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Summer Sizzle Festival Performers 2025

Join us for a relaxing, musical trip through time. This summer, we invite you to enjoy a mini vacation with the Vancouver Island Symphony! Join us for three special trips featuring our talented musicians from the strings, winds, and brass sections. They will be your tour guides as you explore 300 years of music in just one hour!

CONCERT ONE : JULY 8 – 12

Join us as we step into a musical time machine, traveling through the centuries guided by the voices of the string quartet. Our journey begins in the vibrant salons of 18th-century France, with the elegant and fiery duet by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges—a composer whose music and story were nearly lost to time. We then visit the refined symmetry and wit of Joseph Haydn, the father of the string quartet, who codified the form in the Classical era.

Fast-forward to the kaleidoscopic textures and impressionistic colors of Maurice Ravel, writing in early 20th-century Paris—a world both haunted and inspired by the echoes of the past. Finally, we arrive in the present with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, whose work playfully deconstructs and reimagines history, reminding us that time is never linear in music.

Each piece opens a portal to its own time yet speaks across generations—woven together by shared themes of innovation, conversation, and human expression.

MUSICIANS: Hannah Addario-Berry Cello   |   Erin Dorfer and Samantha Kung, Violins   |    Sevilya Hendrickx Viola

PROGRAMME

Joseph BOLOGNE, Chevalier du Saint Georges: Sonata for Two Violins
Franz Joseph HAYDN: String Quartet Op 77 #2
Caroline SHAW: Entr’acte
Maurice RAVEL: String Quartet in F Major

CONCERT TWO: JULY 22 – 26

The combined sonority of the Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn and Bassoon was realized as far back as classical times and has been a favourite of composers for both indoor and outdoor informal music making, ever since. The ‘reedy’ dexterity interspersed with the suggested horn calls to the hunt make perfect musical partners.

These pieces of music offer a fascinating glimpse of that of early English and French theatre music, the German Harmoniemusik (just for the ears of aristocratic patrons!!) also known as the rock bands of Mozart’s time, music of the hunt (Haydn’s own lifelong predilection), even Beethoven may ‘pop in’, and the intimate and romantic (Grieg) and English pastoral scenes (Warlock).

MUSICIANS: Anthony Averay, Bassoon   |   Andrew Clark, Horn   |    Geronimo Mendoza Oboe   |    Juyong You, Clarinet

PROGRAMME

Henry PURCELL: Rondeau’ from the play, ‘Abdelazar’ (featured in Britten’s Young Persons Guide
to the Orchestra)
Jean-Philippe RAMEAU: Les Indes Gallantes, Les Boreades
Joseph HAYDN: Baryton Trio No 100 & Minuet and Trio Symphony No 58
W. A. MOZART: Divertimento K136 in F
Johann Lickl: Cassazione
Gioacchini ROSSINI: Quartet No 1 for winds’ ‘Allegro Moderato’
Edvard Piano Concerto in A minor, op.16 Lullaby
Peter WARLOCK: Capriol Suite

CONCERT THREE: AUGUST 5 – 9

The Back Row Brass are a back this summer! This popular ensemble will take the audience on a trip through time. From the earliest notes made on animal bones and rocks through the Renaissance, classical and romantic periods, all the way to the modern era represented by trombonist Scott MacInnes’ composition Elegy. Composers included Gabrieli, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Holst, Debussy, MacInnes, and Cheetham.

MUSICIANS
Scott MacInnes Trombone   |  Stevan Paranosic Trumpet
Mark D'Angelo Trumpet  |    Karen Hough Horn   |   Nick Atkinson, Tuba

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Hannah Addario-Berry
Cello

Canadian cellist Hannah Addario-Berry has been delighting music lovers around the world for over a decade. Specializing in chamber music and solo repertoire, Hannah is passionately committed to performing music by living composers. Along with her exquisite cello playing, Hannah’s warmth and engaging presentation style enable listeners to forge a deeper connection with music. Hannah is Principal Cellist with the Vancouver Island Symphony, and performs regularly with many ensembles in Vancouver and San Francisco. She has been invited to play at festivals such as Other Minds and Switchboard Music in San Francisco, Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival in northern California, and Music By The Sea in Bamfield, British Columbia. From 2006-2010 Hannah was cellist with the renowned Del Sol String Quartet, during which time the quartet performed more than 50 world premieres and recorded two highly acclaimed albums, Ring of Fire: Music from the Pacific Rim and First Life: String Quartets of Marc Blitzstein. In 2015, Hannah created Scordatura, an innovative project combining Zoltán Kodály’s monumental Sonata for Solo Cello with a series of newly commissioned works, all of which share a unique altered tuning of the cello. Scordatura celebrated the centenary of Kodály’s Sonata and explored anew sound space for solo cello. Hannah performed the program in 25 cities around the US and Canada and recorded Scordatura in early 2016. Her previous album, Lady in the East, features music for solo cello by the Canadian composer Stephen Brown and was reviewed by Gramophone Magazine in October 2014. Hannah’s love of chamber music began early and acquired momentum when she was invited to join McGill University’s prestigious Lloyd Carr-Harris String Quartet, with whom she performed in France and Italy, including at Casalmaggiore Music Festival. For her graduate work, she chose San Francisco Conservatory’s Masters in Chamber Music, where she collaborated with artists such as Menahem Pressler, Jean-Michel Fonteneau, Ian Swensen, and Jodi Levitz. Hannah lives with her partner and their two children in North Vancouver, Canada, where she enjoys cooking, gardening, hiking, and woodworking.www.addarioberry.com

