Vernon Regehr
A native of Winnipeg, Vernon Regehr is quickly gaining recognition as a versatile, creative and passionate musician. Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe remarked of a Tanglewood Music Festival performance of Elliott Carter’s first string quartet, ‘…an extraordinary event…performed with outstanding aplomb and degree of understanding, and deservedly won one of the summer’s sturdiest ovations.’ Over the past decade Regehr has given concerto performances under the direction of Bramwell Tovey, Aldo Parisot and Peter Gardner, and later this season will perform Hindemith’s ‘Kammermusik III’ with the Morpheus Ensemble in Milwaukee. As a chamber musician he has collaborated with members of the Shanghai, Tokyo, Penderecki, Super Nova and Frye Street string quartets as well as with internationally renowned pianist Leon Fleisher. In a recent performance at the Groundswell New Music Festival commemorating Carter’s 100th birthday, the Winnipeg Free Press said Regehr’s performance of the cello sonata ‘…showed a clear understanding of the work, while handling its hefty technical demands with finesse.’
Regehr performs regularly in France with a long-time collaborator, pianist Mimi Solomon and has made festival appearances at the University of Victoria, Artspring (BC), First Avenue Chamber Players (New York), the SoundaXis New Music festival (Toronto) Hilton Beach (ON) and the Chamber Music Societies of Quebec and Kitchener-Waterloo. Regehr is a founding member of the Cardinal Points Ensemble, who performed at the International Festival of Ensembles in St. Petersburg Russia last season. In the past year he also became a founding member of the ORA Ensemble, which specializes in the fusion of new music, visual art and performance theatre. In October 2008 he was guest principal cellist of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra for a concert tour featuring internationally renowned soprano Isabel Bayrakdian, with concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Boston, and New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Regehr completed his undergraduate training at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, where he completed his undergraduate training with Kim Scholes, Shauna Rolston and Thomas Wiebe. Regehr earned both his Masters and Doctoral degrees at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he studied with Timothy Eddy. He was the recipient of the Ina Gordon Fellowship for two seasons at the Tanglewood Music Centre, and also performed at the Taos School of Music, Banff Centre for the Arts, Colorado College Conservatory and the Oberlin Conservatory Summer Festival in Casalmaggiore, Italy.
While living in New York, Regehr taught cello in East Harlem with the renowned music school Opus 118, which was featured in the major motion picture Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep. He also appeared in Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film ‘Sarabande’, which was the fourth of six films from the Inspired by Bach series featuring Yo-Yo Ma.
For many years Regehr served on the performance and teaching faculty Kinhaven Music Festival in Vermont, and has taught at numerous other festivals. He has given masterclasses at the University of Toronto, the Glenn Gould School, Wilfred Laurier University, the Winnipeg Violoncello Society and the Maritime Conservatory in Halifax. He currently teaches cello and conducts the chamber orchestra at Memorial University of Newfoundland.