Darren Anthony Postema
1966 -
Darren Postema,
conductor and trumpet performer with a specialty in Baroque music on authentic
instruments, has been professionally active for 25 years. He has served as a
music educator at all levels for nearly twenty years.
Postema was born in Australia and has
traveled extensively in Europe, the U.S., Asia, and South Africa as a
conductor, performer, and educator. He completed a B.Mus.Ed.
at the Canberra Institute of the Arts in Australia in
1988, with a primary performance area in trumpet. While at CIA, he was
assistant conductor of its brass ensemble for three years.
After he graduated he was
director of the senior band program at Lyneham High
School in Canberra for a year before accepting a position in 1989 as Director
of the Helderberg College Choir and Chamber Orchestra
in South Africa, where he taught for four years as a lecturer and Director of
Communications and Media Centre. While there he began a guest conducting
relationship with the New England Youth Ensemble when they toured there in 1991
that continued in subsequent tours through 2001.
During his time at HC, Postema completed an M.Mus. in trumpet performance in 1992
at the University of Cape Town and started work on a postgraduate Certificate
in Baroque Studies, which he completed in 1995 at the Royal Conservatorium of
Music and Dance in the Netherlands. He has played trumpet with the Canberra
Symphony Orchestra, the University of Cape Town Symphony Orchestra, the
Netherlands Baroque Orchestra, the Sibelius Academy Baroque Orchestra, and the
Swedish University Akademiska Orckestern
of Turku where he was principal trumpet from 2003-2005.
Postema’s conducting studies started in 1987
under Leonard Dommett, then a well-known director of
Australian professional orchestras. From
1999 to 2001 he studied conducting privately with George Ellis at the Wesley
Institute of Performing Arts in Sydney, Australia, and from 2003 to 2005 with
Professor Jorma Panula at
the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland.
In 1996-1997 he worked
part-time as the conductor of the Metsänkävijat Concert Band of Turku in Finland, and then served as Assistant Conductor of the Sydney Male
Choir from 1998 to 2000. From 2003 to
the present he has been a guest conductor with a number of orchestras, including
three times in successive years with the Maldova
Philharmonic Orchestra, and other appearances with orchestras in Bulgaria,
Finland, the Ukraine, and Japan.
Highlights for Postema as
a conductor have included leading a rarely performed octet by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara in 2003; a 2004 performance of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony with the
orchestra in Chișinău, Moldova; and the 2005 Finnish
premier performance of Beethoven’s Battle
Symphony, Opus 91, with original instruments and five cannons, recorded live for Finnish national family
television. He conducted another
performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
with the State Academic Orchestra in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2009 and two years
later, when he was invited to return, he conducted a program that included
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 and
Beethoven’s Egmont Overture.
After leaving Helderberg College, he held other academic positions,
including classroom teaching and librarianship at Mountain View Adventist
College in Sydney, 1998-2002; music teaching
in Australia, Vietnam, Qatar, and Singapore, 2006- ; and private lessons on
trumpet and in theory, 1999 -.
In 2008 Postema completed a doctorate in education (Ed.D.) at the University of Tasmania in Australia, his
research being in orchestral pedagogy. The title of his dissertation was
Orchestral Conducting Pedagogy: A
case study of participants’ perceptions of teaching and learning in the Symphony Australia conductor
development programme.
ds/2013
Sources: Curriculum Vitae for Darren Anthony Postema; biography at his website and other online sources.