Sevilya Hendrickx
Viola

Sevilya Hendrickx-Rai was born into a musical family. Both of her parents are classical musicians and Sevilya learned classical music and arts at a very young age. She received her professional education in two very culturally active yet different countries. The Russian Federation gave Sevilya a traditional education in the best sense and connections with world- renowned artists. In The Netherlands, she explored the baroque style as well as contemporary music and many other diverse ways of playing. Sevilya earned her master’s degree with distinction from The Royal Conservatory in The Netherlands. She performed with many Dutch professional orchestras. At the beginning of Sevilya’s study at the conservatory, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Yannick Nézet Séguin, invited her to join the tour to France. She also performed as guest principal viola at North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra as well as South Netherlands Philharmonic. At a young age, Sevilya impressively became a member of the Hague Philharmonic Orchestra. She performed in numerous most known concert halls such as Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Théâtre de Champs-Elysees in Paris, Philharmonie de Paris, The Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, St. Petersburg Philharmonia etc. Sevilya settled with her family in Canada in beautiful British Columbia a few years ago. Here she has been active as a performer and educator. In 2019, Sevilya became a member of the Vancouver Island Symphony. Sevilya has also been the artistic director of the Vancouver Island Conservatory of Music & Arts since 2021. She leads the school towards an innovative music and arts education where everyone receives a customized learning experience. In 2022, she performed as a guest principal viola of the Vancouver Opera. Throughout her professional career, she has gained a lot of connections with conductors and artists from all over the world. Aside from her music career, Sevilya has always been intrigued by different languages and cultures. Momentarily she studies Chinese Language and Culture at Vancouver Island University.

Franz Joseph Haydn
Austrian composer

Franz Joseph Haydn (31 March 1732 – 31 May 1809) was an Austrian composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the piano trio. His contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets “Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet“.

Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family at their remote estate. Until the later part of his life, this isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, “forced to become original”.[c] Yet his music circulated widely, and for much of his career he was the most celebrated composer in Europe.

He was a friend and mentor of Mozart, a tutor of Beethoven, and the older brother of composer Michael Haydn.

 

Read more on Wikipedia.org…

Maurice Ravel
French composer

Joseph Maurice Ravel[n 1] (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer.

Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France’s premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers’ piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.

A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.

Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.

 

Read more at Wikipedia.org

Geronimo Mendoza
Principal Oboe

Whether performing La Boheme with the Vancouver Opera, Le Sacre du printemps with the Vancouver Symphony, collaborating with ethnical performers from various latitudes with the Vancouver Intercultural Orchestra or exploring the most avant-garde trends with the Vancouver New Music ensemble, oboist Geronimo Mendoza can be found on stage collaborating with virtually every ensemble of the Canadian West Coast. A formerly member of the Mexico City Philharmonic, with which he toured Europe, Asia and North America, he now calls the Vancouver Island Symphony his musical home. Before leaving his native land, Mexico, to establish with his family in British Columbia, he  attended various international music festivals working with world-celebrated artists, and was recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Mexican Arts Council as a solo artist and chamber musician.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
composer

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the classical era.

Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, Mozart was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his early death at the age of 35. The circumstances of his death have been much mythologized.

He composed more than 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence is profound on subsequent Western art music. Ludwig van Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote: “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years”.

 

Read more on Wikipedia.org…

Gioanchino Rossini
February 29, 1792 - November 13, 1868

Gioachino Antonio Rossini, (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.

Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In 1815 he was engaged to write operas and manage theatres in Naples. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere; this productivity necessitated an almost formulaic approach for some components (such as overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing. During this period he produced his most popular works, including the comic operas L’italiana in Algeri, Il barbiere di Siviglia (known in English as The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola, which brought to a peak the opera buffa tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello. He also composed opera seria works such as Otello, Tancredi and Semiramide. All of these attracted admiration for their innovation in melody, harmonic and instrumental colour, and dramatic form. In 1824 he was contracted by the Opéra in Paris, for which he produced an opera to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, Il viaggio a Reims (later cannibalised for his first opera in French, Le comte Ory), revisions of two of his Italian operas, Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse, and in 1829 his last opera, Guillaume Tell.

