Sixteen-year-old pianist, Towa Stewart recently returned from the B.C. Festival of the Performing Arts in Victoria where he represented the North Island.
There he won first place in both the Senior Class and the Senior Canadian Class. There are 32 regional performing arts festivals throughout the province.
Each regional festival sends its most promising young artists between the ages of 10 and 28 to participate in the annual provincial festival, which is held in a different community each year. The five-day event includes adjudications, master classes and workshops for piano, voice, strings, woodwinds and brass, speech arts and dance.
Stewart has also received another honour, the 2018 Dorothy Brealey Memorial Scholarship winner. This $1,000 scholarship administered by the C.R. Friends of Music is awarded each year to a piano student studying with a C.R. teacher, in memory of Dorothy Brealey, a well-loved local piano teacher.
Stewart studies piano with Shelley Roberts and advanced theory with Sandy Havelaar.