About
Alain Trudel Interim Artistic Director with Boris Brott, Founder
(Alain Biography)
Our Mission
The 35-year old Brott Music Festival was founded in 1987 by Boris Brott and is one of our anchor arts organizations in Hamilton, ON and is the largest orchestral music festival in Canada.
Brott Music presents classical, opera, jazz, Broadway, chamber, rock, pops, and education concerts of the highest calibre in the Golden Horseshoe. It is a fully incorporated, not for profit charitable organization with a dedicated Board of Directors, staff, and volunteer contingent.
Brott Music’s mission is to ensure that its music-making will enthrall every age, gender, and ethnicity; to impart a love of music from all our musicians to all of our audiences, to imbue those listeners with the desire and motivation to be better and more productive members of their communities and to enrich our community’s cultural tapestry.
"Brott Music believes in providing high quality musical experiences free of charge to those who may be unable to attend in a traditional concert setting. Citizens of the region have enjoyed performances at hospices, long term care facilities, churches, school gyms, Tiger Cat football games, on the street at Hamilton’s art crawl and even a popup Handel’s Messiah at a shopping mall."
Our Vision
Brott Music believes that music should be celebrated alongside other art forms to enhance our audience’s experience. You will find our orchestra performing alongside painters and Prime Ministers; ballet dancers and blues bands; authors, acrobats, astronauts and Arkells!
Brott Music’s artistic vision reaches far beyond being a music festival. The goal to ensure our music and mission are diverse and inclusive of people of all ages, financial means and cultural backgrounds including Indigenous artists and audiences. BMF increases accessibility to the arts through dynamic programming and affordable price structures in a variety of spaces.
The Festival runs two nationally renowned and federally supported training programs:
The National Academy Orchestra of Canada
The National Academy Orchestra of Canada whose mentor-apprentice approach is the only program of its type in Canada, provides on-the-job training for Canada’s finest music graduates, who are paired with mentors from Canada’s finest orchestras. They also receive career management advice in addition to a rigorous professional schedule of rehearsals and performance.
This fully professional orchestra is auditioned annually and 41 members selected from over 500 applications and has been invited to perform at the Toronto Summer Music Festival, Windermere in Muskoka and Parry Sound’s Festival of the Sound. To date, over 1200 have graduated the program.
Visit the NAOMeet Our OrchestraBrott Opera
BrottOpera—a professional training program for emerging professional opera singers, who are given the opportunity to rehearse and perform a fully staged opera and Pop Opera each year with the National Academy Orchestra.
Brott Opera was established in 2015 to fill the artistic void left by the closing of Opera Hamilton/Opera Ontario in the region. Artistically it is led by conductor Boris Brott and employs opera administrators, production teams and established "mentor" artist from across Canada and internationally.
Visit Brott OperaMeet Our CastFounding Artistic Director Boris Brott was an internationally renowned, pioneering Canadian conductor who was a member of the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario, and the Order of Quebec. In 1988, then-Mayor of Hamilton Robert Morrow asked Boris to organize some musical events in the summer for a group of international delegates visiting the City. Brott Music has grown from a 10-day event (then called Boris Brott Summer Music Festival) to one of Hamilton/Halton regions’ most respected year-round cultural cornerstones.
Memorable moments in its three-decade history include a performance for Pope John Paul II and 800,000 at World Youth Day in Toronto in 2002; a Junos performance in 2015 and a popup concert launching Arkells new album High Noon in 2014 that CBC’s Adam Carter called “One of the coolest musical performances I have ever seen.”
World class soloists and other personalities have made appearances on the Festival stage: James Ehnes, Anton Kuerti, Jan Lisiecki, Pinchas Zukerman, Lara St. John, Marc Garneau, the Hon. Lincoln Alexander, Karen Kain, Rex Harrington, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell, Mordecai Richler and Michael Ondaatje to name only a few.
Since 1999, Brott Education Concerts have impacted over 270,000 students (pre-K to gr. 8) by introducing them to the sounds and experience of a live orchestral performance. These productions are often themed with social issues such as bullying, tolerance and racism. Programs such as Music & The Inuit Spirit, Music &The Underground Railroad and Beethoven & The Bully garnered Brott a National Child Day award.
Music Director of the Toledo Symphony (USA) and of l’orchestre symphonique de Laval (CAN) Alain Trudel has been praised for his “immense talent as conductor, musician and performer” (La Presse). Under his leadership these orchestras have been nominated for Junos, Opus and Emmy awards “Every so often a perfect listening trance can befall one” (Fanfare Magazine).
