As part of its Strike a chord mentorship, Sutherland Trio awards two composers at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music the opportunity to have their works performed by Sutherland Trio and the winning Mentorship ensemble. We are thrilled to announce  that In 2023, those two composers are Georgina Palmer (for Emerge) and Bryn Renard (for And Ever)!

 

Sutherland Trio is excited to be forging relationships between generations of composers and performers and highlighting the emerging compositional talent at MCM. 

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Georgina Palmer - winner 2023 for Emerge

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Georgina Palmer is a New Zealand-British composer, currently residing in Melbourne where she studies composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Notable composing career highlights to date include winning the 2020 SOUNZ NZCF Choral Composition Competition, winning the 2022 Audrey Reid Composition Prize, a commission from the National Youth Brass Band of New Zealand and, most recently, having a work performed in the Celebrating Global Harmony Through Music concert at Carnegie Hall in NYC. She hopes to do film-scoring work in the future and is passionate about film and television, studying it as a breadth subject alongside composition. Outside of composing, Georgina thoroughly enjoys playing piano and percussion in a variety of ensembles in both New Zealand and Australia (most recently at the Australian National Brass Band Championships in Newcastle with Darebin-Preston City Brass). She is delighted to be selected as a Sutherland Trio Composition Award recipient this year.

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Bryn Renard  - winner 2023 for And Ever

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Bryn Renard is an emerging composer and proud queer voice from Melbourne’s inner north, currently in their second year of composition study at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. 

 

Their music takes inventive approaches to explore the complex beauty of human emotion, intimacy, and vulnerability. Bryn’s work has been featured in the Melbourne Recital Centre twice, and on numerous occasions in the University of Melbourne’s public concerts. 

 

Bryn is grateful to have received the Sutherland Trio Composition Prize, and looks forward to contributing their voice to Melbourne’s unique musical landscape.

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Huangkai Lai - winner 2022 for Inside the Whale

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Kaykay is an honours student studying Composition at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. He graduated from The Australian National University School of Music studying both Piano Performance and Composition in 2021. He was a recipient of the Dennis Griffin Piano Undergraduate Scholarship.

 

Kaykay has won awards at numerous regional and national level competitions and has performed in many public concerts. He was the winner of 2022 “To Country” Composition Competition. He was a finalist in Australian Artology’s Fanfare Competition, and a finalist in Whitworth Roach Classical Music Performance Competition in 2021. Kaykay was also a finalist in the 2015 "Music Ambassador" National Piano Competition, and he won the First Prize in the 2014 Chopin International Youth Piano Competition.

 

Kaykay was the guest performer for The Australian National University Graduation Ceremony in Llewellyn Hall in 2022. He gave a piano recital at Embassy of Hungary, Canberra in 2021, and performed at Canberra Theatre Centre in 2020. 

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Anton Pokryshevsky  - winner 2022 for A theme based on Elie Wiesel’s memoir ‘Night' 

 

Anton has been playing music since early childhood, starting with classical piano and trumpet and developing a strong love for composers such as Bach, Schumann, Rachmaninoff and Piazzolla. Over the years, he discovered the beauty of jazz and improvisation, often finding himself freely improvising and experimenting with different melodic ideas and harmonies. His language has been influenced by the likes of Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea as well as by Eastern European and Jewish folk music. Free improvisation became a means of Anton’s self-expression and eventually became his creative outlet, developing his own unique voice and language. This led him to start composing for a range of different ensembles in a variety of genres. Anton’s compositions include works for a symphony orchestra, for chamber ensembles, Big Bands, jazz combos and solo instruments. Anton particularly has a strong interest in film music and hopes to pursue this professionally. 

 

In recent years, Anton has been mentored by Tony Gould, Mikhail Solovei, Steve Sedergreen and Paddy McMullin. Anton holds an AMusA diploma in classical piano. 

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