James Dillon and Friends at MacPhail

James Dillon is one of Europe’s most internationally celebrated and performed composers. His work spans all genres from solo to chamber music, orchestral to opera. The recipient of a number of prizes and awards including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis and the Japan Foundation Artist Scholarship, he has also won an unprecedented five Royal Philharmonic Society awards, most recently in 2018 for his work Tanz/haus : triptych 2017. He has been a guest lecturer at many universities throughout the world and was named 2001 New York University Distinguished International Visitor. In 2007 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Huddersfield and in the same year was appointed Professor of Composition, University of Minnesota, now holding the position of Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

Dillon’s orchestral music includes concertos for flute, violin, piano and string quartet—Edinburgh Festival, BBC Proms, and Donaueschingen Musiktage commissions respectively; Via Sacra, commissioned by the Société Philharmonique de Bruxelles to celebrate the city’s Millennium project; Physis, commissioned by the Orchestre de Paris and La navette, a single-movement work commissioned by SWR for performance at the Donaueschingen Musiktage 2001; and The Gates, commissioned by the Donaueschingen Musiktage 2016 for String Quartet and Orchestra.

Dr. Alyssa Anderson (mezzo-soprano) is an active performer and arts administrator based in Minneapolis. She received her B.M. in performance from the State University of New York, College at Fredonia, and her M.M. and D.M.A. from the University of Minnesota.

As Artistic Director and vocalist of The Dream Songs Project, a classical voice and guitar duo based in Minneapolis, Alyssa has commissioned twelve major works for the ensemble and premiered numerous pieces by local and national composers in concerts across the US. She is a founding member and current Artistic Director of the experimental chamber group, RenegadeEnsemble, and also performs as The Poem Is Done with saxophonist Dr. Jeffery Kyle Hutchins.

A core member of The Rose Ensemble since 2015, Alyssa has also performed as a soloist with numerous other ensembles and presenting organizations in the Twin Cities, such as Zeitgeist, Mirandola Ensemble, LOFTRecital, 113 Composer Collective, Metamorphosis Opera Theater, Consortium Carissimi, Minnesota Bach Ensemble, Oratorio Society of Minnesota, Kenwood Symphony Orchestra, Twin Cities Lyric Theater, and Bloomington Symphony Orchestra.

Pianist Shannon Wettstein invites audiences to hear connections between daring new music and historical masterworks. With over 400 premieres as soloist and chamber musician, she has collaborated with composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Julia Wolfe, Chinary Ung, and Frederick Rzewski.

In the US, Shannon has performed solo and chamber concerts at Lincoln Center, Boston’s Gardner Museum, the Ft. Worth Modern Art Museum, and Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego. Steve Smith of the New York Times wrote that her performance at The Stone was “full of subtleties no recording could catch…a reminder of why we attend concerts.”  Shannon is a professor of piano and chamber music at St. Cloud State University and regularly performs contemporary chamber music as half of the Calliope flute and piano duo. Shannon is the host of Dr. Avant-Garde, a podcast about creating community and inspiring creativity through conversations with people moving the art of music forward in the 21st century.

Harris Bernstein started his musical studies at the age of 4 in Minneapolis, MN on the violin. It wasn’t until 14 years later that he discovered the viola during his undergraduate degree at McGill University. At McGill, Harris studied with Andre Roy and was a recipient of the Lloyd-Carr Harris Foundation Scholarship and received the Reward for Outstanding Achievement in Viola. For the past three years, Harris has studied with Professor Ettore Causa at the Yale School of Music where he earned a Master’s degree. There he was a recipient of the Francis G. Wickes Scholarship and fellowship and the Lester S. and Enid W. Morse Scholarship. As an avid performer of new music, Harris made his solo debut with the Yale Philharmonia where he performed Soomin Kim’s viola concerto, I Dreamed of a Small Blue Stone.