At seventeen years old, Sophie Bell has been playing the violin since the second grade. She is currently the concertmaster of the CSUN (California Southern University Northridge) Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and also previously served as concertmaster for SCSBOA (Southern California School Band and Orchestra Association). After her three years in SCSBOA, she began to participate in the All State program as well. As a longtime member of Junior Chamber Music, she finds a great interest in chamber music. After participating in trios, quartets, and duets, she has developed a wide musical range. 

Sophie made her first concerto debut at age fourteen, performing Mozart’s Fifth Concerto for AVSOMC (Antelope Valley Symphony Orchestra and Master Chorale). Since then, she has also performed as soloist for PSYCO (Pasadena Summer Youth Chamber Orchestra) with the Bruch Concerto Third Movement. She has won first place in both the Gail Newby Concerto Competition and Bach Competition, second place in ASTA LA, and is a state finalist in the VOCE Competition. Recently, she won first place in the CSUN Youth Philharmonic Competition and third place in the Edith Knox Competition. Currently, she is studying under Linda Rose. In addition to music, Sophie enjoys playing with the family chickens and an endless amount of reading.

Ryan Yang (13) is a 7th grader at Harvard-Westlake School. He started playing the cello at the age of 7 and currently studies with Dr. Benjamin Lash at Colburn School. For the past years, he has participated and won honors in numerous competitions. His first accomplishment was winning first place at the Korea Times Music Competition in 2018. Ryan was awarded the First Prize in the Los Angeles Violoncello Society Scholarship Audition and in the Southern California Junior Bach Festival’s Complete Works Audition. In March 2022, he won the First Prize at the Golden Classical Music Award and had the honor of performing at Carnegie Hall. In July 2022, Ryan won First Place in both Open Baroque and Open Solo categories at Southwestern Youth Music Festival. Ryan is an active member of Junior Chamber Music and his 2021-2022 ensemble received first place in the Junior Chamber Music Competition, first place in the MTAC VOCE Regional Competition, and second place at the MTAC VOCE State Finals. His 2022 summer musical highlights include performing the world premiere of “Dhire-Dhire,” by composer Reena Esmail at the MTAC State Convention. Most recently, he won first place in his division at the JCM-CAPMT Young Musicians Concerto Competition and first prize in the 2023 CalASTA Los Angeles Bowed Strings Competition.

Helaine Zhao was born and raised in Irvine, California. She started piano lessons at age 5, and currently studies with Mr. Rufus Choi at Salit Conservatory of Music.

Helaine has participated in numerous international, national, and regional performances and competitions. Most recently, she was selected into the MTAC Young Artist Guild, won 1st Prize CAPMT State Concerto and Contemporary Competition with Andrys Basten Award, 2nd Prize at the LA Liszt International Piano Competition and Best Mephisto Waltz Performance, 3rd Prize at the Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition, Best Contemporary Piece and Audience Choice Award at the Claudette Sorel Piano Competition. Helaine was named 2022 National YoungArts Merit Winner, 3-time State Winner at MTAC Piano Concerto and Solo Competition. 

In addition, Helaine performed in various concert halls including Winifred Concert Hall, Segerstrom Concert Hall, Thayer Hall at Colburn School, and Walt Disney Concert Hall. She has also performed twice at Carnegie Hall, New York. She made her orchestral debut at the age of 10 and was also a featured piano soloist with the SYMF Orchestra, OCSA Symphony Orchestra, PA Foundation Orchestra, LA Youth Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, and the Redlands Bowl Symphony Orchestra.

Helaine enjoys serving others and has consistently performed at senior centers with Music Students’ Service League since 2012. Outside of music, Helaine enjoys reading books, writing, baking, hiking with her family, and playing with her pet birds.

Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto was commissioned by the great Austro-Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. Between 1879 and 1882, Dvořák and Joachim collaborated on the score.  In November of 1882, Joachim performed the work for Dvořák at a private rehearsal, leading to final revisions by the composer. Joachim never played the Dvořák Violin Concerto at a public concert. The young Czech violinist František Ondříček was the soloist in the October 14, 1883 world premiere, at the National Theater in Prague.

