Dinuk wins 2016 JUNO Award for composition
View(s):
Halifax, NS – Nova Scotia’s own Dinuk Wijeratne is the winner of the 2016 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year.
Wijeratne is Symphony Nova Scotia’s RBC Composer in Residence, and a fixture in Nova Scotia’s classical and world-music scene. Along with conducting and composing for Symphony Nova Scotia, he also serves as Music Director of the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra, and keeps a busy schedule performing with orchestras and ensembles across Canada and around the world.
Wijeratne’s JUNO win was announced on April 2, at the awards ceremony in the Calgary TELUS Convention Centre.
He was nominated for his new work entitled Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems, performed by the Afiara Quartet with Nova Scotia’s Skratch Bastid on their award-winning 2015 release Spin Cycle.
The Sri Lankan-born composer, pianist, and conductor 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.
Wijeratne has composed specially for almost all of the artists and ensembles with whom he has shared the stage; to name a few: the Gryphon Trio, the Afiara & Cecelia String Quartets, the Apollo Saxophone Quartet, TorQ Percussion Quartet, the New Juilliard Ensemble, Yo-Yo Ma & the Silk Road Ensemble, Zakir Hussain, Suzie LeBlanc, Kinan Azmeh, Tim Garland, Buck 65, Skratch Bastid, MIR, Joseph Petric, Ed Thigpen, Pandit Ramesh Misra, Adrian Spillett, David Jalbert, Kevork Mourad, and Symphony Nova Scotia, as well as the orchestras of Toronto, Vancouver, Windsor, P.E.I., Thunder Bay, and the National Arts Centre.
He grew up in Dubai before studying composition at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM, Manchester, U.K.), at the Juilliard School with John Corigliano, and conducting at Mannes College. He is the recipient of the Canada Council Jean-Marie Beaudet award for orchestral conducting; the Nova Scotia Established Artist Award; multiple Masterworks and Merritt Award nominations; Juilliard and Mannes scholarships; two Countess of Munster composition grants; the Sema Jazz Improvisation Prize; the Soroptimist International Award for Composer-Conductors; and the Sir John Manduell Prize – the RNCM’s highest student honour.
Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems has also been nominated for an ECMA, with winners to be announced during East Coast Music Week, happening April 13-17, 2016 in Sydney, NS.
“I just got back home, and I can tell you that the whole JUNO experience was such a wonderfully crazy blur of activity that I need some time now to stare at the Halifax waterfront to make sense of it all!” says Wijeratne.
“I’m privileged to have been there amongst so many nominees from Nova Scotia, and can’t wait to get back to creating more music for my Symphony Nova Scotia family.”
Wijeratne has a long history with Symphony Nova Scotia. He was appointed as the orchestra’s Resident Conductor in 2005, shortly after his arrival in Canada, and has continued to conduct and compose for the orchestra ever since.
This past January, he was appointed as the orchestra’s RBC Composer in Residence, a new position made possible through RBC’s Emerging Artists Project. His appointment marked the very first time one person has served as both a Conductor in Residence and a Composer in Residence with a single Canadian orchestra.
Wijeratne is already busy at work creating his first new composition for Symphony Nova Scotia, entitled Polyphonic Lively. The orchestra will perform it at its first classical concert of its 2016/17 concert season, scheduled for October 13, 2016 at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.