Rossini’s withdrawal from opera for the last 40 years of his life has never been fully explained; contributary factors may have been ill-health, the wealth his success had brought him, and the rise of spectacular grand opera under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer. From the early 1830s to 1855, when he left Paris and was based in Bologna, Rossini wrote relatively little. On his return to Paris in 1855 he became renowned for his musical salons on Saturdays, regularly attended by musicians and the artistic and fashionable circles of Paris, for which he wrote the entertaining pieces Péchés de vieillesse. Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. Rossini’s last major composition was his Petite messe solennelle (1863). He died in Paris in 1868.

 

Read more on Wikipedia.org…

The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, composed by Edvard Grieg in 1868, was the only concerto Grieg completed. It is one of his most popular works and is among the most popular of all piano concerti.

The work is among Grieg’s earliest important works, written by the 24-year-old composer in 1868 in Søllerød, Denmark, during one of his visits there to benefit from the climate.

The concerto is often compared to the Piano Concerto of Robert Schumann: it is in the same key; the opening descending flourish on the piano is similar; and the overall style is considered to be closer to Schumann than any other single composer. Incidentally, both composers wrote only one concerto for piano. Grieg had heard Schumann’s concerto played by Clara Schumann in Leipzig in 1858, and was greatly influenced by Schumann’s style generally, having been taught the piano by Schumann’s friend Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel.

Read more in Wikipedia.org…

Scott MacInnes
Principal Bass Trombone

 

Scott MacInnes received his MMus from the University of Victoria (11) and his BMus at the University of Toronto (05). Scott moved to Victoria after winning a one-year bass trombone position with the Victoria Symphony for the 2005/6 season. The following year Scott secured the position of Principal Bass Trombone with the Vancouver Island Symphony. Scott is an extremely active chamber musician both as a member of the Pinnacle Brass Quintet and iTromboni. Demonstrating his great versatility Scott can also been seen playing jazz, pop and rock around Victoria, as well as in most of the musical theater pits. As an instructor Scott teaches privately as well as at the University of Victoria where he teaches chamber music, a pep band and private instruction. Scott also holds the position of Artistic Director for both the Meridiem Wind Orchestra and the BC Brass Collective.

Stevan Paranosic
Principal Trumpet

 

Stevan Paranosic is the Principal Trumpet of the Vancouver Island Symphony. Previously he performed as Acting 2nd Trumpet with the Victoria Symphony for 7 seasons and has appeared with trumpet sections of the Vancouver, Kamloops, Prince George, and Okanagan Symphony orchestras. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Windsor and a Masters degree from the University of British Columbia. A big fan of brass chamber music performance, Stevan is active as a member, arranger and organizer of many brass groups. He is a core member of the Festive Brass quartet, which performs at The Butchart Gardens every Christmas season. The Festive Brass was featured with the Vancouver Island Symphony on their very popular Brassy Christmas seasonal show in 2014 & 2017. Stevan has been a private trumpet instructor for over 15 years and loves teaching all ages of students from beginners to more advanced. Inspired to ‘pay it forward’ to the next generation, Stevan returned to university to complete a Bachelors of Education and recently started work as a BC certified teacher. He is a dedicated music educator, devoted father and he admits he is an amusingly eccentric maestro of Christmas music madness.

Mark D'Angelo
Principal Trumpet

 

Mark D’Angelo, a native of North Vancouver, holds a Master of Music Degree from the University of McGill in Montreal.  Mark is currently Principal Trumpet with the Kamloops Symphony, and Second Trumpet with the Vancouver Island Symphony.  He has also performed with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver New Music, Victoria Symphony, Turning Point Ensemble, CBC Radio Orchestra, Thunder Bay Symphony, and the American Brass Quintet as an Aspen Music Festival Fellowship recipient. Mark has performed with Ben Hepner, Grammy winner Lila Downs, Lara St. John, and Tony Award winner Idena Menzel.  In 2017 Mark performed the British Columbia premiere of John Estacio’s Concerto for Trumpet with the Kamloops Symphony.  Mark currently holds the position of director of instrumental ensembles at Douglas College, trumpet instructor at Capilano University, Trinity Western University, and is a Stomvi Performing Artist.

Karen Hough
French Horn

 

Karen Hough was born in Nanaimo as were 3 previous generations of her family, and raised in Victoria. She earned her Bachelor of Music Degree from the University of Victoria. She went on to study at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto in the Orchestral Training Programme. She received her Master of Music from Yale University and was the first horn player ever to receive Yale’s prestigious Artist Diploma. She spent a year as Artist in Residence at The Banff Centre. Summer Music Festivals she attended include Courtney Youth Music Camp, the Blossom Festival at Kent State University, Aspen and the LA Philharmonic Institute with guest conductors Simon Rattle and John Williams. After a career as an orchestral and chamber musician in Toronto, Karen returned to the west coast. She served in the Naden Band of the Royal Canadian Navy, as well as joining the Vancouver Island Symphony. She is also an avid chamber musician, playing in such groups as the West Coast Chamber Players, Windsong Woodwind quintet, and Ensemble Pacifica. She cnn be found in the pit of many musical theatre productions.