April 27, 2006

Yellow Springs High School seniors Elizabeth Brown (left) and Tina Chen will perform movements from two piano concerti with the Community Orchestra and other local performers next Thursday, May 4.

By Lauren Heaton

It’s rare for any musician to solo with the accompaniment of an entire orchestra; rarer still for a high school musician to have that opportunity. But as usual, Yellow Springs is unique, and its musicians will look for any excuse to play, especially when three talented high school seniors, two from the community, really want to perform.

A collaborative concert will take place Thursday, May 4, when Yellow Springs High School seniors Tina Chen and Elizabeth Brown and Mason High School senior Adam Farmer solo with local musicians in “A Celebration Concert: Celebrating Music, Life and Community,” at 8 p.m. in Antioch College Kelly Hall.

The event is part senior recital, part spring music festival and partly a chance to revive a collaborative approach to making music, according to Community Orchestra Director Shirley Mullins. The collaboration will take place between the college and the community, between various local music groups and between Yellow Springs musicians and area musicians, she said.

It’s also a chance for the seniors to say goodbye to their community, and for the community to give them a good send off. “Imagine having your doctor or your neighbor accompanying you in your senior solo,” Mullins said. “There’s so much more to it than music, it’s that old thing of kindness.”

The idea for the concert came from Chen and Brown, who since last year have each been studying a piano concerto, a solo piece with orchestral accompaniment, with their teacher Cammy Grote. When Grote approached Mullins, the woman YSHS Band Director Dennis Farmer likes to call “The Grand Matriarch of Music in Yellow Springs,” Mullins recognized a perfect opportunity to gather musicians from all corners of town for the performance.

The concert will open with Antioch College music professor James Johnston conducting the Yellow Springs Community Band performing an arrangement of Rossini’s Italian opera “La Gazza Ladra” (The Thieving Magpie.) Mullins will then step up to conduct the Yellow Springs Community Orchestra and members of the Antioch Community Orchestra, Yellow Springs High School Orchestra and Yellow Springs Strings as they accompany the three soloists.

Chen will perform the dramatic first movement of Edvard Grieg’s masterpiece, Piano Concerto in A Minor, written in 1868 to include strings, timpani and a full winds section. Brown will play the lyrical andante movement of Dmitry Schostakovich’s Concerto No. 2, written for strings and horn in 1957 after the fall of Stalin. Farmer will perform Hummel’s Bassoon Concerto with orchestral accompaniment, and Johnston will close the concert with band arrangements of “Promenade,” “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs” and the “Great Gate of Kiev” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

Other parts of the community are supporting the concert through sponsorship and grants, such as the $225 given by the Charlotte Drake Foundation, managed by the Yellow Springs Community Foundation, to rent the Shostakovich music. Antioch College, the Yellow Springs Schools, the Yellow Springs Youth Orchestra Association, United Way, Community Council and the Senior Center also contributed by providing the concert and rehearsal spaces, a 9-foot Steinway grand, and all the things that could otherwise have easily cost $1,000 to put on the concert, Mullins said.

This is a busy time for Chen and Brown, who over the next two weeks are up against advanced placement course exams, senior projects, their senior prom, and performing the last weekend of the YSHS spring musical. They are on a high as they speed through the last weeks of their high school careers, and they are a little nervous too.

“I’m either going to collapse or pass out,” Brown said. “But this is the only chance I’ll ever get to do this. If we don’t die first, then we’re graduating in June.”

They both feel the chance to solo with an orchestra is a once in a lifetime opportunity that they’ve been preparing for since they began playing the piano around the age of five.

Farmer said his son Adam also loves to perform and jumped at the opportunity to play with the Yellow Springs group. Adam is a member of the Cincinnati Youth Symphony and plans to attend the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in the fall where he will major in bassoon performance. Still, while Adam’s community in Mason has a community band, Farmer appreciates the opportunity his son is getting in Yellow Springs, where there is such a large number of people who are committed to music as a lifetime activity and creative outlet, he said.

“The thing I love about community music here is that people don’t put their instruments away when they graduate,” Farmer said. “We’ll do anything we can to keep that tradition alive in Yellow Springs.”

Often YSHS seniors solo with their high school band or orchestra, but according to Grote and Mullins, no high school student has ever soloed with what is turning out to be most of the music community of Yellow Springs as backup.

“This is such an unusual opportunity for these students that most professional musicians never get,” Grote said.

The opportunity for Mullins is to continue making connections through music between groups inside and outside of town, she said.

“I can imagine a symphony orchestra of area students college age and younger, or the idea of creating a regional orchestra…” Mullins mused. “The possibilities are endless.”

Thursday’s concert is free and open to the public, but donations are always gladly accepted to support the high school music scholarship fund that helps send local kids to music lessons, camps and conferences to further their musical training. Beginning at 7:30 p.m. just before the concert, the Yellow Springs Strings will serenade audience members in the stairwell on their way into Kelly Hall, where organizers will accept donations.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com