Interplay: Musicians & Composers 2025

Joel is known for pushing the boundaries of opera, and has been called “Canadian opera’s enfant not-so-terrible.” In 2010, he founded Against the Grain Theatre in Toronto and served as its Artistic Director until 2023. Joel has adapted and translated over ten operas presented in unexpected venues, and was named an Arts Hero by The Globe and Mail in 2020 for his work directing the critically-acclaimed digital Messiah/Complex. He has also directed over 50 productions for opera companies across North America and Europe including The Canadian Opera Company, Vancouver Opera, and Minnesota Opera.  He is currently Artistic Director for Edmonton Opera.

Amiel Gladstone is a West Coast based writer and director.

Recent opera includes Rattenbury and Tosca for Pacific Opera Victoria, Dark Sisters and Lucia di Lammermoor for Vancouver Opera, as well as several operas for young folks for Vancouver Opera In Schools.

As a director, his productions have been both site specific in unusual venues and in traditional theatres, with companies such as the Alberta Theatre Projects, Arts Club, Belfry, Caravan Farm Theatre, Factory Theatre, Firehall, the Guild in Whitehorse, Musical Stage Co, Theatre Replacement, Theatre Conspiracy, Theatre SKAM, Vancouver Playhouse, and the PuSh Festival.

As a playwright, his plays have been produced by Alberta Theatre Projects, Belfry Theatre, Touchstone Theatre, Caravan Farm Theatre, the National Arts Centre, Solo Collective, Western Edge Theatre, Theatre SKAM, as well as internationally in the United States, France, and Romania.

Megumi Masaki is a pianist, multimedia performing artist, educator and curator. She is recognized as an innovator that reimagines the piano, pianist and performance space. Her work pushes boundaries of interactivity between sound, image, text and movement in multimedia works through new technologies, including hand-gesture-motion tracking to generate and control live-electronics and live-video, AI, 3D visuals, keyboard-controlled computer game, e-textile sensors and active infra-red tracking. As a Japanese-Canadian artist, her work also explores how human rights and environmental issues can intersect and be communicated through music. Over 70 compositions have been created with/for Megumi and she has premiered 150 works worldwide. Megumi was appointed to the Order of Manitoba and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
www.megumimasaki.com

Please check back regularly for additions to the faculty list.

Kamna Gupta is an American Prize-winning conductor experienced in operatic, orchestral, and choral repertoires. Several premieres mark her 2023-24 season: Ms. Gupta leads the Trinity Church Wall Street Choirs and NOVUS in Luna Pearl Woolf’s new oratorio Number Our Days, and returns to Spoleto Festival USA to conduct the world premiere of Ruinous Gods. In addition to these, Ms. Gupta makes her Washington National Opera debut as the cover conductor for Songbird, joins the faculty of Banff Center for Arts and Creativity for their chamber opera program, and returns to Tapestry Opera to conduct Rocking Horse Winner which she recorded to much acclaim during the pandemic and was featured on CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. Recent credits include Les pêcheurs de perles with Vancouver Opera, In Our Daughter’s Eyes with LA Opera and The Prototype Festival, and the world premiere of The Rip Van Winkles at The Glimmerglass Festival.

Brooklyn-based composer, pianist, and conductor Daniel Schlosberg’s music has been performed by the Dover Quartet, Minnesota Orchestra, Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Nashville and Albany Symphonies, at Carnegie Hall, (le) poisson rouge, Royal Albert Hall, Beijing Modern Music Festival, and David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, and has also been featured in the New York Times and WNYC’s Soundcheck. Daniel has received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards. He has composed for and music directed at the Soho Repertory Theater, Public Theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Playwrights Horizons. Current projects include composition and music direction for Jeremy O. Harris’s A Boy’s Company Presents (premiering Summer ‘23), music direction for Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond’s Only an Octave Apart at Wilton’s Music Hall in London (October ‘22) and at the Spoleto Festival (June ‘23), and The Extinctionist, a new opera for Heartbeat Opera (premiering Spring ‘24). Daniel is the Music Director of Heartbeat Opera, for which his radical re-orchestrations of classic operas have been praised by the Wall Street Journal as “ingenious.” In addition to collaborations with Angel Blue, Ariana DeBose, Ben Stiller, Tony Kushner, Anthony McGill, and the Imani Winds, Schlosberg was a pianist on the Grammy-winning soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and a featured soloist in Only an Octave Apart with the New York Philharmonic.

A recipient of the 2022 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, celebrated American soprano Karen Slack has garnered international renown for her artistic ver-satility, charisma and entrepreneurial endeavors. She has received critical acclaim for her dynamic and passionate performances in both lead operatic roles and on the concert stage, and as a sought-after collaborator who is known as a leader and advocate, as a curator and artistic advisor, and for her ground-breaking approach to engagement. 

American tenor and voice teacher Jason Ferrante has been praised by Opera News for "singing up a stylish storm" and by the Sarasota Herald Tribune as "one of the best voices I have heard"  In the past two seasons, he has been heard as Beadle Bamford in a new production of Sweeney Todd with Opera Omaha, Don Basilio and Don Curzio in Le Nozze di Figaro in his debut with Virginia Opera and Knoxville Opera, the Fourth Jew in Salome in his debut with Tulsa Opera and a debut with the Palm Beach Symphony as tenor soloist in Mozart's Requiem conducted by Gerard Schwarz. He has performed over 80 roles on the operatic stage and has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras including the Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Juilliard and National Symphony Orchestras. In addition to his two-decade stage career, Ferrante has become one of the most in-demand voice teachers in the opera world, teaching professionals who appear on the stages of the world and teaching singers in training programs at the opera companies of Minnesota, Pensacola, Nashville, Portland, Wolf Trap, Arizona and Brevard. He is a regular judge for the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition and leads the classical voice discipline for YoungArts.   

Amanda Testini (she/her) is a performer, choreographer and director based on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She has worked at the Arts Club, Bard on the Beach, the Cultch, Theatre Replacement, the Firehall, the Belfry, Opera Kelowna, the Gateway, Savage Society, Theatre Under the Stars, VACT, Carousel Theatre, shameless hussy productions, Neworld Theatre, Speakeasy Theatre, the Electric Company, Vancouver Opera,  and Axis Theatre. Some of her career highlights include assistant choreographing Onegin (Arts Club/Belfry), touring Canda playing lead character ‘Justine Chambers’ in Love Bomb (Shameless Hussy Productions), choreographing 4 East Van Pantos with Theatre Replacement, playing ‘Lydia Wickham’ in Miss Benett: Christmas at Pemberly, and assistant directing La Cenerentola (Vancouver Opera). Most recently, she was the 21/22 Yulanda M Faris Young Artist Stage Director at Vancouver Opera where she directed Cavalleria Rusticana: in Concert, Blond Eckbert, and choreographed and assistant directed HMS Pinafore.  Currently, she is part of developing a contemporary dance show to Laura Reznek’s new record, Agrimony, led by Sophie Dow. Amanda is so grateful to be here at the Banff Centre to continue to develop her craft and dive into the rich world of opera. She also acknowledges the support of the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Bill Millerd Artist Fund. Amanda is a Jessie Award Nominee and a graduate of Studio 58.