Canadian conductor, Mark Vuorinen, is Artistic Director and Conductor of two prominent choral ensembles: the Toronto Chamber Choir, a leading early music choral ensemble, and Kitchener-Waterloo’s Grand Philharmonic Choir, a symphonic chorus whose repertoire includes the great masterpieces for chorus and orchestra.
Mark holds a Master of Music degree from Yale University’s School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music, where he received full scholarship. He is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Toronto where, during his residency, he regularly conducted the University of Toronto MacMillan Singers in performances.
An active church musician, Mark is currently the George Black Fellow in Sacred Music at the Church of the Redeemer, Toronto. In this capacity, he directs a successful Bach Cantata Series that attracts an enthusiastic audience.
Mark is also Founding Artistic Director of the Toronto Choral Artists, a semi-professional ensemble that debuted in early 2009. The mandate of this organization is to champion new works, particularly those of young and emerging Canadian composers. Performances in 2009-2010 included a collaboration with the Toronto Bach Consort and the world premiere of American composer Robinson McClellan’s This Ravelled Dust: Cantata for the Nuclear Age at Toronto’s Music Gallery.
A recipient of many awards, Mark was named the E. Stanley Sedar Scholar at Yale University and is a recipient of the Elmer Iseler National Graduate Fellowship in Choral Conducting. Mark is a past recipient of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto Centennial Foundation Graduate Fellowship. In the summer of 2008 Mark received the David and Marcia Beach Summer Study Award from the University of Toronto for studies in Germany with leading Bach scholar and conductor Helmuth Rilling.
Mark’s research interests include the study of contemporary choral literature from the Baltic states, and in particular, the music of Arvo Pärt and Veljo Tormis. In 2006, Mark was invited by the American Choral Director’s Association to present a workshop on this topic to the Connecticut Fall conference in Hartford, CT. Mark was an invited lecturer at Boston University’s Arvo Pärt and Contemporary Spirituality Conference in March 2010, marking the composer’s 75th birthday and, in winter 2011 his article Symbolic Chiasm is Arvo Pärt’s Passio (1982) is published in the University of Montreal’s Circuit musiques contemporaines.
It was an evening of well-chosen repertoire performed with technical assurance and secure musical judgment.
— The Globe and Mail