Comox Valley pianist Towa Stewart, 16, won first place in the senior and senior canadian classes at the B.C. Festival of the Performing Arts in Victoria, where he represented the North Island.

There are 32 regional performing arts festivals throughout the province. Each 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 also won the 2018 Dorothy Brealey Memorial Scholarship. 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 Brealey, a well-loved local piano teacher.

Stewart studies piano with Shelley Roberts and advanced theory with Sandy Havelaar.