Full bio

Christopher Foley is a collaborative pianist dedicated to the fields of teaching, chamber music, art song, opera, and contemporary music. At the Eastman School of Music, he received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1994, majoring in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music as a student of Jean Barr and David Burge. He is on the faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music, where he teaches piano, collaborative piano, vocal literature, vocal coaching, and serves as the head of the voice department at the Royal Conservatory School. He spent fourteen summers as Resident Accompanist at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Brunswick, Maine. In 1989 at the Eckhardt-Grammaté Competition for the Performance of Contemporary Music, he won first prize for the performance of the commissioned work (Walter Buczinski's Mosaics) and third prize overall. In 1991, he won first prize in piano at the Kneisel Competition for the Performance of German Lieder in Rochester, New York.
As pianist and repetiteur for Tapestry New Opera Works, he has been involved with recent, as well as being on the creative team for Tapestry's unique Composer/Librettist and Director/Musical Director laboratories. In 2010 he was the first Leadership Legacy Intern at Tapestry, where he created the Tapestry Songbook program, a workshop and recital program aimed at educating emerging singers and pianists in the new opera development process. At the 2006 Women in Music festival at the Eastman School of Music, he will be performing works of Laura Schwendiner and Barabara Pentland. In 2003, he performed works by Linda Catlin Smith, Andriy Talpash and Juhan Puhm with the Continuum Ensemble in Distillation: The Water Project, an interdisciplinary project featuring video installations by Ramona Ramlochand. A longtime member of the Vancouver New Music Ensemble, solo performances have included The Wanderer: Chamber Music of Africa and two critically acclaimed six-hour retrospectives of 20th-century music, entitled Countdown: The Odd Decades and Countdown: The Even Decades—Distance and Enchantment. In March of 2002 he coached and performed in Modern Baroque Opera's production of Peter Hannan's controversial new opera 120 Songs for the Marquis de Sade.

At the 2012 Honens International Piano Competition, he provided the color commentary for CBC's live global webcast of the final concerto round. Some of the many venues at which he has recently performed include the Eastman School of Music Faculty Concert Series, the University of Western Ontario, Cleveland State Composers’ Forum, Vancouver International New Music Festival, April in Santa Cruz, Sonic Boom, Toronto Arts Week, Word on the Street, Canadian Contemporary Music Workshop, Toronto Dance Theatre, Algoma Fall Festival, and the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music. In June of 2004, his recording of Abigail Richardson's dissolve with Ryan Scott and Sanya Eng was awarded first prize in the under-30 division of the International Rostrum of Composers and was broadcast over 100 times throughout Europe and North America in the 2004-05 season. As author of the Collaborative Piano Blog, he writes about issues of importance to the collaborative pianist, as well as current musical events in Toronto and elsewhere. Dr. Foley has recently appeared as pianist and coach for the singers featured on the Bravo!Canada reality show Bathroom Divas. 

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Last revised 10/28/12

Link to short bio