Jessica Tse
(1st Place Winner)
Clarinetist Jessica Tse has been praised for her “fine musicianship” (Thornhill Chamber Music Institute). She is an emerging soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral musician. She is an artist with Prologue for the Performing Arts as a member of Quintroversy, a woodwind quintet dedicated to introducing classical music to young audiences. She looks forward to performing at the McMichael Canadian Art Gallery for family day and at the pre-concert performance for the Toronto Symphony’s family concert, “Lights, Camera… Orchestra!” in February 2017.
Passionate about new music, in 2012, Jessica premiered Chan Ka Nin’s Ambiance for solo clarinet at Ford-Crawford Hall in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2010, she performed Lines, the work of Canadian composer Harry Freedman, at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, as the North American musical ambassador chosen by Sing Tao Daily. She has performed with the National Academy Orchestra, FAWN Chamber Creative, Musica Reflecta, and can be heard on recordings for Eighth Note Publications. She has performed recitals for the Lunchtime Chamber Music series at the Yorkminister Baptist Church, the Good Neighbour’s Club for homeless men, Groupmuse, the Live Chamber Music series in Hamilton, and Performing Arts York Region.
Jessica is a graduate of the University of Ottawa and Indiana University. She currently attends the University of Toronto where she is pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in clarinet performance. Her teachers include James Campbell, Kimball Sykes, and David Bourque. She also studied historical clarinet with Eric Hoeprich at Indiana University. As a teacher, Jessica has taught at the OrKidstra’s Kidsplayers Band Program, a program for children from economic-priority areas in Ottawa, Ontario, and has taught clarinet lessons through Skype as part of a pilot program between Mpingo Studios, Indiana University, and Kenyatta University (Nairobi, Kenya).
She performed Allan Gilliland’s “Dreaming of the Masters” at our summer concert, Canadiana: Songs in the Key of “Eh”.
Young-Min Kim
(2nd Place Winner)
Young-Min is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, currently playing horn in the Rouge River Winds as well as the Toronto Youth Wind Orchestra, in which he has also played trumpet, trombone and euphonium in previous years. He has performed in numerous tours with TYWO, during which he has played in world-renowned halls such as Carnegie Hall in New York and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He also serves as a reservist in the Canadian Armed Forces, in which he plays trombone for the navy band at HMCS York in Toronto. In contrast to his active life as a musician, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from McMaster University and is currently working in Markham as a photonics engineer. In his free time, he enjoys playing golf, watching The Office, and making multi-track recordings featuring himself playing several different instruments.
He performed Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Morceau de Concert” at our spring concert, the Sounds of Spring.