Classical Music Discoveries

A Lavish Outpouring of Talent By Bryce Christensen ““If you have a talent,” said the Irish poet Brendan Francis, “use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.” A quintet of highly talented young musicians were lavishly sharing—not hoarding—their rare talents on the stage of Cedar City’s Heritage Center on the night of April 23rd, as they performed a rich variety of classical music for an appreciative audience. As featured soloists for the Orchestra of Southern Utah’s annual Roy L. Halversen Young Artist Concert, these five musicians—Anna Sun, Aubrey Shirts, Elise, Read, Ben Bradshaw, and Mike Wallace—offered powerful evidence that the vibrant local musical tradition that Roy Halversen did so much to foster during his more than four decades of music teaching and directing is alive and well. Performing first on the program, fourteen-year-old Anna Sun played the third movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto, Op. 25. No. 1 with a poise and deftness astounding in a musician so young. Dancing skillfully over the keys, her fingers produced an irresistible cascade of radiant beauty. Always an inspiring presence, OSU director Xun Sun beamed with quite visible and well-justified pride as he directed the Orchestra in accompanying his gifted daughter. As Sun yielded the orchestra baton to guest conductor Alec Mariana, clarinetist Aubrey Shirts, a junior in music education at SUU, moved into the soloist’s limelight as she played the third movement of Carl Maria von Weber’s Concerto, Op. 74. Ms. Shirts fully captured the restless energy pervading most of this spritely number, yet still handled with perfect grace the short passages of liquid serenity. The spotlight next shifted to vocalist Elise Renee Read, another music major at SUU, who performed “Oh Mio Babbino Caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and “Addio Donde Lieta Usci” from Puccini’s La Boheme. Ms. Read’s marvelously resonant soprano voice rendered both numbers with an impassioned fervor, soaring effortlessly into empyreal heights. As the final youth soloists of the evening, bassoonists Ben Bradshaw and Michael Wallace, both music students at SUU, joined their woodwind talents as a duet to play Johan Baptist Wanhal’s Concerto in F Major. Pouring forth a wealth of mellow and elegant harmonies, this duo together plumbed the majestic profundity of their deep-toned instrument. After the intermission, the lavish outpouring of individual talents gave way to an equally lavish torrent of collective talent, as Xun Sun again took up the baton to lead the Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 (1st and 2nd movements with 4th movement coda). To be sure, this evocative number did feature two more memorable solos—a poignantly liquid clarinet solo, again showcasing Ms. Shirt’s exceptional talents, and a plaintive and mournful French horn solo by Pete Akins. But only the full resources of the orchestra could master the daunting challenge of a composition combining a wide range of musical effects. It was not for nothing that critic Harold C. Schonberg regarded Tchiakovsky as "a sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody,” and mining the inexhaustible supersensousness of the Russian composer’s work requires a complete and well-prepared orchestra. Indeed all the orchestra’s resources—the piercing summons of the brass, the stirring cadences of the drums, the hypnotic seductions of the strings, and the fluid sonority of the woodwinds—did come together, sometimes in fusion, sometimes in counterpoint, in the course of this wonderful performance. And what a musical ride the orchestra gave the audience, moving from the grave and somber opening strains into a veritable eruption of instrumental fury, and then subsiding again into brooding suspense! The audience could only marvel at how the same talents that enabled the orchestra musicians to play with courtly and regal dignity one moment could just a few minutes later enable them to overwhelm their listeners with a passage of scalding white heat. By the time the orchestra had played the final regal notes, the audience knew it had experienced something quite rare. And as listeners exited the concert hall, they were acutely and gratefully aware that remarkable musicians had shared their talents with truly lavish generosity. Podcast hostess: Sandy Hedgecock Recording by; Ken Hedgecock Graphics used by permission: Rollan Fell and the Print Shoppe, Cedar City