Artists

Donald Betts made his New York debut as a pianist and composer at the age of 21, playing his own music along with works by Prokofieff, Liszt, and Schumann. The New York Times called him "a pianist of imagination and poetic feeling". Musical America cited "his tremendous technique and bravura style".

Dr. Kim S. Ellis is a native of Rockford, Illinois. She has been principal clarinetist with the Symphony of Southeast Texas since 1990 and is a Buffet Crampon USA performing artists. She is an active performer and clinician at conventions and clinics throughout the United States including the Texas Music Educators Assosication, Festival of Texas Composers, Oklahoma Clarinet Symposium, College Music Society-South Chapter, Sarasota Music Festival, and the University of New Hampshire Chamber Music Festival.

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1931, Donald Martino began music lessons at nine ñ learning to play the clarinet, saxophone, and oboe ñ and composing at age 15. He went on to obtain degrees from Syracuse and Princeton Universities.

Ronald Perera’s (b. Boston 1941) compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral, and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He is perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville, Ferlinghetti, Updike and Henry Beston. Seven major pieces are represented on compact discs released in the late 1990s. Reviewing CRI CD 796 for Fanfare magazine, critic John Story writes, “Three Poems of Günter Grass is, quite simply, one of the most haunting works of the last 25 years.” Reviewing The Outermost House on Albany Troy 314 he writes, “When he is on form, Ronald Perera is among the finest living combiners of words and music…The music is simply lovely.”

Georgia native Gabriela Diaz began her musical training at the age of 5, studying piano with her mother and the next year, violin with her father. As a childhood cancer survivor, Diaz is committed to supporting cancer research and treatment in her capacity as a musician. In 2004, Diaz was a recipient of a grant from the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, an award that enabled Gabriela to create and direct the Boston Hope Ensemble. This program is now part of Winsor Music. A firm believer in the healing properties of music, Diaz and her colleagues have performed in cancer units in Boston hospitals and presented benefit concerts for cancer research organizations in numerous venues throughout the United States.

Tyler Hay was born in 1994 in Kent and began learning the piano at the age of 6. He studied with the Head of Keyboard, Andrew Haigh at Kent Music Academy for three years before gaining a place to study at the Purcell School for Young Musicians in 2007 where he continued under Tessa Nicholson. He completed his studies as an ABRSM scholar at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2016 where he studied with the Head of Keyboard Graham Scott and Professor Frank Wibaut.

Simon Proctor is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music where he gained the GRSM degree and LRAM diploma in piano performance and teaching. He won several prizes for composition, orchestration, and piano including the Eric Coates prize, the Academy’s top award for orchestral composition. As a pianist, he has given recitals in Germany, The Bahamas, and the United States and has appeared many times as a concerto soloist in the United Kingdom and America.