John Estacio

Raised in the farming community of the Holland Marsh, Ontario, Estacio took piano and accordion lessons, and played church organ every Sunday.

As a teenager, he created soundtracks for short student films, played trumpet, and performed in high school productions of Broadway musicals.

In 1992, his first major orchestral work, Visoes da Noite, won second-prize in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Canadian Composers Competition.

A Farmer's Symphony (1994), Borealis (1997), Flights of Fancy (1999), Frenergy (1998), Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin and Cello (1997), Variations on a Memory (1995), Victims of Us All (1996), Wondrous Light (1997) and The Twins and the Monster (2001) a children's tale for actress and orchestra with text by Tololwa M. Mollel, were all written for the ESO.

Recent works include orchestrations of Seven Songs by Jean Sibelius for tenor Ben Heppner and the score of The Secret of The Nutcracker for a CBC television broadcast in December 2008.