Map of You with Maeve Palmer & Rachel Fenlon

This concert features two of Canada's most exciting sopranos. Rachel Fenlon takes her signature self-accompanied style to the music of composer Daniel Janke from their recently released album Map of You (available from Centrediscs). This music sits at the boundary between art-song and folk creating a language and topology all its own. Rounding out the program is Maeve Palmer and Jialiang Zhu's exploration of Canadian-Irish identity, contrasting contemporary composers from both Ireland and Irish-Canadian composers here.

Rachel Fenlon is a soprano and pianist who is finding a unique voice on the classical music stages of the world. Drawing from a singer-songwriter approach, Rachel performs song recitals as both singer and pianist accompanying herself. Praised for her “unusually shaped recitals in keeping with her extraordinary talent” (Places des Arts/Festival de Lanaudière), Rachel performs internationally as a recitalist, as solo pianist and singer, and on the opera stage. Rachel was born in the UK, raised on the west coast of Canada, and is now based in Berlin.

The 2024/25 season sees Rachel make self-accompanied recital debuts at the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Bechstein Hall, Salle Bourgie Montreal, Vancouver Recital Society, the Virtuosi Festival in Brazil and the Algarve Music Series. She returns to her native Canada, touring various programmes at leading festivals and venues including Salle Bourgie, Vancouver Recital Society, Domaine Forget, Coast Recital Society, ArtSpring, SweetWater Music Festival, and Music Toronto. In opera, Rachel returns to work with Ensemble Nylandia/Isabella Shaw in La Doriclea. Rachel releases her debut solo album of Schubert’s Die Winterreise on Orchid Classics in autumn 2024.

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“Triple-threat ... coloratura” (OperaCanada) Maeve Palmer is an alumna of the Rebanks Family Fellowship and the University of Toronto (UofT) Opera School. Maeve is a prize winner of the 2021 Jim and Charlotte Norcop Prize in Song (UofT), a prize winner of the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, and a Dora award winner. She has performed with Tapestry Opera, New Music Concerts, Continuum Contemporary Music, and Opera Atelier. Her voice can be heard in the Hollywood film The Space Between Us. Recent operatic roles include Adina, L’Elisir d’Amore (Highlands Opera), Genio Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Jean MacDonald and Daisy Fairchild in The Bells of Baddeck (MacDonald & Burry), and Robot 1, and [Helena] understudy in Tapestry Opera’s production of RUR: A Torrent of Light (Lizée). An interpreter of many Mozart roles, Maeve has performed as Queen of the Night (Toronto City Opera) Susanna, Sandrina, and Serpetta (UofT Opera), and Zerlina (Center for Opera Studies Italy). World and Canadian premieres include works by Nicole Lizée, Alice Ping Yee Ho, Samuel Andreyev, and Haydn. A passionate scholar, Maeve recently finished her doctorate in Voice Pedagogy and Vocology at UofT as a Massey College Junior Fellow.

Host or Publisher Canadian Music Centre