About

Hommage and Inspiration

Praised for their “beauty of sound and striking expression”, the Iris Trio will perform a cozy house concert at Cecilia’s Retreat on November 26th. On tour for their new album release of CD “Homage and Inspiration” (with Coviello Classics), their program includes the Fairy Tale narration (Märchenerzählungen) by Robert Schumann, and György Kurtág’s piece, Hommage to Schumann. The trio will also be joined by poet Don McKay who will read his 4 new poems for the premiere of “Bird Island Suite!”

The Iris Trio (clarinetist Christine Carter, violist Molly Carr, and pianist Anna Petrova) began working together during their years at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. They performed their debut in 2013 at the German Consulate in New York City to a sold-out audience and were immediately invited to appear at the prestigious Mozartfest in Würzburg, Germany. The Trio subsequently gave the world premiere of Christof Weiß’s Conversation Among Friends at the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Residence Palace and were featured in Michael Wende & Andreea Varga’s documentary, MozartLabor. They have since appeared at venues throughout North America and Europe, including a tour of their most recent project, Homage and Inspiration, across Germany. Their debut album, recorded at the Sendesaal in Bremen Germany, will be released in 2020 on Coviello Classics, accompanied by tours in Canada, the US, and Europe. The three members of the Trio are each active recitalists and educators in their own right. Collectively they hold faculty positions at the Juilliard School, University of Louisville, and Memorial University, and have performed around the world on many of the major concert stages from Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Sydney Opera House.

Don McKay’s books of poetry include Birding, or Desire (1983), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), Another Gravity (2000), Strike/Slip (2006) and Paradoxides (2012). Camber, a selected poetry, appeared in 2004. Five of his books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, and two of them—Night Field and Another Gravity—received that award. He has been nominated for the Griffin Award three times and received it for Strike/Slip in 2007. Between 1975 and 2018 he served as co-editor and co-publisher with Brick Books. After teaching English and Creative Writing at the Universities of Western Ontario and New Brunswick for twenty-seven years, he now writes and edits full time. From 1991 to 1997 he edited The Fiddlehead, and he has served as a workshop leader for institutions and writers’ groups. He was the Associate Director for poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts for 14 years. His abiding interest in natural history and the environment has led to three books on the poetics of wilderness: Vis à Vis (2001), Deactivated West 100 (2005), and The Shell of the Tortoise (2011). His collected poems, Angular Unconformity, appeared in 2014. Don McKay currently makes his home in St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 2009 he was named to the Order of Canada.