CBC: “Amid tough economic times for many arts organizations, Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque orchestra and chamber choir ended its 30th anniversary year with its ninth consecutive operating surplus…. Another highlight was The Galileo Project, Taffelmusik’s co-production with The Banff Centre. The concert toured Ontario and Mexico this year and is slated to travel to the U.S., Asia and Australia.

FFWD: “As an institution devoted to creativity, The Banff Centre provides for its artists and other residents because it expects a lot of them, and the musicians recruited for the Indie Band Residency are no exception. The program, the brainchild of the Banff Centre’s director of music, Barry Schiffman, and the director of audio, Theresa Leonard, is a bit of a departure for the institution, which typically has focused on classical and jazz for its residencies.”

CBC Radio 3: “This week The Banff Centre of the Arts announced the bands and producers that will be taking part in their second annual Indie Band Residency… Make sure to stay tuned to the blog for updates from within the walls of the Banff Centre Indie Band Residency as producer Chris Kelly will be blogging for us as he goes through it with his band Analog Bell Service.”

The New Yorker: Alex Ross writes, “Evan Hurd, who photographed Adams for my Profile, traveled to Banff in June to observe the making of Inuksuit and produced this short documentary.”

All About Jazz: Interview with Seattle trumpeter Chad McCullough, who was part of this year’s jazz residency. “The whole experience up there was very cool. The faculty was Joshua Redman, Tony Malaby, Jerry Granelli and Don Byron. On top of that there were 60 musicians from all over the world. We were pulling 20-hour days, playing, writing and arranging. They have a club on the campus with four bands playing every night. There’s also a recording studio so you have people putting projects together left and right. It was also eye-opening to hear people from all over the world; guys from Slovakia who could just crush everyone on the piano. It was a life changing experience.”

CBC: “Alaska-based composer John Luther Adams’s new work, Inuksiut [sic], which will debut Sunday at the Banff Centre for the Arts, is his first piece designed to be performed outdoors.”

Calgary Herald: “On Sunday, the Banff Centre drums in the shortest night of the year with the premiere of a work inspired by Inuit stone sentinels that have stood watch for centuries across the vast windswept Arctic.”

Photo of composer John Luther Adams

San Jose [California] Mercury News: “John Adams’s highly anticipated String Quartet received its West Coast premiere Sunday afternoon at Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium, and it is a stunner. Performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, with Adams on hand to introduce it, the piece emerged one of his most brilliant and inventive masterworks.… Commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts, the Juilliard School and Banff Centre, String Quartet is Adams’s first full-size quartet without electronics.”

CBC: Evolution is evolving — the CBC Radio-Canada composers competition gets underway this week at the Banff Centre. Five young Canadian composers selected to write pieces for one ensemble — competing for the $20,000 National Composition Grand Prize among other awards — are now settling into their ‘huts’ to write.

You can hear from the composers themselves throughout the week on “The Signal” (10 p.m.), leading up to the special live broadcast of the finished works on March 26.

They’ve also been blogging over on the Evolution website.

Four of the five Evoution finalists have works that are currently available online at Concerts On Demand: David Adamcyk, Geof Holbrook, Andrew Staniland, Vincent Ho.