Graduating Prizes To Sy & Bridge

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Top Graduating Prizes Go To Sy and Bridge


 

17 June 2015 - The Faculty of Music is proud to announce that tenor Charles Sy (MMus 2015, BMusPerf 2013) is the recipient of the 2015-16 Tecumseh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award and accordionist Michael Bridge (BMusPerf 2015) is the recipient of the 2015-16 William and Phyllis Waters Graduating Award.

Each of the prestigious graduating awards comes with a prize of $25,000, the largest awards given by the Faculty of Music. For consideration of the award, candidates are required to submit an application with letters of recommendation, an outline of future goals and how the award will assist in financing their career development following graduation. 

Established in 2005, the William and Phyllis Waters Graduating Award created by Dr. William Waters and the Tecumseh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award created by Dr. John B. Lawson are given to graduating students of the Faculty of Music who are Ontario residents demonstrating financial need who are deemed to have the greatest potential to make an important contribution to the field of music. The awards were created to support and encourage graduating students to achieve their career goals. 

  

Charles Sy

 

Photo: William Ford Photography

Toronto native Charles Sy received both First prize and Audience Choice in the Canadian Opera Company’s 2014 Centre Stage Ensemble Studio Competition Gala. He has been recognized locally and nationally as a promising young artist with a “softly lyric sound, a natural sense of phrasing coupled with a rare willingness to project beyond the apron” (National Post). He is described as “vocally and dramatically mature with a delicious dark tenor sound that [stretches] easily into shining high notes” (Schmopera). Charles recently completed his MMus in Opera Performance studying with Dr. Darryl Edwards at the University of Toronto where he also completed his BMus in Voice performance in 2013.

Charles will join the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio for the 2015-16 season.

The 2014/15 season with UofT Opera included Charles in the roles of Ralph Rackstraw in Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore and Mr. Owen (A man with a paint box) in Dominick Argento’s Postcard from Morocco. He also appeared in Last DaysFootsteps in Campbell House and as Roméo in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Tony in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story in Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Charles appeared as a featured soloist in Serenades: Forgotten and Found with Recitals at Rosedale and in an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan classics with the Ottawa Choral Society. This season also included the tenor soloist in Handel’s Messiah with Choral Connection and with Chorus Niagara, under the direction of Robert Cooper. Charles is thrilled to be an incoming member of the Gerdine Young Artist Program at Opera Theatre of St. Louis for 2015 where he will sing the role of Adolfo and cover the role of Prunier in Puccini’s La Rondine. Upcoming performances include Tamino in Die Zauberflöte at the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival and Gastone in La Traviata and the Rooster in The Bremen Town Musicians with the Canadian Opera Company.

A recent graduate of the University of Toronto (B.Mus.), Charles is also an alumnus of several prestigious training programs including Music Academy of the West, Opera NUOVA, the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy (COSI), and the Opera as Theatre program at the Banff Centre, where he was praised as being “excellent from beginning to end as Lechmere” (Calgary Herald) for his performance in Britten’s Owen Wingrave.

An enthusiastic interpreter of song, Charles was selected for an Art of Song Fellowship at the Toronto Summer Music Festival in 2012 and was awarded the 2014 Jim and Charlotte Norcop Prize in Song at the University of Toronto. He recently received first place in the Ottawa Choral Society’s 2014 New Discoveries Competition and is a Jeunes Ambassadeurs Lyriques Laureate for 2014, winning the Prix Lyrique Italien and the Prix Jeunes Espoir Lyrique Canadien. He is a Jacqueline Desmarais Grant recipient and is also the recipient of the 2013 Hnatyshyn Foundation Developing Artist Grant for Classical Voice after being nominated to represent the University of Toronto at the national level.

 

Michael Bridge

Photo: Benjamin Laird Arts & Photography

Michael Bridge has performed in China, Croatia, Italy, France, the U.K., and across the USA and Canada. He made his solo orchestral debut with the Boston Pops at age 17 and performs classical, contemporary classical, folk, jazz, rock and pop music on acoustic accordion, digital accordion, and piano.

Bridge is a graduate student in classical accordion performance at the University of Toronto, studying with Professor Joseph Macerollo. His former teachers include Beverley Fess (accordion), Donna Holoboff (piano), and composers Timothy Janz and Robert Rosen (theory, history and composition).

