Award-winning composer Dinuk Wijeratne visits Grammar

Grammar was honoured to welcome composer-performer Dinuk Wijeratne as a guest speaker.
Diunk Wijeratne is a Sri Lankan-born, Canada-based composer-performer who has been described by the Toronto Star as ‘an artist who reflects a positive vision of our cultural future’, and by the New York Times as ‘exuberantly creative’. His boundary-crossing work sees him equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, and takes him to international venues as poles apart as the Berlin Philharmonie and the North Sea Jazz Festival. Dinuk’s 2016 highlights include JUNO and ECMA wins for his string quartet pieces Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems, and his appointment as Composer-in-Residence of Symphony Nova Scotia.

Dinuk grew up in Dubai before taking up composition studies at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), Manchester, UK. In 2001, he was invited by Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano to join his studio at New York’s Juilliard School. Conducting studies followed at New York’s Mannes College of Music.

Dinuk made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2004 as a composer, conductor, and pianist, performing with Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. A second Carnegie appearance followed in 2009, alongside tabla legend Zakir Hussain. Dinuk has also appeared at the Kennedy Center (Washington DC), Opera Bastille (Paris), Lincoln Center (New York), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Sri Lanka, Japan, and across the Middle East.

A passionate educator, Dinuk has lectured at the universities of Dalhousie, Acadia, and Saskatchewan, and is celebrating his tenth season as Music Director of the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra, and this is where I first met Dinuk. He has conducted the orchestras of the National Arts Centre, Thunder Bay, PEI, Scotia Festival Orchestra, and appeared numerous times with Symphony Nova Scotia during his three-year appointment as Conductor-in-Residence. He is the recipient of a countless number of awards, so many that it would fill up two whole pages, single-spaced. His music and collaborative work embrace the great diversity of his international background and influences, and I, personally, am so honoured and delighted to know Dinuk as both a mentor and friend.

-Andrew Son'17
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