Dvořák once commented: “I myself have gone to the simple, half-forgotten tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in my most serious works. Only in this way can a musician express the true sentiment of his people.” The Violin Concerto is a marvelous example of the great Czech composer incorporating the spirit of his homeland into a virtuoso concert work that has charmed violinists and audiences around the world.

The Concerto is in three movements. The first (Allegro, ma non troppo) opens with a bold orchestral fanfare, representing the first half of the movement’s central theme.  The soloist enters with the theme’s graceful second portion. Throughout the movement, this theme alternates with various episodes.  

Notes by Ken Meltzer

Sarasate was a violin prodigy from Spain, and so tremendously gifted that he won the patronage of none other than his own Queen, Isabella II.  That royal backing eventually allowed him to study in Paris, which his where is career and fame truly began.  Sarasate began commissioning works from the great composers of his time, including Eduard Lalo, Max Bruch, Henri Wieniawski, and Camille Saint-Saëns.  Saint-Saëns recalls the young Sarasate requesting his services as “a boy with such confidence and barely the outline of a mustache on his lip.”  But Sarasate also composed works for himself, such as Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs), unabashedly to show off his virtuosic prowess – encores, if you will, and they are always dazzling.

The Romani people, otherwise known as Gypsies, are one of Europe’s largest minorities, as they were in Sarasate’s times. Their culture greatly reveres music and their stunning prowess on the fiddle is legendary.  Their collective history of persecution, as well as their vigorous embrace of life, is told in their music – of tragedy alongside fiery and rollicking dances.  Such is the tenor of Sarasate’s most famous composition, Zigeunerweisen, written in 1878 to show off his own legendary violin skills.

Gypsy music was prominent in Spain during Sarasate’s life – in fact, the music and dance of flamenco is essentially Gypsy music.  But for Zigeunerweisen, Sarasate was charmed by Western Europe’s current love affair with the Gypsy music from Hungary, thanks both to Brahms and Liszt.  But the underlying tunes are really simply vehicles for virtuosic splendor.  Sarasate unleashed a[…] fire spiccato (the bow bouncing on the strings), harmonics and artificial harmonics (where a string is pressed into the fret, then […] extremely high pitches), wild and fanciful […] and much more.  Zigeunerweisen is a powerhouse of passion and technique, always an extremely challenging piece to play and a tremendous delight to hear.

Notes by Max Derrickson

When Saint-Saëns wrote his first Cello Concerto in 1872, he was still a controversial name in conservative French musical circles, known as a modernist young radical and “prophet of Wagner.” He was nonetheless an established figure and had occupied this position for some time since he had made waves early as a child prodigy. Berlioz, his senior by more than 30 years and his ally in the artistic wars, once said that Saint-Saëns “knows everything, but lacks inexperience.” Saint-Saëns would live long enough to outlive his antagonists and himself become known in his later years as a reactionary in Parisian musical circles, which by then were witnessing Stravinsky’s ballets.

The Cello Concerto in A minor is an intriguing departure from the standard concerto form. It begins as a normal-enough sonata-allegro first movement; having the cello enter immediately was an unusual touch. In a more radical change, the movement simply slows to a halt during the development section and is then interrupted by what amounts to a separate movement, marked Allegretto con moto and in three-four time. It resembles a minuet enough that it might as well be one, and its sound, with strings muted and largely eschewing the bass register, has a music-box charm that contrasts markedly with the energetic Allegro, which returns and finishes as if nothing had happened. Saint-Saëns thus achieves a single movement that has the effect of the traditional fast-slow-fast three-movement concerto.

The Concerto was well-received from the start, particularly in France, where it was perceived as being free from Saint-Saëns’ unfortunate modernist tendencies. One Paris critic suggested that more works in the same vein would restore the prestige he had lost with “his all-too-obvious divergence from classicism.”

Notes by Howard Posner

With this sparkling concerto, the 24-year-old Beethoven made his debut as a pianist and composer before the Viennese public on March 29, 1795. According to the Wiener Zeitung, there was “unanimous applause,” and the young musician had the honor of performing the concerto later that same year with the esteemed Haydn conducting.

