Jacinthe Couture

Couture, Jacinthe

(Marie Jeanne Henriette) Jacinthe Couture. Pianist, teacher, b St-Gédéon, near Chicoutimi, Que, 4 Nov 1950; M MUS piano (Laval) 1971. Jacinthe Couture studied piano 1967-71 at Laval University with Anna-Marie Globenski and Robert Weisz. For her participation in the Canadian Music Competitions she won a bursary from the Quebec Ministry of Education and continued her studies 1972-5 at Indiana University in Bloomington with György Sebök (piano) and Joseph Gingold and János Starker (chamber music). She returned to Indiana in 1978 to take courses in performance with Jules Herford and on occasion worked again with Sebök. She won first prize in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra Concours in 1973, and won the CBC Talent Festival, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago prize, and the Prix d'Europe in 1974. She was assistant to Sebök at the Sibelius Academy in Finland in 1976 and in Bloomington in 1977, and taught 1976-8 at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In 1979 she began teaching at the University of Montreal and has also taught at the Orford Arts Centre and at the Conservatoire de musique de Saguenay and the Camp Musicale des Laurentides..

Couture played Liszt's Concerto No. 2 with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in 1973 and with the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra in 1974, Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand with the Belgian Radio Orchestra in 1976, and Beethoven's 'Emperor' Concerto with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago in 1975. In 1977 she performed at Carnegie Recital Hall as part of the exchange program of Jeunesses musicales of Canada (Youth and Music Canada), for which organization she also toured Quebec 1976-7. She gave recitals in Frederiction and Chicoutimi in 1982 and at the Salle Claude-Champagne in Montreal in 1982. She has recorded the fugues 12 x 12 by Harry Somers (1975-7, RCI 452). She continues to perform chamber music and to accompany, especially in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area and elsewhere in Quebec.

Among Jacinthe Couture's students have been Pierre-Richard Aubin, Louise Léveillé, and Marie-Andrée Ostiguy.