Festival Finale: Heroic Handel

Mark Vuorinen is Artistic Director and Conductor of The Elora Singers and the Elora Festival and Waterloo Region's Grand Philharmonic Choir. He is also Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo. A recipient of many awards, Mark was the 2016 Laureate of the Ontario Arts Council’s Leslie Bell Prize, and received a 2016 National Choral Award from Choral Canada for his research on Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Mark holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Toronto and Master of Music degree from Yale University’s School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music. Mark’s research interests include the study of contemporary choral literature. from the Baltic States, and in particular, the music of Arvo Pärt. Mark was an invited lecturer at the Arvo Pärt Project’s Sounding the Sacred conference in New York City in May 2017. He is published in Circuit Musiques Contemporaines, the Research Memorandum Series of Chorus America, and Principles of Music Composing of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.