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Canadian violist Douglas McNabney is a major force in North American chamber and orchestral music as a player, educator, and impresario. McNabney was born into a large Irish immigrant family in Toronto and grew up on the city's edges in what was then the suburb of Etobicoke. His family was not particularly musical, and his first lessons on the piano came in public school, on a cardboard keyboard. His high school music program was a strong one, and he has said: "It distresses me to think that the opportunities I enjoyed as a young person are no longer offered to young people today." After playing piano, drums, and violin, McNabney attended the University of Toronto, earning a degree not in any of these instruments, but in musicology. He switched to viola, earning a Master's at the University of Western Ontario and going on for a Doctorate at the Université de Montréal. McNabney served from 1983 to 1986 as principal violist of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, often playing solo parts such as that in Berlioz's Harold in Italy. McNabney became the artistic director of Quebec's Domaine Forget Music Festival and Academy in 2001 and assumed the chairmanship of McGill University's performance department in 2004. He has continued to teach viola at McGill while also returning to English Canada as director of the Toronto Summer Music Festival and Academy since 2010. McNabney has played chamber music with a wide variety of North American groups including the Allegri Quartet, the Orford Quartet, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the Lafayette Quartet, and the Galliard Ensemble. He has appeared on several string trio recordings on the Oxingale label, including one of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, and, in 2018, a reissued performance (with Jonathan Crow and Matt Haimovitz) of Mozart's Divertimento for string trio in E flat major, K. 563, and Preludes and Fugues, K. 404a. ~ James Manheim

Canadian pianist Louise Bessette has built a career as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music. She has chosen a difficult path to follow, performing and championing music by relatively little known living composers like José Evangelista, Serge Provost, Michelle Gonville, and André Villeneuve. But Bessette has, for the most part, managed to achieve more than modest success in her career. Competition winner, recording artist, chamber music player, soloist, and recitalist in concert halls throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, Bessette has attracted the attention of contemporary composers needing a strong advocate for their works. In addition to those mentioned above, Raul Sosa, Bruno Ducol, Phillippe Boivin, Jacques Lejeune, and Claude Ballif have written major works for her. For all her progressive tendencies, though, Bessette has played her share of traditional fare, including works by Mozart and, via transcription, Johann Strauss, Jr., and Dvorák. She has also performed more mainstream modern music, particularly works by Ives and Messiaen. Bessette regularly collaborates with chamber music groups and appears often with major orchestras and conductors. She has made numerous recordings for various labels, including Analekta, Atma Classique, CBC Records, Mode, Les éditions Doberman-Yppan, and Montaigne.

Louise Bessette was born in Montreal, Canada, on June 20, 1959. She began piano lessons at five and from 1971 studied at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal (CMM), where she was awarded first prize in chamber music performance in 1979 and first prize in solo piano in 1980.

Following her 1980 graduation she had advanced studies with Eugene List (New York) and Yvonne Loriod (Paris), the celebrated pianist and wife of Messiaen. Though Bessette won the 1981 Eckhardt-Grammatté Competition, it was her victory at the Concours international de musique contemporaine de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1986 that gave her broad international notice. Bessette's first recordings appeared in 1987, and included highly praised accounts of the Ives Concord Sonata and excerpts from Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'enfant Jésus, on the CBC Musica Viva label.

In 1991 Bessette was given the Flandre-Québec Award, for her efforts to promote contemporary music. Numerous other awards and citations followed, as well as a stream of recordings. Bessette began teaching piano at the CMM in 1996. In 2003 she founded her own record label, Sept Jardins, and issued her inaugural CD Tango Diablo! to wide acclaim. Among her later recordings is the 2008 collection of Messiaen works on Analekta entitled Les Oiseaux.

Violinist Jonathan Crow has played a major role in the musical life of his native Canada as a soloist, chamber player, and educator. In the early 2000s, he was both the concertmaster and the youngest member of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Crow was born in the remote Pacific city of Prince George, British Columbia, in 1977. He took up the violin at age six and did his undergraduate work at British Columbia's Victoria Conservatory, moving to McGill University in Montreal for a Master's degree. Before earning that degree in 1998, he had already won a place in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He became not only the orchestra's youngest player but also the youngest concertmaster of a major North American orchestra. He was helped along by a scholarship from Chicago's Ravinia Festival, and he made appearances as a soloist under conductor Yehudi Menuhin during this period. After joining the Guarneri, Emerson, Vermeer, and Tokyo Quartets in guest appearances, Crow formed the string trio Triskelion in Canada in 2004. He is also a founding member of the New Orford String Quartet. Crow began teaching violin at McGill in 2005, reached the rank of associate professor in 2010, and moved to the University of Toronto the following year; one motivation was that he had been appointed concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. As a soloist, he has championed new works by Canadian composers including Healey Willan, Ernest MacMillan, Christos Hatzis, Marjian Mozetich, Barrie Cabena, Michael Conway Baker, and Eldon Rathburn. Crow has recorded as a soloist and chamber player for the Oxingale, XXI, Bridge, CBC, and ATMA Classique labels; in 2018, that group of labels expanded when he joined violinist Douglas McNabney and cellist Matt Haimovitz in a reissued recording of Mozart's music for string trio on the PentaTone Classics from the Netherlands. Crow plays a del Gesù violin from the year 1738. ~ James Manheim