Sinfonia Toronto w/ pianist Heather Schmidt and violinist Xiaohan Guo

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Sinfonia Toronto's [1] 2009/2010 Masterpiece Series continues April 9th at 8:00pm, with violin pyrotechnics and a virtuoso composer. This concert features Sinfonia Toronto's 2009/2010 Composer in Residence Heather Schmidt at the piano playing her own composition, and Sinfonia's own violinist Xiaohan Guo.

Sinfonia Toronto's Composer in Residence Heather Schmidt lives a dual life as a busy concert pianist, and a prolific composer of concert music and film scores. She has been nominated for the Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year, won the Julliard Composers' Competition, as well as two SOCAN Composer's Competitions, and 3 consecutive BMI Awards. In the past decade, Dr. Schmidt has received over forty commissions, and recorded for NAXOS and CBC Records. At this concert Ms. Schmidt will give the Toronto premiere of her Piano Concerto No. 6.

Born in Shenyang, China, Xiaohan Guo began her violin studies at the age of six and enrolled at the Shenyang Conservatory at the age of 13. She won the 2001 Mozart Violin Concerto Competition, and as a member of the Shanghai Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, had the pleasure of performing with outstanding musicians such as Itzhak Perlman, Seiji Ozawa and Mstislav Rostropovich. She has been a student of Mrs. Eleonora Turovsky at University of Montreal since her arrival in Canada in 2004.

Sinfonia Toronto is comprised of thirteen virtuoso string players. "A world-class ensemble," according to Germany's Russelsheimer Echo, they perform standing, in the tradition of great chamber orchestras, under the direction of Music Director and conductor Nurhan Arman. A roster of Toronto's finest woodwinds, brass and percussion joins the strings for select programs, drawn from the full range of chamber orchestra repertoire. The Toronto Star writes of "a remarkable range of colour," "ample eloquence" and "gripping authority," while La Scena Musicale declared: "Nurhan Arman and his orchestra literally conquered us." Their most recent CD, Flanders Fields Reflections features the 2009 Juno Award winner for Classical Composition of the Year, a Sinfonia Toronto commission composed by John Burge.

The programme for the evening also includes Mozart's Divertimento K 138, Charles-Camille Saint-Saens' Caprice, Franz Waxman's Carmen Fantasy, Astor Piazzolla's Oblivion Four for Tango and Shostakovich's Prelude and Scherzo.

Tickets for this concert are $12 - $40 and are available through the Roy Thomson Hall box office at www.roythomson.com [4], 416-872-4255.

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