Mini VDB - Katie Yap and Simon Martyn-Ellis
Program
About the artists
Katie Yap, viola
Modern and baroque violist Katie Yap plays regularly with Australia’s finest ensembles including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Van Diemen's Band, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian World Orchestra, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and has joined groups like the Academy of Ancient Music overseas. Her greatest love is chamber music, and she is a founding member of prog-baroque quartet Croissants & Whiskey, the Chrysalis Harp Trio, and crossover folk/baroque group Wattleseed Ensemble.
Katie is fascinated by music’s ability to tell stories and bring people together. As the 2022 Freedman Fellow, her project Multitudes explored the nexus of folk, baroque, and new music styles, and a life-long fascination with improvisation. She will create four new works through collaborative composition with partners in crime Emily Sheppard (fiddle/voice), Donald Nicolson (harpsichord/electronics), Bowerbird Collective (violin and cello), and Mindy Meng Wang (guzheng), exploring themes of cultural identity, environmental storytelling and activism, and the physical joy of music-making.
Katie has become known for her curation and project management, exploring this side of her career through her role as Artistic Director of the 3MBS women-in-music festival, Music, She Wrote and Wattleseed Ensemble. She is also a passionate educator, having taught viola at the University of Queensland and Monash University, and she has an intractable habit of stress-baking, which can make for delicious rehearsal breaks!
Simon Martyn-Ellis, theorbo
Simon Martyn-Ellis began playing the lute after finding the classical guitar repertoire too restrictive for ensemble performance: continuo collaborations remain a mainstay of his activities.
Simon returned to Australia in August 2019 after 17 years abroad, having lived and worked in first Germany for a decade, and then the United States. Intensely grateful for his experiences, he looks immensely forward to working with past, present and future colleagues from home and around the globe.
You can hear him working within Pinchgut Opera, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Latitude 37, the Australian Haydn Ensemble, Van Diemen’s Band, ARCO, Salut! Baroque, Ensemble Galante, the Sydney and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, as a founding member of Notturno and Duo Corbetta, along with other small but special collaborations.
Simon is currently Mentor-in-Residence for Van Diemen's Band, along with his wife, violist Karina Schmitz. As Mentors, Simon and Karina are working with VDB's Fellows and the wider musical community in Nipaluna/Hobart, investing in the Baroque performance skills of local Baroque musicians.