December 16, 2005 -

Ottawa, Canada -- The National Arts Centre is pleased to welcome back Joel Quarrington to his position as principal double bass of the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Quarrington held this position with the Orchestra for the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons before returning to his former position as principal double bass of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.  Joel Quarrington will return to the National Arts Centre Orchestra at the beginning of the 2006-2007 season.

Joel Quarrington has long been recognized as Canada’s foremost double bassist and is regarded as one of the world’s leading players. A winner of the Geneva International Competition, he has made solo appearances in Canada, the US, Europe and China. He has played concerti with a number of Canadian orchestras including the NAC Orchestra and those of Edmonton, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Toronto. As a member of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, he participated in tours to Atlantic Canada in 2002, and to the United States and Mexico in 2003.

Joel Quarrington is a faculty member of Toronto’s Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music and has taught in masterclasses for such esteemed schools as Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and London’s Royal Academy of Music. He introduced a double bass component to the NAC Summer Music Institute in the summer of 2003. He will return to the faculty of the Summer Music Institute in 2006.

Joel Quarrington is also a renowned chamber musician and has performed with many of the world's leading string quartets including the Orford, Vermeer, Cleveland, Colorado, St. Lawrence, Allegri and Tokyo Quartets. Joel is particularly honoured to have been a part of a 1982 recording session with the great Glenn Gould for the soundtrack of Timothy Findley's The Wars. Written for solo cello and bass and based on Brahms’ Intermezzi, this turned out to be the last music composed by Gould before his untimely death.

Joel performs on an Italian bass made in 1630 by the Brescian master, Santo Paolo Maggini. He is a strong advocate of the unusual practice of tuning the bass in fifths, an octave lower than the cello. This is the tuning he uses exclusively.

Joel’s latest CD, Virtuoso Reality on CBC Records was released to critical acclaim, as was his earlier NAXOS CD of music by Giovanni Bottesini. He recently finished recording Vol. 2 of the NAXOS Bottesini series, recording duos with celebrated soprano Nancy Argenta and with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal bassist Harold Robinson as well as with James Campbell, one of the world’s great clarinet soloists.

In his spare time, Joel is a truly terrible erhu player (an erhu is a chinese two-string violin) and has recently released his seventh erhu CD, Erhu's (the) Greatest; A Golden Decade which is a compilation disc and features the Quarrington Brothers 1999 appearance on Peter Gzowski’s CBC radio show Morningside as well as highlights from such memorable recordings as Country Erhu '98, Everybody Digs the Erhu, The Three Erhus at the Acropolis and Erhus From Beyond the Galaxy.

For more information about Joel Quarrington visit his website at www.joelquarrington.com.

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For more information please contact:
Jane Morris, Marketing Officer,
National Arts Centre Orchestra
(613) 947-7000, ext. 335
jmorris@nac-cna.ca