Trudel has also served as principal guest conductor of the Victoria Symphony, musical adviser of the Manitoba chamber orchestra, principal conductor of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra and music director of Orchestra London. Trudel was also conductor of the CBC Radio Orchestra, taking the orchestra to new heights of artistic quality, as well as public and critical acclaim “Alain Trudel, conducted an engaging, unusual, multicultural program with enthusiastic verve.” (LA Times).
Trudel has conducted every major orchestra in Canada as well as orchestras in the UK, USA, Sweden, Brazil, Italy, Russia, Japan, Hong-Kong, Malaysia and Latin America.
He has been a regular guest with the Opera de Montréal and in March 2017 he conducted, to great acclaim, the world premiere of the operatic version of “The Wall”. “The entire audience was on its feet for another standing ovation, with concertgoers shouting wow and bravo” (Rolling Stone Magazine) “The Wall Triumphs in Montréal” (Le Figaro, Paris). Trudel also lead the american premiere at the Cincinnati Opera.
Always committed to upcoming generations of musicians, Trudel was the Principal Youth and Familly conductor with the National Art Center Orchestra from, the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2004 to 2012 and has regularly been invited to conduct the tours and recordings of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. Their recordings togethers have been nominated for two Junos.
A long-time pedagogue and mentor, Trudel has been instrumental in teaching and guiding new generations of musicians for more than 25 years. He served on the faculty of the universities of Ottawa and Western, both as conductor of the opera and of the orchestra as well as teaching post-graduate courses. Trudel also was for many year trombone and chamber music teacher at le conservatoire de musique de Montréal. He has given masterclasses at numerous music festivals and schools including the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, Hochshule Köln, Hamamatsu Festival, Graz akademie, Italian Brass Week and the University of Hong- Kong.
His highly selling recording on Naxos, Atma and other labels have received multiple prizes and rave reviews: 5 stars from BBC magazine, Choc de l’année from Le monde de la musique, Grand prix de l’académie Charles Cros, Opus Prize, as well as the New York Times and the American Music Guide.
Trudel is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, among them a Knighthood of the province of Québec (chevalier de l’ordre), the Virginia Parker Prize, Jubilee medal from the Queen of England, the Heinz Unger Prize, the Mildred Dixon Holmes Award. In 2006 he was named an Ambassador of Canadian Music by the Canadian Music Center.
Hailed as “the Jascha Heifetz of the trombone” (Le monde de la musique) Alain Trudel is also one of the world’s most respected and renowned trombonists. Trudel made his solo debut at the age of 18 with Charles Dutoit and l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal and has continued to grace the world’s stages for nearly 30 years, including appearances with l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France, the Hong-Kong Philharmonic, the Austrian Radio Orchestra, Carnegie-Weill Recital Hall (NY), Dresdner Neueu Musik Tage (Germany), Tasmania New Music Festival (Australia), Festival Musica Strasbourg (France), Klangbogen Festival (Vienna), Akiyoshidai and Hamamatsu festival (Japan). in 2018 he was awarded the prestigious International Trombone Association Award for his outstanding contribution.
A Yamaha artist for the last three decades the company has internationally distributed the Alain Trudel mouthpiece designed with his specifications.
Brott Music saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to innovate and adapt. The result -mainly through digital pivoting – was staff & musicians remained employed, musicians and singers were trained, and world class artists/scholars/teachers joined Brott Music to bring a different type of musical experience to audiences in their own home.
Brott Music Live was a series of informal concerts that highlighted the Festival’s original planned 2020 programs through interviews, performances and Zoom round tables. These were streamed from artists’ homes to Facebook and YouTube, most notably a fully virtual Mozart Don Giovanni opera, orchestral musicians performing at various Hamilton landmarks and their own hometowns
Brott Music’s Virtual Orchestral Training saw the creation of a 7-week online, virtual “from home” training program for 54 emerging professional musicians from across Canada. A documentary-style performance of Canadian composer John Estacio’s Filumena was filmed safely at First Ontario Concert Hall digital use as was Handel’s Messiah, released on new Brott To You channel in time for Christmas. 2020 also saw the premiere of Brott Backstage – Cable 14 broadcasts free content to patrons of all ages and musical tastes throughout the City of Hamilton, hosted by Maestro Boris Brott.
