York’s classical singers win top accolades at competition

Raymond Kwan
Senior Staff
York’s classical singing students conquered the 15th Annual Newmarket Voice Festival, beating out their competition with nearly five dozen awards.
The festival, held last year on Nov.1 to 6, saw all 21 of York’s par- ticipants bring home at least one prize for a total of 59 awards, including 20 gold awards, 15 silvers, 10 bronzes and 14 scholarships.

The students also sang their way to the top of their adjudication categories at auditions for the Na- tional Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), Ontario Chapter.
Professor Catherine Robbin, director of the classical vocal studies program in York’s music department, gave high praises.
“We’re very proud of the York classical voice students who have [performed] so well yet again at the Newmarket Voice Festival,” said Robbin. “I’ve been taking a group up there to perform for a number of years now, and every year they represent themselves well. But I think this year they were particularly illustrious.”
Fourth-year classical vocal studies major Joyce Goh competed in and won the $1,000 Senior Scholarship Program, the festival’s top prize.
Goh’s performance, which included Hugo Wolf’s German lieder and Joachim Rodrigo’s “De Los A?lamos Vengo, Madre,” drew acclaim from the adjudicator and earned Goh and her singing teacher Norma Burrowes some congratulations.
“In the [Senior Scholarship] program, the singer would sing her 30-minute recital and then the adjudicator will ask some questions about singing or about the repertoire, and then we will do a singing technical test,” explained Goh. “And we won’t know the results until a week later.”
The festival culminated in the “Concert of the Stars” where Goh, as the Senior Scholarship winner, performed one of her Spanish songs. “Throughout the night at the concert, my peers were sitting [with] me. They kept saying ‘Joyce, you’re winning it, we believe in you’ […] That’s the best thing about the classical voice [program] at York. Everybody supports each other. Even during the competi- tion, you won’t see butting heads [or] sour moments. Everybody is happy,” she said.
Goh also added that the anticipation and reflection before and after the performance made her nervous, but that she was completely confident during the performance. She aspires to go into professional operatic singing.
Other notable winners from the festival included classical vocal studies majors, Christopher Dallo and Jessika Monea, who respectively earned three $100 awards and won three gold prizes, two silvers and a $100 scholarship.
With files from Yfile