Clarinetist Don Ross is the leader of Saint Crispin's Chamber Ensemble, one of Edmonton's busiest and most innovative art music groups. Since 1994 the group has appeared on numerous CD's, CBC broadcasts and new music festivals and has played over two dozen programs of traditional masterpieces and cutting edge new works, including pieces commissioned from Allan Gilliland, Robert Rosen, Siaw Kin Lee and others. Don also appears regularly as a soloist, session and orchestra player. Don's students at Alberta College Conservatory are frequent competition and audition winners and he is much in demand as a clinician and adjudicator. He has conducted the Edmonton premieres of works by Boulez, Takemitsu and Howard Bashaw as well as many emerging composers. He frequently collaborates with BEAMS and the Edmonton Composers Concert Society, and several of his own compositions have been recorded and broadcast. He holds music degrees from the Universities of Alberta and Toronto, as well as a Master's from Northwestern University in Chicago. The teachers that most influenced his playing were Robert Marcellus, Alan Hacker and Michele Zukovsky. In the past year he has played with six orchestras, including the Edmonton Symphony and Calgary Opera. He was recently invited by Maestro Grzegorz Nowak to play in the inaugural season of the Metamorphosis Orchestra. Saint Crispin's Chamber Ensemble were featured performers at the rESOund new music festival and won two Canada Council grants to commission new works. In May 2002, the group hosted the first SOCAN/CMC reading session in western Canada. CBC radio broadcast Don's arrangements of Scottish bagpipe music and his show called Hymn to the Sun, which featured a newly discovered piece from the Roman Empire, a new work commissioned from Allan Gilliland and works by Weber, Berg and Gershwin. National CBC TV broadcast a his collaboration with Denae artist Leela Gilday from Yellowknife. He conducted A Beggars Passion and the Alberta College Summer Band and his composition Brief Refuge was played at the Flanders Festival. Don's students at Alberta College Conservatory won a Downey prize, U of Toronto, Alberta and BC scholarships and six chairs in the Alberta Honour Band. He was a clinician for Windworks, and Fort MacMurray schools and instructor at MusiCamp Alberta and Grande Prairie College. He also performed four times with the Boreal Electro-acoustic Music Society (BEAMS). |