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The adjudicators have been announced for the 2021 Estevan and District Music Festival. 

Anna Marie Bekolay will adjudicate the vocal and speech arts discipline. A soprano, violinist, teacher and adjudicator, she performs with many ensembles in and around Saskatoon and runs Anna Bekolay’s Studio, teaching voice, violin, recorder and fiddle.  

In 2006, she received a gold medal from the Royal Conservatory of Music for the highest mark in the country on her associate diploma exam for voice performance.  

She has a number of current vocal projects on the go in different genres. 

Her singing was also featured recently at the 2017 Saskatchewan Wearable Art Gala in the collaborative presentation of the wearable art piece Faceted Wing by Nadine Jaggi. 

Jim McCarthy will adjudicate the instrumental discipline. He is an established freelance musician with accolades in a wide range of skills: performing, composing, arranging, studio production, music education and instrument design and building.  

He graduated from Australia’s University of Adelaide in 1996 with a master’s degree in music performance – percussion.  

He has maintained annual tours in Australia performing with Musica Viva in Schools as well as running various masterclasses and clinics. He also arranges music for school bands and produces sequences and recordings for The Fun Music Company.

Additionally, he runs a web-based business that focuses on designing and building custom percussion instruments, as well as a subscription website that produces video tutorials for marimba technique and monthly critiques of percussion performances on YouTube.  

Laurel Teichroeb will be the piano adjudicator. She holds an associate teacher’s diploma with the Royal Conservatory of Music, a primary/elementary piano pedagogy diploma, and a licentiate diploma in piano pedagogy with the Canadian National Conservatory of Music (CNCM). 

Teichroeb is an examiner for CNCM, clinician at provincial music conferences, and an adjudicator for festivals throughout Western Canada. 

Growing up in a musically enriched community in Springside, she began piano lessons with the late Jean Laube. Her earliest music influences were playing in church and singing in school, where she began accompanying at a very young age. At age 15, Teichroeb began teaching piano with her goal being to always be passionate about music, and to allow her students to find the joy of music at all levels of learning. 

The festival is tentatively scheduled to run from April 11-17, and will be a virtual event instead of having live music. The performer is responsible for recording and submitting the video of the performance. Good audio and video quality are important.

St. Paul's United Church will be available for recording performances from March 19-22 and March 26-28. The participants will book through the music festival and a committee member will be at the facility whenever there is a recording booked, in order to do the sanitizing before and afterwards and to ensure that all COVID-19 guidelines are being followed, including masking, social distancing, etc.   

To book a time at St. Paul’s, call Alicia Mann at 306 421-3352

St. Paul's venue guidelines must be followed. Entrants are responsible for recording and uploading their performance videos.  The deadline for uploading videos is April 1.   

The piano portion for the music festival will run from April 11-14, the vocal, speech arts and musical theatre will be April 16 and the instrumental portion will be April 17.