Bridge won the University of Toronto Concerto Competition (2015), the Calgary Stampede Talent Search (2013), and is a two-time Canadian Digital Accordion Champion (2013, 2011). He placed 2nd at the Digital Accordion World Championships (2013) and 4th at the Junior Acoustic World Accordion Championships (2011).

Bridge has collaborated with both Quartetto Gelato and Bellows and Brass (as a substitute member), the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Lethbridge Symphony Orchestra (Nov. ’15), the Ontario Philharmonic, the I.C.O.T. Orchestra, the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra (date TBA), the Euphonia Chamber Orchestra, Soundstreams, Fawn Opera, Barrie Concerts (Oct. ’15), TEDx Talks, The Chopin Society, the Royal Conservatory of Music contemporary music ensemble, Ladom Ensemble, The Collective, the Alex Meixner Band, the Crystal Plamondon Band, The Lizzy Hoyt Band, the Doll Sisters, Joseph Johnson (cello), Joseph Macerollo (accordion), Kornel Wolak and Peter Stoll (clarinet), Ivana Santilli, Melanie Conly, Maeve Palmer and Conrad Siebert (voice), Larnell Lewis, Dan Barton and Norm Bergeron (percussion), Marek Majewski and Michael Savona (classical guitar), and Alicia Baker, Cory Pessaturo and Mario Pedone (accordion).

Along with Dr. Kornel Wolak (clarinet and piano), Bridge is a founding member of DOUBLE-DOUBLE DUO – a high-energy and technologically advanced show with upcoming performances from Ecuador to Poland. Bridge has been a full-time member of Ladom Ensemble since 2014 – an acoustic Iranian-Serbian-Classical quartet based out of Toronto.

Bridge has adjudicated accordion competitions in the USA and Canada, and has given masterclasses in Virginia, West Virginia, Illinois, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Alberta and Ontario. In 2010, he was a theory instructor at the CASSA (Calgary Arts Summer School Association) summer program for youth.

Some of Bridge’s most surprising and unusual performance credits include a TEDx Talk, playing on a float in the Calgary Stampede Parade to a live audience of 300,000, improvising live silent film accompaniments to films by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, premiering the first-ever chamber works written with digital accordion through Fawn Opera, playing polka-rock fusion shows at Texas’ wildly popular Wurstfest, and performing an accordion solo on stage with The Barenaked Ladies in If I Had $1,000,000.

Over the past decade, Bridge has recorded and produced 7 folk albums and 1 classical album (including two albums of his own compositions). As a collaborator, he has recorded two albums with Alicia Baker for the Baker-Bridge Duo, and was featured on Grammy-nominated artist Alex Meixner’s album Happiness Is a Choice.

Bridge works professionally in English, French and Spanish. He performs on Pigini and Scandalli acoustic accordions, and Roland digital accordions.

 

Previous Recipients 

Tecumseh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award 

2014 – Alexandra Smither (BMusPerf Voice 2014)

2013 – Andrew Haji (MMus Opera 2013, BMusPerf 2011

2012 – Riho Maimets (MMus Composition 2012

2011 – Leslie Ann Bradley (MMus Voice Performance 2011, OpDip 2002, BMusPerf 2000

2010 – Lindsay Barrett (OpDip 2010

2009 – Christopher Ku (MA Music 2009, BMus 2007

2008 – Lucille Mok (BMus 2008

2007 – Christopher Donnelly (MMus 2007 Jazz Piano, BMusPerf 2005

2006 – Ryan Jackson (BMusPerf Organ 2006

  

William and Phyllis Waters Graduating Award 

2014 – David Zucchi (BMusPerf Saxophone 2014)

2013 – Matt Woroshyl (BMusPerf Jazz Saxophone 2013

2012 – Coco Chen (BMusPerf Violin 2012

2011 – Laura Silberberg (MMus Composition 2010, BMus 2008

2010 – Alex Goodman (BMusPerf Jazz Guitar 2010

2009 – Lauren Sweetman (MA Music Ethnomusicology 2009, BMus 2007

2008 – Katarzyna Sadej (MMus Voice Performance 2008

2007 – Stephen Hegedus (MMus Voice Performance 2007, BMusPerf 2005

2006 – Sarah Nematallah (BMusPerf Violin 2006)