Art of the Duo

The Jamestown Concert Association is pleased to announce that Kinan Azmeh will be performing with Dinuk Wijeratne! 
Described as a Winning Performance by the Daily Star, The Art of the Duo is a collaboration project between the award winning Syrian clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh and Sri Lankan-born Canadian innovative pianist and composer Dinuk Wijeratne. This project fuses elements of Arabic and south-east Asian vocabulary with classical and jazz music idioms to create a new sonic world that the legendary Marcel Khalife called wings of Breath. The duo has released their album Complex Stories, Simple Sounds in 2009 and has been touring with their recital around the US, Canada, Argentina, Europe, and the Middle-East.

Sri Lankan-born Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne is a JUNO award-winning composer, conductor, and pianist 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 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 in his twelfth season as Music Director of the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra. 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 3-year appointment as Conductor-in-Residence. He is the recipient of the Canada Council Jean-Marie Beaudet award for orchestral conducting; the NS Established Artist Award; NS Masterworks nominations for his Tabla Concerto and piano trio Love Triangle; double Merritt Award nominations; Juilliard, Mannes & Countess of Munster scholarships; the Sema Jazz Improvisation Prize; the Soroptimist International Award for Composer-Conductors; and the Sir John Manduell Prize – the RNCM’s highest student honor. His music and collaborative work embrace the great diversity of his international background and influences.

Check out his biography on his webpage http://www.dinukwijeratne.com/without-sidebar/ .  Also you can view a video from their performances at http://kinanazmeh.com/theartoftheduo/ .  Join us for a fabulous evening of entertainment at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Friday, 18 May 2018 at 8:00 pm.