CMC Presents : Solo Works

with Wesley Shen and Roan Ma

 

Presenting two of Toronto’s most dynamic new music performers playing a selection of works dear to them. The two will play solo sets of piano music and violin music as well as a piece or two for violin and piano. The concert will also be the premiere of Sonny-Ray Day Rider’s work that is the CLC’s ISCM Commissioning Project for Indigenous Artists.

—-

Wesley Shen is a Toronto-based pianist and harpsichordist specializing in the performance of contemporary music. He can be found in equal measure as a solo, collaborative, chamber and orchestral musician. He regularly performs with a number of groups including Continuum New Music, New Music Concerts, Esprit Orchestra, Soundstreams, and FAWN Chamber Creative. He is also a core member of the Freesound Ensemble, one of Toronto’s newer contemporary music collectives. In more traditional settings, he can also be seen performing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.

A passionate advocate for new music, Wesley works closely with many of Canada’s top composers including Linda Catlin Smith, Anna Höstman, Bekah Simms, and James O’Callaghan. He can be heard on a number of recent albums including Emilie LeBel’s landscapes of memory, Bekah Simms’ Bestiaries, and Monica Pearce’s Textile Fantasies. He has also received numerous grants from the Canada Council of the Arts to commission over a dozen new works for both solo harpsichord and solo piano. He continues to strive to create and contribute to these deeply fruitful collaborative relationships between performers and composers, as well as promote the harpsichord as an expressive and exciting contemporary music instrument.

As well as the piano and harpsichord, Wesley has added a number of additional instruments to his palette, namely the shō and more recently the Ondes Martenot. Wesley is a co-founding member of shshcc, a trio of two shōs and accordion with Michael Murphy and Matti Pulkki, commissioning and performing newly created works for this unique ensemble.

Recent appearances include performing Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field with Amahl Arulanandam, Gérard Grisey’s Vortex temporum with Freesound Ensemble, Henryk Gorecki’s Harpsichord Concerto with Esprit Orchestra, and will soon be performing with Opéra de Montréal on Ondes Martenot in the new opera Clown(s) by Ana Sokolovic.

______________

Roan Ma is a multi-faceted musician passionate about creating space within the classical music world where diverse voices are represented. Her work focuses on rediscovering music and musicians obscured by time and social constrictions, as well as challenging the conventions of classical violin through contemporary repertoire.

Roan received her BM and MM degrees in violin performance from the Manhattan School of Music, graduating from her Masters with the Hugo Kortschak Commencement Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chamber Music. She then received her Master of Music Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College. During her tenure in New York City, Roan also worked at Manhattan School of Music’s Orto Center for Recording Arts and Distance Learning as both a Recording Engineer and as the Recording Arts Manager. Currently, Roan is pursuing a DMA in violin performance at the University of Toronto studying under Jonathan Crow and Mark Fewer.

Recent festivals and residencies include IRCAM’s ManiFeste 2023, Continuum Contemporary Music’s 2023 HATCH mentorship program, Bang on a Can’s 2024 Summer Festival, The Next Festival of Emerging Artists (with the Kronos Quartet), and Darmstadt Summer Course 2025. Roan currently works as Continuum Contemporary Music’s Artistic Producer through their MAP program.

Roan also leads an active academic life in addition to her performance career. Recent paper and lecture-recital presentations of her research at conferences include Female Baroque Composers Hidden in the Male Canon at the Rutgers University Musicological Society’s Graduate Student Conference, Problems in Progress and Preservation Within Music Conservatories at Columbia University’s “Facing Climates” Conference, Kaija Saariaho’s Electronics: Reconceptualizing Authorship in Composer-Engineer Collaboration at Carleton University’s Music, Sound, and Liminality Conference, and Her Music or Their Music?: Electronics in Kaija Saariaho’s Compositions and Career at McGill University’s Graduate Music Symposium. Her doctoral research at the University of Toronto concentrates on music for violin and electronics from a pedagogical and performance perspective.