Souvenir de Florence

Canadian-Romanian conductor Andrei Feher has earned a reputation for his musical maturity and integrity, natural authority on the podium, and an imaginative and intelligent approach to programming. He is hailed for his “ability to connect with his players, using their skills as if they were the piano and he the pianist” (The Record).

Feher regularly appears with top Canadian and European orchestras. His noteworthy 2019 debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, performing Stravinsky’s Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss, was recorded and airs on BBC Radio 3. Subscription appearances include Symphony Nova Scotia, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta sinfónica RTVE Madrid, and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. Additional highlights include appearances as guest conductor with Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Orchestre symphonique de Québec, Les Violons du Roy, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Orchestre National d’Ile de France, Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal and Romanian Radio National Orchestra. Feher’s 2023/24 Season marked debut appearances at Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Enescu Festival in Bucharest and at Orchestre Symphonique de Laval.

In 2018, at age 26, Feher was appointed Music Director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, making him one of the youngest to lead a major Canadian orchestra. During his five-year tenure as Music Director, Feher is credited with seeing the Orchestra through pandemic closures with 12 full-orchestra online programs and transforming the symphony’s relationship with French speakers in the region and beyond. Performance highlights under his artistic direction include Carmen, La Traviata, and Mahler’s Second Symphony, with numerous sold-out shows held at the Raffi Armenian Theatre within the Centre In The Square, a concert hall seating over 2,000.

Having gained early experience as assistant to Fabien Gabel at the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, at the age of 22 Feher joined the Orchestre de Paris as Assistant Conductor to its Music Director, Paavo Järvi. During this time he collaborated with conductors including Zubin Mehta, Valery Gergiev, Christoph von Dohnányi and Jaap van Zweden. Feher has collaborated with some of today’s most eminent performers including Emanuel Ax, Marc-André Hamelin and Erin Wall. In 2013, he was awarded the Prix Opus Discovery of the Year.

A strong advocate of contemporary music, Feher has recently performed works by Eric Champagne, Pierre Mercure, George Dimitrov, Ciprian Pop and Abigail Richardson, as well as the world premiere of Thierry Besancon’s opera for children Les Zoocrates with Opéra de Lausanne. In November 2015, Feher conducted the world premiere of Soleil Noir by Pierre Jodlowski with the Orchestre de Pau-Béarn, which resulted in an immediate invitation to conduct the work in Toulouse in November 2016.

Flutist Ariane Brisson never ceases to captivate audiences and critics with the finesse of her playing and the sincerity of her interpretations, seizing every opportunity to surprise and offer a unique voice on the musical scene. Her nomination as Discovery of the Year at the 24th Opus Awards Gala and as Grand Laureate at the coveted Prix d’Europe are among the many distinctions that mark her career.

An accomplished and versatile musician, Ariane Brisson's most recent collaborations with Les Violons du Roy, the Trois-Rivières and Drummondville Symphonic Orchestras, I Musici and the Neues Zürcher Orchester (Switzerland) as a soloist have allowed the flautist to present a vast repertoire, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Guillaume Connesson.

Charmed by the fluidity and sensitivity of Ariane’s playing, the musicians of the renowned wind quintet Pentaèdre invited her to join the ensemble in 2016. She has been its artistic director since 2019. Curious, Ariane’s reflections led her to complete a doctorate in performance at the Université de Montréal in 2022, under the tutelage of Jean-François Rivest and Michel Duchesneau, and thus to rethink the interpretation and pedagogy of the transverse flute. In May 2022, Ariane Brisson and pianist Olivier Hébert-Bouchard’s very first album for flute and piano, Mythes, was released on the ATMA Classique label, which features exclusively original transcriptions by the flutist. In March 2025, a disc dedicated to two Sonatas for flute and piano by Prokofiev, with pianist Philip Chiu, will be released, still under the ATMA label.

Principal flute of the Drummondville Symphony Orchestra and the Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Ariane also leads fruitful collaborations with the greatest orchestral ensembles in Quebec, including Les Violons du Roy, the Orchestre Métropolitain and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, leading her to perform regularly in North America, Europe and Asia. A sought-after and passionate teacher, the flutist has been teaching with great enthusiasm since 2019 at the Faculty of Music of the Université de Montréal, where she is a lecturer.

Ariane Brisson would like to particularly thank the Fondation du Prix d’Europe, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), the Sylva-Gelber Foundation, the Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique (OICRM) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), foundations and organizations that allow her to ambitiously realize her various artistic and research projects. Sensitive to the various aesthetics of the musical repertoire, Ariane plays in turn on a Yamaha transverse flute made of grenadilla wood, as well as on a Powell 10K flute kindly loaned by the Compagnie Canimex Inc. (Drummondville, Canada), owned by patron Roger Dubois.