About Timothy Wilfong

Baritone Tim Wilfong has been captivating audiences across the United States and Canada with his clear, warm tone and talent for bringing words to life on stage. His opera roles include Argante in Rinaldo, Ben in Menotti’s The Telephone, Starveling in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Police Captain in the Canadian premier of John Musto’s Volpone with Opera McGill; Marcello in La Bohème with the Friends of the Performing Arts in Concord, MA; Papageno in Die Zauberflöte at the James Library and center for the Arts, Norwell, MA; and the Clock in L’Enfant et les sortilèges and Lord Dunmow in Sir Lennox Berekely’s A Dinner Engagement at New England Conservatory in Boston.

An avid performer of Baroque music, Tim has been the bass soloist for Handel’s Messiah with the Vermont Philharmonic for five years. He has performed with Cappella Clausura (Boston, MA) and McGill’s Early Music Ensembles, and was a featured soloist with the Carr Collegium for a standing-room-only performance of Campra’s Les Femmes during the Boston Early Music Festival Fringe Series. Tim has a passion for championing new repertoire and has premiered works by Kate Salfelder, Jessica Rugani, Albert Oppenheimer, Kevin Zhang, and Jacob Rex Zimmerman. In 2019, he teamed up with cellist Laura Jacyna to commission duets from composers across North America and Europe which were premiered as a livestream concert.

A native of Colorado, Tim holds a Bachelor of Music with Academic Honors from New England Conservatory, where he was a Daniels Scholar, and a Master of Music in Performance at the Schulich School of Music from McGill University. He is the cantor at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Montreal.

About Rich Coburn

Rich Coburn is a freelance pianist, vocal coach, organist, arranger, and composer. He is a founding member of the vocal chamber ensemble Quintus 4. He also trains creative entrepreneurs in negotiation and communication. Known for his “subtle and nuanced playing,” Rich made his orchestral debut at 17 with the Youth Symphony of the Kootenays and has since appeared in concert throughout Canada, the United States, Italy, France, Austria, and China.

Rich has worked as a coach at Virginia Opera, L’Atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal and Opera McGill, as well as Music Director for Jeunesses Musicales du Canada and Cowtown Opera. He is currently Music Director and Organist at the Anglican Parish of St. Lawrence.

A graduate of McGill’s Artist Diploma program studying collaborative piano with Michael McMahon, Rich also holds a Masters and a Bachelors (from McGill and the University of Calgary), as well as an Associate of the Royal Canadian College of Organists, and an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto diplomas. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Centre, Music Academy of the West, as well as the Franz Schubert Institute.

Rich is fascinated by the compositional procedures of the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has developed a unique method of analysis for this repertoire. He is passionate about discovering and performing new music, and old music in new ways. His favourite musical experience is playing two-piano repertoire with his twin brother.