About the composer

                   Esprit commissioned Yannick to write Stark, utter, forego… (2003), a concerto for piano & amplified orchestra, and gave the piece its World Premiere performance conducted by Alex Pauk, Sunday, March 30, 2003, as part of its Time Chant concert; St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, Toronto, Ontario.

                   One of the most gifted Quebec composers of his generation, Yannick Plamondon was born in 1970 near Quebec City. A self-taught musician at first, he studied composition at the Quebec Music Conservatory where he won his first prize with great honours and later studied computer-assisted composition with Serge Provost at the Montreal Music Conservatory for a Masters Degree in 1999. Yannick has worked under such renowned composers as Jonathan Harvey, Luca Francesconi, Tristan Murail and York Höller.

                   His works have been performed in Canada and abroad by ensembles such as Le Nouvel Ensemble moderne, L'Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, the KORE Ensemble, the Toronto New Music Concerts ensemble, the New Music Ensemble of Kiev, The Netherland Radio Kammerorchestre and Klangforum Wien, to name a few.

                   A winner of the 1999 CBC/Radio-Canada Competition for young composers, he won the prestigious Jules-Léger Prize for new Chamber Music in 2002, offered by the Canada Council for the Arts, for his work Autoportrait sur Times Square, a commission from Toronto's Continuum ensemble. He also won the Orchestral Music Prize of the National Arts Centre in 1995 and the Prize of Forum 1998 presented by Le Nouvel Ensemble moderne.

                   Yannick's works have been selected for the Guadeamus 2000 Festival, for the Ton Brunyel Prize (Holland) and were presented at UNESCO's International Rostrum of Composers.

                   He is dedicated to the renewal of the "concert formula" and believes that ideas are reformulated through unique models and mediums, inspiring him, recently, to work with artists from other disciplines.

                   Written for the most diverse instrumental combinations up to the whole symphony orchestra, Yannick Plamondon's music is characterized by a natural gift for colour, recurrence, complex combinations, inter-textuality, and the aspiration to fuse lyricism and formalism.