Music performance in youth sets a rhythm for life

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 15, 2000

Sometimes I think that everything I know about life I learned in band and orchestra. When I was growing up in a suburb of Minneapolis, I spent many hours playing in school and community youth ensembles, mainly tenor sax but also some clarinet.

I still get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought of being picked out by the conductor to go over a rocky passage by myself during rehearsal while the rest of the orchestra listened.

I was not a good musician, and I hated to practice, but I was persistent, in part, I think, because I was so fascinated by the character types who make up an orchestra.

Trumpeters were egomaniacs who constantly started up jazz bands on the side to spotlight themselves. Trombonists were droll wits. Oboists worried a lot because it was so hard to stay in tune with a double reed. French horn players tended to be brains. Percussionists were a breed apart, often budding bohemians who dressed in black. Flutists -- inevitably girls in my day -- were unattainable goddesses.

Violinists and other string players were from another planet. As a wind player, I couldn't imagine how they made music.

And then there were the conductors. Talk about giants walking the earth. These despots of the podium loomed large in the life of a young musician in the Eisenhower 1950s and early '60s, before rock 'n' roll blew classical music away.

I can't tell you how impressive it seemed that one of our orchestra conductors was a violinist in a quartet called the Golden Strings that played in a pricey downtown restaurant. Mantovani was probably the group's model, I now realize, but they might as well have been the Guarneri String Quartet as far as I was concerned back then.

All these memories and more welled up last week when I went to the Pinellas Youth Symphony's final concert of the season at the Palladium Theater.

There was a good turnout, and the family members, friends and other people in attendance clearly enjoyed the program's mix of familiar standards and a few oddities. But I think everyone also picked up on the palpable sense of community that surrounded the concert.

The Pinellas Youth Symphony has an uphill battle, given the spotty music instruction being offered in the schools, but it has no need to apologize. Made up of musicians from all over the county who audition to become members, the Senior Winds and the Senior Orchestra played extremely well.

There were some gaps in the instrumentation, though, notably in the strings, an area of the music curriculum the Pinellas school system has cut with devastating effect. The 58-member orchestra had just one double bassist and two cellists.

The organization benefits greatly from the leadership of its artistic director, Thomas Wilkins, whose day job is resident conductor of the Florida Orchestra. I don't suppose a busy musician like Wilkins is able to spend a lot of time with the youth symphony, but when he does get in front of these youngsters, it's got to be a treat. He conducted the winds in a smartly paced march by Saint-Saens and the full orchestra in an excerpt from Grieg's Peer Gynt suite.

Other Florida Orchestra members are also involved with the youth symphony as coaches. Mark Sforzini, the orchestra's principal bassoon as well as an accomplished composer, is music director. Sforzini conducted the Senior Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's rousing Marche Slave -- if ever a piece of music was written for the young to play, this barn-burner is it -- and a couple of movements from Dvorak's Symphony No. 8.

The final concert wasn't all chestnuts. One of the interesting things about youth orchestras is how much new or neglected music a lot of them play. Unlike their professional adult colleagues, who have to perform the standard repertoire over and over to keep conservative symphonygoers happy, the youngsters are free to take a risk on relatively offbeat programming from time to time.

Exhibit A: Andre Dubas conducted the winds in an atmospheric piece I'd never heard, Norman Dello Joio's Scenes from the Louvre, written for a TV documentary.

During the concert, seniors in the orchestra who are going off to college were introduced, and an impressive lineup it was. Many aim to be music majors at top universities and conservatories. Two of them were featured in the concert.

Geoffrey Pilkington, the French horn principal who is going to Juilliard, conducted Morton Gould's American Salute, a set of variations on When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Concertmaster Joshua Ulrich, headed for the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, was the soloist in a movement from Lalo's lyrical violin vehicle, Symphonie Espagnole.

"You can tell by the schools they're going to that these are the leaders of tomorrow," Wilkins told the audience, speaking of all the seniors. "This is the real deal."

As I listened to the music, I couldn't help but reflect on how lucky the kids onstage were to be having the same sort of experience that has turned out to mean so much to me down through the years. Even more than sports, the other big extracurricular activity of my youth, playing in an orchestra gave me and my fellow musicians an appreciation of the value of working together on something larger than ourselves.

I have long forgotten what I did in the championship game that finished off my high school hockey career. But I still remember struggling to learn things like the sax part in Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije suite for a state orchestra competition. Just don't ask me to play it now.

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