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Bay Area Youth Orchestra Festival 2011
SFCV sent videographer Vincent Tremblay to capture all the action at BAYOF. Watch clips from the orchestras and backstage interviews with some of the performers!
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Symphonic Youth
March 9, 2010
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From the very first note of the first Bay Area Youth Orchestra Festival (BAYOF Hope) two years ago, Wendy Howe knew she’d helped inaugurate what would become a treasured tradition.
The California Youth Symphony led off the afternoon at Davies Symphony Hall with Dvořák’s Carnival Overture. “And a vibration went through all of the other orchestras that were seated in the audience, watching,” Howe recalled. “They all sat up straighter and paid attention. It was an amazing shift in focus. And from that moment on, the concert was inspirational, for the kids as well as the rest of the audience. Each group gained respect for every other group.”
This past weekend, five of the six ensembles which shared that experience returned to Davies for the second of the biennial events. Besides the California Youth Symphony, they were the Oakland Youth Orchestra, the Peninsula Youth Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra of Berkeley, of which Howe is executive director. Just as in 2009, each orchestra designated a beneficiary organization serving disadvantaged youth, to share the proceeds of the event; hence the “Hope.”
New to the festival this year was the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra, whose concertmaster, 17-year-old violinist Kirsten Skabelund, spoke with SFCV in the preceding week about her anticipation of her own special moment in “a gorgeous place with beautiful acoustics,” presenting another Dvořak work, the first movement of the Symphony No. 8. “At the beginning, when we come in, it’s like the morning, we’re just beginning something,” she said. “And it’s exciting, like everything’s waking up.”
Preceding the excitement of the concert were opportunities for the kids to watch each other’s rehearsals and bond over a catered lunch and a backstage cookie social. Violinist Celia Cheung, back for her second BAYOF Hope, recalled seeing some familiar faces among the participants in 2009. “Some of them I knew from previous orchestras, a lot of us came through the Berkeley Youth Orchestra,” said Cheung, who’s now concertmaster with the OYO. “So there was a lot of catching up about, how’s school, what’s different about each orchestra, how the conductors are different. And from the string players’ point of view, sometimes we would talk about how nice the brass sections sounded, ‘cause that’s really important.”
Thunderous Finale From Festival Orchestra
Out of the 575 musicians aged 12 to 21, Cheung was also one of the few selected from this year's six ensembles for the all-star Festival Orchestra, which performs an encore under the direction of YPSO conductor David Ramadanoff. “For a lot of young musicians, we’re used to just one style of conducting, and we don’t really realize the different ways conductors can communicate,” remarked cellist Austin Wang, who’s been working with the CYS under Leo Eylar. As a participant in the Festival Orchestra, he was looking forward to learning Ramadanoff’s “body language”, as well to the “sense of urgency” involved in preparing the Respighi with only two rehearsals.
“The energy that the kids bring to playing this music is incredible, because they love it,” remarked Ramadanoff. “And they’ve learned how to focus, and how to work together.” As the de facto music director of the festival, Ramadanoff determined the order of the program, which aside from the Dvořák included selections, each about ten minutes in length, by Richard Strauss (“Dance of the Seven Veils,” from Salome), Arturo Márquez (Danzon No. 2), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Sadko, Symphonic Picture), Alberto Ginastera (Estancia Suite), and Jean Sibelius (Symphony No. 1, fourth movement). Ramadanoff and the composite Festival Orchestra closed out the concert in spectacular, brass-driven style with the final two movements of Respighi's Pines of Rome, bringing the audience to its feet.
Although she was encouraged by arts patron Alba Witkin, Wendy Howe confesses to her own “selfish” motive in founding the BAYOF Hope, as a meeting place not only for the student musicians but also managers, like herself, and conductors of youth orchestras, who don’t get much chance to compare notes and pick up tips. “It was having everybody collaborate instead of feeling competitive,” noted Howe, “because a lot of us draw from the same pool of kids. And I felt like we’re all in this together, it’s all the same mission, so I just wanted to create more of that feeling. And Jefferson Packer, who was the manager for the SFSYO, just said, why don’t we do this at Davies, because it’s big enough to actually accommodate everybody.
“Then everybody wanted David [Ramadanoff] to be the conductor, because he’s had the most experience, and he’s very respected by his colleagues. I think he has the least ego of any conductor I’ve ever known. He treats his youth orchestras exactly the same way he treats his professional groups, he talks to the kids exactly the same way he talks to the pros. And he respects all of the musicians equally; it doesn’t matter if they’re last chair in the second violins, or principal oboe. He expects a certain level from the students, and they deliver that, and it’s partly because they want to meet his expectations.”
Experience Tells: Ramadanoff On Making an Orchestra Gel
For the Festival Orchestra and his own YPSO, Ramadanoff chooses the repertoire carefully. “It has be good music,” he said, “and what I mean by that is, it has to be music that has interesting things for them to play. I’m trying to keep everyone in the orchestra busy, by choosing works that involve as many of the instruments as possible. … I also try to find things that are challenging to them, just barely within their reach, for which they have to stretch. And things that will teach the brass as a section, the winds as a section, and the winds-and-brass as a section, to learn to listen to each other and to sound together. There’s a lot of stuff where they have to listen to the kind of sonorities that they’re making, as well as having interesting individual lines to play.”
Celia Cheung noted how much easier it had been to hear those sonorities at Davies, the first time she sat on stage in 2009. “You look up and you see a wonderful bunch of acoustic things hanging from the ceiling, to bounce the sound off,” she testified. “You don’t scare yourself with too many echos, either. And the doors are really cool, you can exit and no one will notice that you left.” She was proud about the OYO’s showcasing of Márquez’s tricky Danzon No. 2, whose “tempo changes and strange meter” they’d mastered with a little help from artistic director Michael Morgan. “It shows off the musical side of OYO, and our wind and brass.”
The SFSYO presented Ginastera’s Estancia Suite. “If you watch older ensembles perform it, like the Vienna Philharmonic, they have such a refined way of playing,” noted SFSYO concertmaster Alexi Kinney. “What we try to do, as a youth ensemble, is bring some fun to it, and excitement. It’s dancelike, and you might see us stand up and twirl around.” (At the Sunday concert, they literally stomped through the “Malambo” movement, and the violins stood to deliver the piece's final kick.)
For kids who, unlike the SFSYO, are unused to the majesty of the Davies stage and its capacious auditorium, the BAYOF Hope represents a too-rare peak experience in their young musical lives. “I don’t think the full impact hits us until we actually get to the hall,” says Austin Wang. “It’s an event everyone will look back on and relish, and it will always be, ‘Wow, I was there!’.”