October 23, 2008
Students bring their best 15 minutes to the annual Concerto Competition
You take the stage, surrounded by the orchestra. The conductor looks at you and you nod to say you’re ready. Then the music begins and you get set for your solo.
It’s a moment every musician dreams of, and for a few School of Music students each year, it comes true in the Concerto Competition.
“The competition is a remarkable opportunity for the students to realize a dream of performing in front of a large live audience with a well trained orchestra,” said David Kappy, the music professor who has coordinated the competition for a number of years.
The preliminary round was this week and involved 25 students. The finals, which are on Monday evening, Oct. 27, in Meany Hall, will feature nine students competing for three to four spots in a concert with the UW Symphony Jan. 29. The finals are open to the public.
Students begin competing within three divisions of the School of Music. Teachers in piano, strings and orchestral instruments send their best students to the preliminary round, which is judged by all of the teachers in their respective divisions. (Voice students don’t participate because they get their chance to perform in the UW opera productions.) The teachers simply rank the performers, and send up to four in each division on to the finals, which are judged by outside musicians. Three to four of the contestants in the finals are chosen to perform in the symphony concert.
Each student prepares a 15-minute piece of music for the competition. Since concertos can run anywhere from 25 to 50 minutes, no one is playing a full concerto. Students consult with their teachers to choose, and if necessary, cut the music.
“The music has to be accessible,” Kappy said. “If you play anything really outrageous, it’s going to be hard to win with that.”
The competition is open to any student registered for applied music lessons — undergraduate or graduate — though of course graduate students have the advantage of experience. But Lauren Roth not only was an undergraduate when she won the competition three years ago, she was a freshman. She did have a head start, however — she’d been studying with Music Professor Ron Patterson before coming to the UW.
“I was working on Tzigane Rapsodie de Concert, by Ravel, and Ron said, hey, the competition is coming,” Roth recalled. “It happens so early in the quarter that you really have to decide early on — before school starts — that it’s something you want to do. So I told him sure, I’d participate, and we kept on working on it.”
Roth is used to starting things early. A violinist, she had her first lesson on her instrument at age 3. “My birthday is in January, and I wanted three things for Christmas, and a violin was one of them,” Roth said. “Instead I got a fake violin, and I was quite insulted. I gave my mother an ultimatum — to redeem herself from getting me this unplayable thing, I wanted a real violin and my first lesson on my 3rd birthday. She looked around and found a teacher and that’s what happened.”
Of course, Roth’s request didn’t come completely out of left field. All three of her siblings play musical instruments, so she was surrounded by music. And her interest was not a flash in the pan — she’s been making music ever since. The Concerto Competition was, however, her first competition.
“In general, I’m not somebody who gets really nervous to perform,” she said. “I started so young that it’s been just second nature to get in front of people. What is difficult, though, is that you only get one chance. You have just 15 minutes.”
The finals were particularly difficult for Roth, who said her segment came relatively late in the evening. With between nine and 12 students performing 15 minutes each, it makes for a long night.
Roth said she stayed in the back before her turn, going through a couple of tricky passages in her head or with her fingers in the air or on the violin. She didn’t watch other people perform so as not to break her focus. She was one of four students to be chosen that year; in addition to her, there were two pianists and an oboist.
During the competition, students rehearse and go through finals with a pianist playing the orchestra parts, which makes playing in the concert a particular thrill for the winners.
“It’s a real treat to play with an entire orchestra,” Roth said. “Having played [your music] so many times with the piano, being able to play it with the orchestra allows you to hear the oboe, who has that one little line you heard on the piano. And oh, all of a sudden the bassoon and the horns are playing this part that you hear in the left hand of the piano. Everything comes alive because it’s orchestrated as it was meant to be orchestrated.”
Kappy said winning the competition is a “great feather in the cap” for students. “If I had a master’s student who won the competition, that would go on his or her resume so fast it would make your head spin,” he said. “For anybody who wants a sample of their playing, it would be remarkably effective to have a live concerto performance.”
It isn’t such a bad experience for the teacher, either. “I’ve had students win in the past, and it feels great to see them up there on the stage,” Kappy said.
As for Roth, she hasn’t competed since her freshman year, but she’ll be at this year’s concert with the symphony because she’s the orchestra’s concertmaster.
The finals of the Concerto Competition begin at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, in Meany Hall. Tickets are $10 and are available at the door.
