More Top Picks Best Ecg Monitors Under 500 Dollars
player ready...Music, so the saying goes, is a universal language.
More than 100 young musicians who played this summer with the National Youth Orchestra experienced a new level of fluency that took them this July from New York’s Carnegie Hall to China.
The young performers, including Wilmette tuba player Ethan Clemmitt and others from Chicago’s North Shore, experienced the thrill of traveling to China, meeting their Chinese counterparts and performing in multiple venues under a world-class conductor.
They also got the opportunity to play in a non-competitive but high level atmosphere with colleagues, many of whom became close friends, area performers said.
“I had high expectations going in,” Clemmitt said. “But this is by far the best musical group I’ve ever played with.
“I got an even better sense of how to play with an ensemble – it’s not just all about you anymore, when everyone’s so good. And they’re really great people, too.”
The orchestra, also known as the NYO, is only 3 years old, but the Carnegie Hall Weill Music Institute program, started in 2013 with the stated mission of providing a unique experience for high-caliber 16- to 19-year-old musicians, has garnered praise nationally and internationally.
Each year it combines two weeks of intensive training under nationally known professional orchestra players and instructors with a Carnegie Hall concert, followed by a multi-city tour. That tour covered Russia in 2013, the U.S. last year, and the seven-city Chinese trip this summer, under the direction of Charles Dutoit, conductor laureate of The Philadelphia Orchestra and artistic director of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Clemmitt, 19, was introduced to tuba as a fifth-grade Highcrest Middle School student. He first liked the instrument because of the buzzing feel of the mouthpiece when he blew into it – like a horse whinnying, he said Aug. 5 – but quickly grew to like its sonorous timbre: “It’s like a bass, but its sound is richer, like a woodwind,” he said.
He also learned to love tuba-friendly composers like Mahler, Prokofiev and Bruckner.
His parents, both music instructors, encouraged him, Clemmitt said. Like other NYO members, he participated in the Fort Sheridan-based Midwest Young Artists program and the Chicago Youth Symphony, he said. He continued to play after graduating from New Trier High School and heading to the University of Illinois to study engineering, he said.
Clemmitt first auditioned for the NYO’s 2014 season and was named an alternate, which encouraged him to try again for 2015, he said. He learned he made the cut this year in the middle of a differential equations class, he said.
Before the July 10 start of the tour, Clemmitt and the 118 other NYO members experienced a rigorous two weeks of rehearsal – three to seven hours a day – at Purchase College in New York’s Westchester County, under the baton of James Ross, director of orchestral activities at the University of Maryland.
Clemmitt also worked with Dennis Nulty, principal tuba for the Detroit Symphony, who in atelephone interview called Clemmitt “incredibly bright and motivated. He asks the right questions.”
Clemmitt wasn’t the only Illinois NYO member this year. Buffalo Grove clarinetist Torin Bakke, 18, now a senior at Stevenson High School, and French horn player Nivanthi Karunaratne of Gurnee, now 19 and studying science and music at Princeton University, returned for their second year with the orchestra.
Bakke, who began playing clarinet as an elementary student when his hands were too small to play bassoon, said, “The biggest thing I love about it is the community. It’s so welcoming, and they’re great musicians, so it’s the best of both worlds.”
Stephen Williamson, the principal clarinetist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was one of Bakke’s instructors. Williamson said that the experience was as rewarding for teachers as learning was for students – each of whom, he said, “was rooting for each other.”
“They were asking questions that university students in a conservatory would be asking, and they were like giant sponges who wanted to soak up knowledge,” he said. “They were extraordinary, and that’s what was exciting for us.”
Karunaratne, who said she has played the horn since fourth grade, said she never expected to join the NYO, but loved her two years with the orchestra.
“It’s a really unique group of people with an incredibly diverse range of interests, but who also have miles of things in common. So we all bond very quickly. When you have a group who reach that level of playing, we all kind of recognize our kindred spirits,” she said.
Clemmitt, Karunaratne, Bakke and the rest of the 118-player orchestra met and briefly rehearsed with Dutoit before flying to Beijing, the first stop on the tour, a journey that required a rented cargo ban to get two tubas to the airport, Clemmitt and his mother, Elizabeth, noted.
By the end of the final concert, July 26 in Hong Kong, all three North Shore musicians were tired, jet-lagged and certain, each said this month, that they had undergone an experience they’d remember for the rest of their lives.
Ross put it a bit more poetically when he talked about the NYO experience.
More Top Picks Best Fidget Toys For Adults
“These players don’t need to compete with each other. They figure out how to be a team and everyone gets humble,” he said. “There’s a magical component, a love in this that no one could have predicted. There’s a generosity of spirit – these young people take up a mantle of being musical ambassadors to the world.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy
Chords that bind
What: National Youth Orchestra
Founded through: Carnegie Hall
Toured: China