Charlottesville Symphony Youth Concerts
By Ben Larsen
Ben Larsen:
The Charlottesville symphony is hosting their annual youth concerts, performed for fourth and fifth grade students Thursday the 17th. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Elizabeth Roberts, the Director of Youth Education for the symphony.
Elizabeth Roberts:
My name is Elizabeth Roberts and I function as the Director of Youth Education for the Charlottesville Symphony as well as the principal bassoonist in the orchestra. And we’re excited that coming Thursday, we’ll be offering our annual youth concerts, which are in person, live orchestral performances that we present for area fourth and fifth graders. Our audience is made up of public school students, private school students, as well as homeschool students. When we develop the program each spring, we send a save the date notice out to all the area music teachers in the public and private schools as well as those homeschool groups.
Our game plan with this each year is to introduce young kids to the instruments in the orchestra, and we choose fourth and fifth grade for the city and county schools, that’s the year right before they will choose an instrument to play in the band or orchestra program. And we figure, by seeing an orchestra perform live, it’s a great chance for them to know what they might want to do. And instead of just sort of having to guess an instrument, they will have seen and heard it.
And one of the things we do through the concert each year is introduce the students to the instrument families of the orchestra. So we have our woodwinds and our brass and our strings and our percussion, and each instrument family wears a bright colored shirt identifying them as a member of that family. So like the woodwinds are in bright green, the strings in bright yellow, the percussion in bright orange and the brass in bright blue, the students can tell from the audience right away what instrument family they’re seeing. And then we choose different pieces of music each year to help the kids focus in on those particular instrument families.
So this year, our theme is built around Peter and the Wolf, a very famous children’s piece written by Sergei Prokofiev. And each year we pick a theme. Some years it might be nature, some years it might be the weather, some years we’ve compared a symphony orchestra to a football team. Just depends on what kind of fun thing we might concoct each time. So this year we have all animal rooted themes. So we’re starting with a piece by Henry Fillmore that’s arranged for woodwind quartet called The Circus Bee, and then we will have a brass trio playing two movements by a young female composer named Gina Gilly, and that has some Dixieland jazz, and it also has an alligator chasing its prey, and you can hear it snap at the end and decide whether or not it catches its prey. And then our principal string players will play in a quintet with an arrangement of the theme song from the video game Animal Crossing, and that’s been arranged by our music director, Benjamin Rous. Then we’ll follow with a percussion feature of a work by Rimsky-Korsakov, Flight of the Bumblebee, and the featured soloist is our principal percussionist and timpanist, but she’ll be playing the marimba for that. And then we’ll wrap up and put the whole orchestra together on the Peter and the Wolf work, so they get to meet all the smaller families and then hear us in action together.
Ben Larsen:
Now for those of us who aren’t as familiar. Could you tell us more about what the symphony does throughout the year?
Elizabeth Roberts:
Sure. So it’s a really wonderful side by side experience. So we present pairs of Masterworks Concerts five times a year, and we also have our family holiday concerts and our annual youth concerts. And the orchestra is comprised of professional faculty members sitting principal in each section a leader, and then the rest of the group is made of students and community members. And so for the students, it’s a class that they take once a week. And then, of course, during concert weeks, there’s some extra rehearsals on the performances. And for the community members. It’s a chance to maybe keep doing something that they enjoy and want to continue to be involved with, but maybe did not choose as a profession. Our students vary from music majors to any major at UVA, so we’re open to everybody. It’s a very high quality ensemble for what we are. So a lot of fun to present the concerts, and these youth concerts are some of our favorites every year, because the kids in the audience are clearly so enthralled.
Ben Larsen:
Those school field trips will be taking place this Thursday, and you can learn more about the symphony cvillesymphony.org. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu.
