis Buechner and Jamie Syer. A dedicated teacher and an engaging lecturer and adjudicator, each year Dr. Dawson presents many workshops and masterclasses for both teachers and students. In 2006 he was the invited clinician for Conservatory Canada’s National Masterclasses and has served as a jury member for organizations including the Canadian Music Competition, The Canada Council, The Vancouver Foundation and the Canadian Federation of Music Teachers’ Association National Piano Competition. Following his graduate studies with Canadian pianist Jane Coop, Dr. Dawson joined the UBC School of Music faculty in 1991. He is the school’s undergraduate Keyboard Division Coordinator and teaches piano and chamber music.

KEIKO ALEXANDER
Pianist

Japanese born KEIKO ALEXANDER came to the United States to study piano with Sascha Gorodnitzki and Janina Fialkowska at the Juilliard School, and received the Artist Diploma in 1983. She has lived in Laredo, Texas and Cincinnati, Ohio where she performed extensively as a soloist and as a chamber musician. In 2000 she was invited to perform for Hillary Clinton at a campaign event in Cincinnati. After moving to Vancouver in 2000, Ms. Alexander has been active as a performer, teacher and clinician at many festivals and competitions in Canada and abroad. Keiko Alexander has served as an adjudicator in North America for the World Piano Competition in Cincinnati; the MTNA (University of Kentucky); the American College of Musicians Piano Guild; in Germany for the International Piano Competition for 6 Hands and 8 Hands in Marktoberdorf; and in Tokyo for Japan’s Piano Teachers’ National Association.

COREY HAMM
Pianist

COREY HAMM is Assistant Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is also co-director, with Giorgio Magnanensi, of the UBC Contemporary Players. Hamm is pianist with the prominent new music ensembles Hammerhead Consort and The Nu:BC Collective With Nu:BC (“a delightfully diverse evening of sights and sounds”—Georgia Straight) he has performed multimedia concerts of works by Gyorgy Ligeti (danced and choreographed by Emily Molnar “a dazzling performance of five excerpts from György Ligeti’s lengthy Etudes for piano”—Georgia Straight), Howard Bashaw (“Hamm was easily the most impressive member of a well-rehearsed and disciplined band”—Georgia Straight), George Crumb (“navigated the subaqueous atmospheres of George Crumb’s ‘Vox Balaenae’ with ease”—Georgia Straight), Gyorgy Kurtag, John Adams, Michel Gonneville, Chris Paul Harman, Nikolai Kapustin, Steve Mackey, Bright Sheng, Frederic Rzewski, Chen Yi, and many others. Hamm is a founding member of the Canadian two-piano, two-percussion ensemble Hammerhead Consort. Hammerhead Consort was broadcast from the prestigious Witold Lutoslawski Studio on tour in Poland in June 2000 under the auspices of both The Canada Council and Polish Radio and drew rave reviews at the 2000 Winnipeg New Music Festival. Hammerhead released its second CD, Traffic, in 1999, and their first CD won Best Classical Recording at the 1993 ARIA Awards. Future plans include more CDs of music by Bartók (Hamm has given over forty performances of Bartók’s masterpiece “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion”), Rzewski, Kapustin, Helweg, and Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” CBC Radio recorded Hammerhead in premieres of works by Hamel, Helweg and Godin at the opening concert of New Music Concerts 2004-2005 season in Toronto. The Consort premiered Howard Bashaw’s “Concerto for Two Pianos and Two Percussion” with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in March 2000. They have won such important Canadian awards as the Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award (1992), and the CIBC National Music Competition (1991). Hamm is regularly broadcast on CBC Radio as soloist and chamber musician and is actively involved in the promotion and performance of contemporary music. NPR and Polish Radio have also broadcast his performances in Europe, Canada and the USA. He has been involved in the commissioning of over sixty solo, chamber and concerto works and has performed with the Lethbridge Symphony, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and, most recently, The Symphonic Wind Ensemble of Minneapolis in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” under Craig Kirchhoff. Hamm has also performed with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on its Roundhouse and Musically Speaking series. In June 2006 Hamm was pianist for an exciting month long project in Bali combining a small western ensemble from Vancouver with a Balinese Gamelan in a new work by composer and ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer. Red Letter Films made a documentary Bali by Heart about this fascinating project. “Pianist Hamm’s Gift Unlocks Mysteries of Music,” The Halifax Chronicle Herald wrote of Corey Hamm’s solo concert tour promoted by the Debut Atlantic organization. Other tours of Canada have been sponsored by the Debut Incorporated series in Montréal and the Debut series at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Corey Hamm won first prize in the 2004 Elinor Bell Piano Fellowship Competition in Minnesota, was a semi-finalist in the 5th Orleans International Contemporary Piano Competition in Orleans, France 2002, and was the second prizewinner at the 1995 Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition for Contemporary Piano Music. Corey Hamm studied with pianists Stéphane Lemelin, Ernesto Lejano, Thelma Johannes O’Neill, and Marek Jablonski, and completed his Doctoral degree at the University of Minnesota with Prof. Lydia Artymiw. He has participated in masterclasses for Gyorgy Kurtag, Henri Dutilleux, Roger Muraro, Dominique Merlet, Paul Badura-Skoda, Eugene Istomin, Hans Leygraf, Tatiana Nikolaeva, Gyorgy Sebok, Angela Cheng, Boris Berman, David Lively, Noel Lee, Geneviève Joy. Two consecutive scholarships from the Johann Strauss Foundation have taken Hamm to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria for summer study with Claude Helffer, Sergio Perticaroli and Karl-Heinz Kämmerling. During the summers of 1993 and 1994, Hamm studied in the French Piano Institute at the École Normale in Paris where he was awarded a special prize for Excellence in Performance. There, he had the opportunity to perform the complete piano works of Henri Dutilleux for the composer himself and his wife, pianist Geneviève Joy. He was on the piano faculty of the Alberta College Conservatory of Music in Edmonton from 1994 to 2001, and is a frequent adjudicator in Canada and the USA.