Three colleagues within Mount Allison University’s music department are about to go head-to-head for the same prize next month as they all vie for an East Coast Music Association award.
Music professors David Rogosin, Helen Pridmore and Lynn Johnson have been nominated under the best Classical Recording category for their respective albums – but don’t expect any real competitive spirit to get between them.
“There’s no rivalry there at all,” says Pridmore. “It’s just so great to see so many of my friends, who have been so active . . . it’s nice to see their good work being recognized.”
Rogosin says it’s exciting just to be nominated – but on top of that, the opportunity to share that with his co-workers is priceless.
“It’s nice, there’s no real sense of competition. We all do our own separate things so we don’t feel like we’re really competing against each other,” he says.
Johnson agrees.
“The music on our CDs is very different,” she says. “So I think for us to each receive a nomination, that’s been great. The icing on that would be for whoever is selected to win.”
Johnson, a long-time adjunct piano professor at Mount Allison, collaborated with former Mount A educator Edmund Dawe on their CD Dialogue, which was released early in 2012. Dawe now serves as the dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba.
“He contacted me and said he was interested in doing this,” says Johnson.
The project actually got its start back in 2008 and has been evolving over the past few years – with the selections of the repertoire, recording (which took place in Toronto), the editing and finally the production.
“It’s taken quite a while to go through the process,” she says, noting that their busy schedules were challenging to work around.
Johnson, whose career as a performer has taken her throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, says the CD includes works from Johannes Brahms, Maurice Ravel, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergie Rachmaninoff, Haim Alexander and Canadian composer Clermont Pépin. She notes the album was mainly geared around the Brahms selection, “which is such a monumental piece.”
Pridmore, whose album was also a collaboration with a former Mount A alum Wesley Ferreira, says she’s thrilled to be nominated for an ECMA award for the CD. She says the album was based on a special project the two were a part of to represent the historic impact of the Acadian Deportation.
Eight works were specially commissioned by Maritime composers for soprano Pridmore and clarinetist Ferreira – with a concert performed at Grand-Pré National Historic site.
After the performance, the two decided they wanted to do even more with
