With performance credits ranging from orchestral soloist to jazz session player, Toronto bassist and international touring artist Jesse Dietschi is a truly versatile musician and composer equally experienced in jazz, classical, and popular music. He has been a featured soloist with orchestras in both Ontario and the US, and leads both his own jazz trio and chamber jazz group the Catalyst Ensemble. Serving as the Principal Bassist of Sinfonia Toronto, he holds an Artist Diploma from the Glenn Gould School in Orchestral Performance and Masters degrees in both Jazz Performance (U of Toronto) and Composition (Brandon University). Jesse has toured internationally with groups ranging from modern jazz outfits Tunnel Six and the Nick Maclean Quartet to Canadian Tenors’ star Ken Lavigne. Other performing and recording credits include the Canadian Opera Company, the Niagara Symphony, The Headstones, and TV shows Murdoch Mysteries and Hannibal.

Joseph’s 20 concerto commissions continue to create new vocabularies in a canon ranging from minimalist to modernist, palimpsestic to post-digital. Brian Current’s Koussevitsky Foundation concerto was cited for “… Petric’s unusual insight into how to clarify and project detail as well as a superb sense of rhythmic design.” (Halifax Chronicle Herald); the CBC commissioned Koprowski concerto premiere recording with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra “..full of …emotional power, virtuoso demands, gripping, large scale. (American Record Guide). Denis Gougeon’s En Accordeon offered “..brilliant and subtle… powerful, exciting effects (Montreal La Presse); the London premiere of Gunnar Valkare’s Sveriges Reikskonzerter commission Viaggio “… astonishing bravura.” (Musical Opinion, London.)

Joseph’s explorations have been welcomed at international festivals including Huddersfield, Washington Festival, Montreal New Music, and Agora IRCAM. Petric’s passion for accordion palimpsest includes a chamber version of Schubert’s Winterreise with German tenor Christoph Prégardien and Pentaèdre presented at the Hohenems Schubertiade, the Tokyo Spring Festival, Tel Aviv Opera, Blaue Salle Brussels and the Berlin Philharmonic Festival. Petric’s performance in the complete Sequenzas for Berio’s 75th birthday tribute at Seiji Ozawa Hall, at the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Festival, was cited in the New York Times as “…strong, committed… particularly memorable.”

Since completing her studies on viola at the Eastman School of Music, she has performed in concert series and festivals across Canada, from the Halifax Jazz Festival to the Victoria Summer Chamber Music Festival, and internationally in the US and Europe. Kathleen has been heard frequently on CBC Radio as both soloist and chamber musician.

As a baroque violinist and violist, she appears regularly with Tafelmusik, Scaramella and Toronto Masque Theatre. She also performs with the Texas Early Music Project, and with the Montreal-based ensembles Masques and Arion Baroque.

She teaches Early Music at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School, and brings all her musical experiences to bear in her role as broadcaster at The New Classical 96.3FM in Toronto, where she is the weekly host of “In the Still of the Night” and “Dinner Classics.”

Mayumi Seiler has appeared as concerto soloist with major symphonies around the globe, including the Royal Philharmonic, Berlin Symphony, Moscow Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Montréal Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Academica Salzburg, Bournemouth Symphony, City of London Sinfonia and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, among others. She has collaborated with such noted conductors as Kent Nagano, Peter Oundjian, David Atherton, Christopher Hogwood, Neville Marriner, Sandor Vegh, Hugh Wolff and Richard Hickox.

Among Ms. Seiler’s extensive list of recordings are the Beethoven Concerto, the two Mendelssohn Concertos and three of the Haydn Violin Concertos with the City of London Sinfonia and Richard Hickox conducting on the Virgin Classics label. She has recorded Stravinsky’s Le Baiser de la Fée with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and David Atherton, also on Virgin Classics. Her many recordings of chamber music, including works of Schumann, Dohnanyi, Boccherini and Mozart, appear on the Hyperion and Capriccio labels.

While nurturing a busy schedule as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe, Japan and the Americas, Ms. Seiler founded Toronto’s Via Salzburg – acclaimed as “One of the best roads to our musical hearts” (Toronto Star). In Via Salzburg she led a string orchestra in regular performances at the Glenn Gould Studio for sold out audiences. Through 14 seasons she curated programs with renowned artists from Europe and Asia and combined varied art forms such as dance, pantomime and painting into Via Salzburg events, winning the embrace of audiences and the praise of critics citing the performer’s “combustion of creative energy – they clearly love what they are doing” (Toronto Star).

She has collaborated with many of the world’s leading soloists, including violinists Maxim Vengerov, Richard Tognetti and Ruggiero Ricci, violist Veronika Hagen, cellists Steven Isserlis and Colin Carr, pianists Menachim Pressler, André Laplante, Yael Weiss and Ikuyo Nakamichi, clarinetist David Shiffrin, and guitarist Elliot Fisk among many others.

