The Canadian pianist, composer, conductor, vocal coache and broadcaster, Peter Tiefenbach, studied music in Canada, the USA and England, before settling in Toronto.
Peter Tiefenbach enjoys a multifaceted career as a performer (pianist, accompanist), composer, vocal coach, teacher and broadcaster, He has collaborated with noted Canadian singers such as the late contralto Maureen Forrester, baritone Russell Braun and soprano Donna Brown. He and Mary Lou Fallis first performed together in 1997. Highlights of their collaboration include successful Toronto runs of her shows Primadonna and Primadonna Does Shakespeare (2002). In addition, he made his acting debut as Gerhard Krachmann in the playSimpl at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. In 2005, he gave a recital in Calgary with soprano Valdine Anderson and mezzo-soprano Kimberley Barber (broadcast by the CBC), and served as music director for Calgary Opera's production of Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins. That year he performed with Miss Fallis and Kiosque for CBC Radio's OnStage, and toured through Iceland together. He has participated in the Indian River Festival (Prince Edward Island), Niagara International Chamber Music Festival, and Festival Vancouver, where he reprised the Coward-Novello program.
A familiar presence on CBC Radio, Peter Tiefenbach is the former host of the Radio Two program The Arts Tonight. He has orchestrated and conducted a concert for CBC radio and television and of music by Noel Coward and Ivor Novello with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra. Among his commissions are works for violinist Mark Fewer, pianist Jean Marchand, and trumpeter Stuart Laughton. Other major commissions include works for the Canadian Art Song Project, Orpheus Choir of Toronto, Debut Atlantic, Borealis String Quartet, Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Canadian Brass and Elmer Iseler Singers, and the Elora Festival Singers. Current projects include a comic operetta for the Saskatoon Children’s Choir (for the World Children's Choir Festival in Hong Kong), and arrangements of Leonard Bernstein songs for the ARC Ensemble and Wallis Giunta, and tangos for Isabel Bayrakdarian and the St Lawrence String Quartet.His recordings include Jean Stilwell's Kabarett (CBC Records, 2003) and Les chemins de l'amour(CBC Records, 2000), Isabel Bayrakdarian's Azulão (CBC Records, 2003), and Stuart Laughton's Remembrance (Marquis Classics, 2003). He was nominee in the Juno Awards of 1994.
Since 1997, Peter Tiefenbach has been a member of the voice faculty of the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music, where he is music director of the school’s fall opera productions and coaches singers in the Artist Diploma and Performance Diploma programs. He has given vocal master-classes at Wilfrid Laurier University, Dalhousie University, Memorial University and the University of Regina’s Conservatory of the Performing Arts. For the past nine years, he has been a regular guest coach for Calgary Opera’s Emerging Artist program. He has served as assistant conductor for numerous productions of Toronto’s Opera Atelier and served as music director for Opera in Concert’s production of Charpentier’s Louise and the 2013 Canadian premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana. Last season he led performances of Oskar Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier with Toronto Operetta Theatre and returns to the company this spring for Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène. He currently lives in Toronto. |