The Banff Centre: Communications

Vue Weekly: Long cover story about the development and history behind Estacio and Murrell’s Filumena, which played at the Jubilee November 26 – December 1.

San Jose Mercury News: Barry Shiffman, co-founder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet in 1989, is leaving to become director of music programs at the Banff Centre, “a world-famous and well-endowed cultural nexus in the Canadian Rockies.” Article includes extended discussion about the quartet and the influence of the Banff Centre.

Edmonton Journal: The Edmonton Opera production of Filumena, opening tonight at the Jubilee Auditorium, includes much of the original Calgary and Banff cast. The music will be performed by Estacio’s good friends in the Edmonton Symphony. The opera will also be filmed for a national broadcast on CBC in the spring.

Fort Saskatchewan Record Filumena Lossandro was hanged at the Fort Saskatchewan Gaol in 1923, “the nation’s only female hanging and the last.”

Telegraph Travel : What do you miss most when you are away from Banff? Writer, military historian and TV presenter Dan Snow misses the smell of the pines; peaks like mounts Rundle and Sulphur; the moose on the Bow River mudflats…. “And then there’s the Banff Fine Arts Centre, where you can listen to string quartets or watch the best independent films.”

Telluride Daily Planet “From the ski slopes of Stumper to the banks of the Gunnison River deep within the Black Canyon, three films from the Telluride region went north for the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Following all three of the films’ premiers at the Telluride MountainFilm festival in early June, the Banff Mountain Film Festival accepted Solilochairliftquist, The Hatch and The Lost People of Mountain Village.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Article about the success of Seattle’s Mountaineer Books, including a discussion of Subhankar Banerjee’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, which won the Mountain Book Festival mountain images award in 2003.

The Globe and Mail: Sarah Neufeld and Richard Reed Parry, two musicians from Arcade Fire, “Montreal’s most feted musical act,” managed to get away from their group long enough to cloister themselves in Banff for an artist residency with the rest of another band, Bell Orchestre. They quickly had enough material for their album, Recording a Tape the Colour of Light, out now on Rough Trade Records.

The recent appointment of Barry Shiffman, co-founder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, to the post of director of music programs at the Banff Centre has been picked up by the Globe and Mail,
MercuryNews (San Jose, CA), PlaybillArt, and the Calgary Herald, whose full story including statements by Shiffman and John Murrell, executive artistic director of Performing Arts, is available to subscribers only.

Hour.ca: Montreal’s Bell Orchestre is taking a leap into the unknown, attempting to win over pop music fans with its classically based instrumentals.

“So far we’ve mostly played for indie rock crowds… but, especially after our residence at Banff, we noticed that our music could also go over well with classical music fans and jazz fans.”