An active and passionate teacher, Mayumi Seiler serves on the faculty at The Glenn Gould School in Toronto. She has held a professorship at the University Mozarteum in Salzburg, has given masterclasses worldwide and has adjudicated at numerous international violin competitions. She began her musical upbringing in Osaka, Japan, where she was born of Japanese/German parentage. Wedded to the violin from the age of three, she received her musical education at the renowned Mozarteum during the formative years of her childhood in Salzburg.

Mayumi Seiler performs on the 1684 Croall Stradivarius.

She has recorded 3 CD with contemporary music of Rey Jr and Yusupova in Da Vinci Classics and in Art Classics.

Naghmeh showed great interest in rhythms during her childhood and started playing the tonbak when she was 6. While learning the rhythmic patterns of Persian traditional music under the supervision of her father, she was encouraged to learn a melodic instrument to gain insight into the melodic aspect of music as this would make her a better accompanist. So she started playing the santoor under the guidance of Faramarz Payvar and Pashang Kamkar. Besides learning traditional music, Naghmeh found the daf to be very powerful and spiritual and began learning Sufi and Kurdish rhythms on the daf from Bijan Kamkar and Masoud Habibi.

Naghmeh has performed in many well known Iranian traditional bands in Iran and festivals around the world in places such as Germany, Switzerland, Japan (Min On Festival), France (La fete de la music), Italy, Kuwait (Women festival), Austria, and London. She was honored to perform with Hassan Nahid, Iranian master of the ney and Hengameh Akhavan, a famous singer of traditional music for years.

In 2010 Naghmeh moved to Canada and started working with world music, Arabian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Indian and also Jazz. She has been teaching in different music institutes for 15 years and has taught master classes and workshops around the world.

Naghmeh founded a percussion ensemble (Sharghi) while collaborating with Iran’s national TV and recorded numerous pieces and performed live for a decade. She is also skillful in playing darbuka (doumbek), dayereh, cajon, udu and drumset. She has published a book, Helheleh, that includes some pieces for the daf and is currently publishing her percussion CD, Drums&Dreams.

Peter Aidu has been a part of everything new and vital that’s been happening on the Russian acoustic scene for the last ten years. The graduate of Moscow Conservatory with specialization in piano and organ is an architect, archeologist and artist of sound. He plays a number of instruments, some of them common, such as the harpsichord and grand piano, others — less common, such as the hammer clavier and lute. He performs on a giant bagpipe in Moscow parks; or arranges a show with marimbas, rung ladders, and rusty gear-wheels; or puts together a construct of sliced metal sheets that explores the correlation of sound and form.

Peter Aidu has organized a hospice for elder pianos and spends part of his time reconstructing vintage rarities. Using the 18th century textbook, he reconstructed some French dance music. His other creations include an experimental orchestra without a conductor, and Popov sound machines — clunky, but touching monsters that “speak” in place of thunderstorm, trains and fighter aircraft. His latest work is called the Sound Landscapes performance: it’s a presentation of four audio canvases made with a help of old-time theatrical machinery, and as a result the audience experiences a transcendental listening experience of alternate injections of sounds such as a carpet bombing, or a tropical rain, or the Atlantic surf.

Praised as “an engaging visual and vocal actor” (Opera Canada) with a “warm, sonorous baritone” (Stage Door Toronto), Nicholas Borg was a member of the Yulanda M. Faris Young Artist Program at Vancouver Opera for the 2019/2020 season. Last summer Nicholas was involved with Brott Opera and the Manitoba Opera Digital Emerging Artists Program. This past season with Vancouver Opera Nicholas performed the role of Barone Douphol in La traviata, and Fiorello in Il barbiere di Siviglia. Previously, he performed the role of Action in West Side Story in Concert for the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and performed with the Canadian Opera Company Chorus in their productions of Elektra, Cosi fan tutte, and Otello.  Nicholas has performed Marcello in La bohème and Eugene Onegin for Opera Muskoka, Pangloss in Candide and Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance for Toronto Operetta Theatre, Figaro in Mercadante’s lost opera I due Figaro for Voicebox: Opera in Concert, Belcore in L’elisir d’amore for the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy, Tarquinius in The Rape of Lucretia for MYOpera, and El Dancairo in Carmen for the Mississauga Symphony Orchestra.  Nicholas has appeared as a guest soloist for the Grand Philharmonic Choir in Kitchener/Waterloo, and the Amabile Choirs and St. Mary’s Choirs in London Ontario. Nicholas graduated with a Masters in Music degree from the University of Toronto Opera, under the tutelage of renowned soprano Wendy Nielsen, and he holds a Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University.