Alison Mackay

violone

Alison Mackay is well known to Toronto audiences as a bass player and  creator of innovative performance projects for Canadian musicians.  She played violone and double bass with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra for forty years and has remained active in the creation of multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural programming for the orchestra. A number of her projects, which include The Four Seasons, a Cycle of the Sun; The Galileo Project; House of Dreams, and Tales of Two Cities: The Leipzig Damascus Coffee House have been made into feature documentary films and have toured extensively around the world. In 2006, her children's adventure, The Quest for Arundo Donax, was awarded the Canadian Juno Award for Children's Recording of the Year. In collaboration with her husband, David Fallis, Alison directed two city-wide arts festivals: the 2005 Metamorphosis Festival, a presentation of music, art, dance, film, and theatre inspired by the stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the 2008 Sacred Spaces, Sacred Circles Festival, a celebration of architecture and arts in the worship spaces of many cultures in the city of Toronto.  The recipient of the 2013 Betty Webster Award for her contribution to orchestral life in Canada,  she is thrilled to be taking part in this season's Toronto Bach Festival.