That Time of Evening

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Sara Schabas, soprano & Geoffrey Conquer, piano
Wednesday November 2 at 8 pm
$20; $10 Students
Program (subject to change)
G.F. Handel (1685-1759)
Volate, amori (Ariodante)
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Songs on poems by Victor Hugo
– Comment, disaient-ils
– Oh! quand je dors
– S’il est un charmant gazon
– Enfant, si j’etais roi
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Sonata No. 47 in B minor, Hob.XVI:32
I. Allegro moderato
II. Minuet
III. Presto
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Nuvoletta (Op. 25, text by James Joyce)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Op. 24, text by James Agee)
Sara Schabas, a Canadian soprano known performances of “nuance” and “beauty” (Oakwood Register, Ohio and Mooney On Theatre, Toronto), is a native of Toronto.
Schabas has performed at the prestigious Aspen Music Festival in roles including Juliette (cover) in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Candace in William Bolcom’s A Wedding. A former artist-in-residence with the Dayton Opera in Ohio, Schabas’ further operatic roles have included Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) with Premiere Productions Ottawa, Suor Genovieffa (Suor Angelica) with Opera on the Avalon, Papagena (Die Zauberflöte) and Sister Catherine (Dead Man Walking) with Dayton Opera, and Corinna (Il viaggio a Reims), Laurette (Le docteur miracle) and Lauretta (Gianni Schicchi) with Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.
Equally passionate about concert works and art songs, Schabas’ concert engagements have included Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock” and Brahms’ Liebeslieder Wälzer with members of the Dayton Philharmonic, Soprano Soloist in Messiah with the Dayton Philharmonic, Suite from The Tender Land with the Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra and cover for Mahler’s Fourth Symphony at the Castleton Festival under the late Maestro Lorin Maazel. Committed to new works, Schabas has collaborated with the composer Jake Heggie and recently debuted with Tapestry Opera in a recital of new Canadian opera excerpts as part of their Songbook VI. She has performed as a Fellow with Toronto Summer Music Festival’s Art of Song, the Vianden International Music Festival in Luxembourg and the Casalmaggiore International Festival in Italy.
Schabas has received awards from the Canadian Music Competition, Alliance for Canadian New Music Projects, the Orpheus Vocal Competition, and the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Music in Performance with a minor in English Literature from the University of Toronto and a Master of Music in Performance from Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Also dedicated to giving back to her community through music, Schabas has sung with the charities Sharing Notes, where she performed for people in Chicago hospitals, Songs by Heart, where she sang daily in nursing homes with people with alzheimer’s and dementia, and currently volunteers at Baycrest Hospital in Toronto. She returns this season to the Aspen Music Festival as a Mercedes T. Bass Opera Fellow, and performs recitals at the Toronto Arts and Letters Club and at the International Resource Centre for Performing Arts as a recipient of the Judith Forst Scholarship.
Canadian pianist Geoffrey Conquer has been praised for having, “obviously received the secrets of the great pianistic technique that produced Gilels… The sonority is massive and at the same time, always clear, musicality is always there, and rubato used wisely” (La Presse).
Geoffrey Conquer was born in Toronto in 1990 into a musical family and began piano lessons at the age of six. After studying with Svetlana Gojevic for ten years, he received the A.R.C.T Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto. Following this, he studied at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University for eight years with the legendary Georgian pianist and pupil of Emil Gilels, Professor Marina Mdivani. Currently, Geoffrey is a fellow in the Rebanks Family Fellowship and International Performance Residency Program at the Glenn Gould School.
Geoffrey Conquer is a two-time First Prize winner of the McGill Symphony Concerto Competition, a Second Prize winner at the 2014 and 2015 Siegfried Weishaupt International Piano Competition in Germany, and a Laureate of the Canadian Music Competition. Among the numerous scholarships he has been awarded from McGill University are the Mary Feher Prize, two Graduate Excellence Fellowships, and the prestigious Schulich Scholarship. Geoffrey is a grateful recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Williamson Foundation for Music. He has worked in master classes with the renowned pianists and pedagogues Daniel Pollack, Lily Dorfman, and Boris Berman. Also an active collaborative pianist and chamber musician, his coaches include Michael McMahon, Dr. Julia Gavrilova, and Kyoko Hashimoto. His performances have been broadcast on Radio1 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and on CBC-McGill.

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