Over the next several years, he continued to play the work as a showpiece but revised it several times.  On one memorable occasion, when Beethoven decided to write an entirely new third movement – the one that he eventually published – his friend Wegeler reported that “not until the afternoon of the second day before the concert did he write the rondo, and then while suffering from a pretty severe colic which frequently afflicted him… In the anteroom sat four copyists to whom he handed sheet after sheet as soon as it was finished.” Then at the first rehearsal, Beethoven discovered that his piano was tuned a half step lower than the wind instruments, a crisis that required him to transpose his solo part up a half step for that rehearsal.

Although it is called Concerto No. 2, this is the earliest of Beethoven’s five piano concertos.  It was written in Bonn before he moved to Vienna, but, by the time it was published in 1801, his publisher had already issued his next concerto and had called it his Concerto No. 1. This B♭concerto from his earlier years thus became No. 2 and was given a later opus number. By then, Beethoven’s style was starting to evolve from the Mozartian character of this concerto toward something quite new.  His revisions, including writing a new third movement, could bring the work only so far toward his current style and his current level of experience. Thus he told his publisher, “I don’t consider it one of my best works” and offered it to him for half the price of his first symphony.

As a great improviser, Beethoven would have made up his first-movement cadenza on the spot. The written-out cadenza that has come down to us is one that Beethoven created much later (1809). With it, he briefly inserts his more advanced style of piano writing into this early concerto.

Notes by Martin Pearlman

On Christmas Eve of 1874, Tchaikovsky took the completed score of his First Piano Concerto to the piano virtuoso Nicholas Rubinstein, hoping that the player would premiere the work and, through his advocacy, find a place for it in the repertoire. Rubinstein had played other works by Tchaikovsky and, until this point, had been one of the composer’s strongest supporters. No wonder that Tchaikovsky was stunned when the pianist gave the new Concerto a reception that made the Siberian tundra seem warm and welcoming. The composer described the incident in a letter to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, written in January 1878.

“I played the first movement. Never a word, never a single remark. Do you know the awkward and ridiculous sensation of putting before a friend a meal which you have cooked yourself, which he eats – and then holds his tongue? Oh, for a single word, for friendly abuse, for anything to break the silence! For God’s sake say something! But Rubinstein never opened his lips.”

The run-through continued, but the composer still got no reaction from the stone-faced Rubinstein. The master pianist held his tongue until Tchaikovsky had played through the entire Concerto, at which point Rubinstein could no longer contain his disgust.

“‘Well?’ I asked, and rose from the piano. Then a torrent broke from Rubinstein’s lips, gentle at first, gathering volume as it proceeded, and finally bursting into the fury of a Jupiter. My Concerto was worthless, absolutely unplayable; the passages so broken, so disconnected, so unskillfully written, that they could not even be improved; the work itself was bad, trivial, common; here and there I had stolen from other people; only one or two pages were worth anything; all the rest had better be destroyed. I left the room without a word. Presently Rubinstein came to me and, seeing how upset I was, repeated that my Concerto was impossible but said if I would suit it to his requirements he would bring it out at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I replied.”

Luckily, Tchaikovsky didn’t. He immediately banished the idea of dedicating the Concerto to Rubinstein, eventually settling on the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow for the honor. Bülow premiered the work in Boston on October 13, 1875, where it was a triumphant success, marking the beginning of a string of American performances that increased Tchaikovsky’s popularity here.

The opening Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso is certainly that – majestic and measured. After an introductory flourish dominated by the brass, a series of inevitable chords from the piano ride a passionate melody in the orchestra. Before this first theme has completely run out of steam, snatches of the second steal in, foreshadowing its imminent appearance in a uniquely structured double exposition. The stormy development builds to two shattering climaxes, first for the piano, punctuated by the orchestra, and then for the orchestra, with a searing figure for the strings taken up by the piano with thundering bravura. The movement closes with great assurance and authority, with dazzling passagework for the soloist giving melodic shape to a series of resolute chords played by the orchestra.

Notes by John Mangum