Christopher Dawes (orgalt@yahoo.ca) ---------------http://orgalt.com

Christopher Dawes, numbered among Canada’s leading church musicians,
concert organists and choral accompanists, is a freelance musician and
consultant based at Toronto’s Church of St. George-the-Martyr. Mr. Dawes
currently divides his professional time between freelance performing
across a wide spectrum of the Toronto music scene and the Directorship
of Canada’s Summer Institute of Church Music in Whitby and the Organ
Concerts and Academy at Stratford Summer Music. He is faculty
accompanist and coach to the graduate and undergraduate choral
conducting programs at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music,
accompanist to U of T’s MacMillan Singers and Bach Festival Singers, a
staff accompanist to the Toronto Children’s Chorus, and a resident
musician for various productions of Theatre Erindale, the professional
performance wing of the Theatre and Drama Studies program offered
jointly by the Sheridan Institute of Applied Arts and Technology and the
University of Toronto at the latter’s Mississauga campus. Following on
recent graduate work in Music Criticism in the area of musical genre, he
publishes and presents papers at academic conferences and through
www.genreimplosion.ca

He is known for a musicianship that freely crosses classical and popular
styles and eras; for his imaginative, informed and approachable
presentation of both the familiar and the obscure, and for his love of
history, people, and all that is unusual and inspirational in music.

As a Fellow of the Royal Canadian College of Organists, Dawes holds one
of the highest possible distinctions in organ performance. He has given
recitals in most of Canada's major cities and all ten provinces,
including many at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto and Jack Singer Hall in
Calgary. A frequent international traveler with choirs, his major
European venues have included the Domkirk in Koln; Gloucester, Hereford,
Canterbury, St. David’s and Wells Cathedrals in Britain; the Cathedral
of Ghent, Belgium; in Austria the Salzburger Dom and Mozarteum, St.
Stephen’s Cathedral and the Musikverein in Vienna; and in the
Netherlands, the Jakobkerk in Leeuwarden, Joriskerk in Amersfoort, Grote
Kerk in Apeldoorn and the Bovenkerk in Kampen. American engagements have
included a lecture-recital for the University of Michigan's 1996
Conference on Organ Music; a guest soloist appearance with the Purcell
Consort for the Renaissance and Baroque Society of Pittsburgh; the
opening concert of the 1997 New York Region Convention of the American
Guild of Organists, and in October 2000, an International Symposium at
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee celebrating the legacies
and relationship of Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach. In
Québec City in 1995 he performed the opening concert of the Festival de
musique anciènne de Sillery; in Calgary in 1998 he was featured in the
2nd Royal Bank Calgary International Organ Festival, and in Toronto in
2002, performed as part of the reopening of the renovated and
acoustically enhanced Roy Thomson Hall.  He has performed recently in
concert series in Thunder Bay, Edmonton, Halifax, Ajax, Barrie, Dundas,
Bobcaygeon and other places. His second performance for royalty was for
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth at St. James' Cathedral on June 29th, 1997
at the festal service culminating the Cathedral’s bicentennial
celebrations.

He collaborates frequently with Toronto’s top choral ensembles,
including Elmer Iseler Singers, Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, MacMillan
Singers and Bach Festival Singers (at the University of Toronto Faculty
of Music), Soundstreams’ Choir 21, Guelph Chamber Choir, John Laing
Singers, Nathaniel Dett Chorale, Toronto Children’s Chorus.  Chris has
played for choral tours to the north- and southeastern United States;
Holland, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, England
and Ireland, and throughout Ontario, Québec, and the Maritimes. He
appears on some two dozen CDs to date on several labels.

A long-time champion of his country’s music, he has premiered many new
works, and performed or lectured about Canadian music in nine countries.
In 1996/1997 he introduced the Toronto Organ Series to American
organists at the opening concert of the New York Region Convention of
the American Guild of Organists and at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor’s annual Conference on Organ Music. In 1999 he premiered Departure
Point by John Burge, a 40-minute solo organ suite based upon melodic
fragments by Bach, Mozart and Alban Berg. In 2003, independent CD
releases of organ/saxophone music featured the first recording of Denis
Bédard’s Sonatas for saxophone and organ, and the world premiere of
Blues of a Chagall Window by John Burge. Also in 2003 he assisted
Michael Cumberland in the world premiere of Le Cor Magique, a Canada
Council-supported commission by the late Montréal composer Bengt
Hambraeus for the unusual combination of organ and alphorn. In 2010 on
the occasion of his beloved colleague Doreen Rao’s retirement as
Director of Choral Programs at the University of Toronto Faculty of
Music he invited five new choral works on texts from Jelladduin Rumi
from Canada’s foremost choral composers, and contributed one more piece
along with Lori-Anne Dolloff to complete the new collection in Dr. Rao’s
honour, Six Rumi Lyrics. 

He works regularly with Soundstreams Canada on world- and Canadian-
premieres including works such as Arvo Part’s Miserere Mei, Omar
Daniel’s Lavinia Andronicus, R. Murray Schaefer’s opera Children’s
Crusade and Melissa Hui’s Pimooteewin.  Through Soundstreams he has
collaborated with Robert Sund, Maria Guinand, Britain’s Hilliard
Ensemble, director/choreographer Michael Greyeyes, author Thompson
Highway, and most recently David Fallis and Choir 21, Canada’s first
professional choral ensemble dedicated solely to the international
choral repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Among his career’s many church musical ministries, Mr. Dawes served as
organist to St. James’ Cathedral in Toronto from 1991 to 2003, also
serving as Director of Music from 1999-2003.  Since, he serves as a
volunteer to both the Christian Reformed Church of Georgetown and the
Anglican Church of St. George-the Martyr Toronto, and as freelance
consultant, occasional guest organist in services and concerts to
principal musical churches throughout the Toronto area and beyond.