Toronto, March 9, 2023 – Canadian Art Song Project (CASP) is pleased to announce Liberté-Anne Lymberiou and Kendra Harder as the 2023 mentees in the Chung-Wai Chow and John Wright Art Song Mentorship Program for Composers—a new CASP initiative designed to support emerging composers working in the field of Canadian Art Song. They will be working with mentors Dinuk Wijeratne and Cecilia Livingston, respectively.
Generously supported by Chung-Wai Chow and John Wright, the program was announced by CASP Co-artistic Directors Steven Philcox and Lawrence Wiliford in February 2021 as a way to help enrich and re-imagine the writing of Art Song in Canada by bringing together emerging and established artists within a collaborative and open environment.
Over the course of the next year, Liberté-Anne Lymberiou will be working with Dinuk Wijeratne on her project that sets the poetry of award-winning author and poet Emné Nasereddine, who writes “candidly and profoundly on the migrant condition, the place of women in Western and Middle-Eastern cultures, family bonds and relations.”
Kendra Harder will be working with Cecilia Livingston on a project entitled Newly Out – songs that give voice to the experience of being a newly out queer woman.
CASP is thrilled with the number of highly qualified applicants who applied to be part of this program. We look forward to receiving more applications when we announce the next round of this unique program.
About our 2023 Mentees and Mentors
About the Mentees
Liberté-Anne Lymberiou
Born and based in Montreal, of Greek and French Canadian heritage, Liberté-Anne Lymberiou has been leading and composing for her jazz orchestra since the age of 23. She received mentorship from composer Arturo O’Farrill who first encouraged her to pursue a composing and bandleading path. It was through her studies with percussionist Chief Baba Neil Clarke that she began engaging seriously with Pan-African percussion ensemble concepts and a holistic vision of art.
Lymberiou’s most recent works span across traditions and genres, and include a 50-minute opus for 20-piece jazz orchestra, as well as repertoire for saxophone duos, choir, and multi-disciplinary projects involving dance, textile art and film.
Kendra Harder
If you have ever wondered what the beauty of Agustìn Barrios, the campiness of Broadway, and the insanity of Hector Berlioz combined together would sound like, you have not come to the right place. While perhaps all these elements inspire the music of composer, Kendra Harder, what emerges is a sound that is uniquely her own.
Kendra Harder is a queer composer, arranger, guitarist, and amateur feminist musicologist from Saskatoon, SK, on Treaty 6 Territory. One of her biggest passions is creating story through song. She has had operas developed through the inaugural Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes, and Fresh Squeezed Opera Digital Vocal Lab, and has worked on a project with dramaturg Cori Ellison.
About the Mentors
Dinuk Wijeratne
The Sri Lankan-born Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne is a JUNO and multi-award-winning composer, conductor and pianist who has been described by the New York Times as ‘exuberantly creative’ and by the Toronto Star as ‘an artist who reflects a positive vision of our cultural future’. His boundary-crossing work sees him equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, and takes him to international venues as poles apart as the Berlin Philharmonie and the North Sea Jazz Festival.
Dinuk has also appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center (Washington DC), Opera Bastille (Paris), Lincoln Center (New York), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Sri Lanka, Japan, and across the Middle East.
READ MORE at dinukwijeratne.com
Cecilia Livingston
Canadian composer Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company (2022-) and was composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne Festival Opera (2019-22). Cecilia’s residencies at the COC and Glyndebourne build on her two-year fellowship at The American Opera Project in New York. Her opera ‘Singing Only Softly’ won the inaugural Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes and was nominated for two 2020 Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Theatre (including Outstanding New Opera), and her harp and vibraphone duo Garden features on the 2020 JUNO Classical Album of the Year for Solo or Chamber. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in March 2023, and is on faculty at the Banff Centre’s Opera in the 21st Century program.
READ MORE at cecilialivingston.com
