Celebrating R. Murray Schafer

The Rosebud String Quartet, with violinists Aaron Schwebel and Sheila Jaffé, violist Keith Hamm and cellist Leana Rutt formed in 2013 in Rosebud, Alberta at the inaugural Rosebud Chamber Music Festival, an annual summertime chamber music showcase in the Alberta Badlands. Comprised of principal players from the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Canadian Opera Company and National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, the RSQ is one of Canada’s most exciting young string quartets with a unique voice and a special love for the quartets of Haydn.  

The RSQ performs regularly in various Toronto-based series, including Stereo Live, Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre Chamber Music Series, Echo Chamber Toronto, Pocket Concerts, Xenia Concerts, Off Centre Music Salon and Music Mondays. The quartet recently performed on CBC Radio 2’s In Concert. 

The RSQ has performed at Ottawa ChamberFest, Stratford Summer Music Festival, Music by the Sea and the Sweetwater Music Festival. Upcoming performances include Toronto’s Off-Centre Music Salon, the Rosebud Chamber Music Festival, Toronto Summer Music Festival and Sunday Chatter in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  

The RSQ received their chamber music education at the Domaine Forget where they performed with members of the London Haydn Quartet, Chilingirian Quartet, Elias Quartet, ARC Ensemble, Florestan Trio and the Smithsonian Chamber Players.

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Christian Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of the best-selling novel, Eunoia, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök is an avant-garde poet of global renown, earning his reputation as one of the founders of the literary movement, Conceptualism (a poetic school made famous, in part, by the activities of the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, the proprietor of UbuWeb). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of ‘sound-poems’ (particularly Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters) and has performed his poetry at more than 650 venues worldwide. Bök is on the verge of finishing his current project, entitled The Xenotext: a work that requires him to engineer a bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity and an operant machine that writes poetry in response. Bök has displayed examples of his artworks at dozens of galleries, including The Power Plant in Toronto, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. He resides, as an artist, in Melbourne, Australia.

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Sanya Eng is one of Canada’s most sought-after harpists of her generation, equally celebrated as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician. A dynamic and sensitive performer, she has been described as “an outstanding musical talent” (Jerusalem Post), “remarkably polished” (Globe and Mail), and “dazzling with her delicate and intense command of the harp” (Musical Toronto). Eng has been a featured soloist in many festivals and concert series throughout North America, Europe, Israel, Asia and Africa and has appeared as a guest soloist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Les Violons du Roy and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. As an active chamber and orchestral musician, she performs regularly with the Canadian Opera Company, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, New Music Concerts, Soundstreams, Continuum Contemporary Music, the St. Michael’s Boys’ Choir, the Toronto Children’s Chorus and the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus. Eng has recorded for Naxos, Centrediscs, CBC Records, Canadian Art Song Project, hatART, ClassXdiscs and Orange Mountain Music. 

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