UCLA Philharmonia All-Star Concert to showcase solo performances
UCLA PHILHARMONIA ALL-STAR CONCERT
Thursday, 8 p.m.
Schoenberg Hall, $5
By Niran Somasundaram
Jan. 18, 2011 10:42 p.m.
The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music currently has 483 students pursuing a degree of some sort. Of those 483, eight have been chosen to perform in the UCLA Philharmonia All-Star Concert on Thursday at 8 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall.
What differentiates the All-Star concert from other UCLA Philharmonia productions is the competition for solo pieces. The process involved two nights of competitive auditions open to any student in the UCLA music department, graduate or undergraduate, who prepared a piece under 20 minutes.
One of the night’s soloists is first-year doctoral student and alto saxophonist Ryan Weston, who will be performing Pierre Max Dubois’ “Saxophone Concerto.”
Weston began playing the saxophone in fifth grade after being influenced by his siblings who were also musically active.
“I wasn’t super serious about the instrument until my first year of high school,” Weston said. “Once I hit my freshman year, something changed.”
Weston credited his instructor, Keith Jacobson, with changing the way that he viewed the saxophone.
“I didn’t understand what the saxophone could do until I heard my teacher play. Once I heard him, I was hooked,” Weston said. “That was when I began viewing music as a career.”
After participating in various all-star bands and jazz combos in high school, Weston auditioned for a spot in the UCLA music program. He received both his undergraduate and masters degrees from the Herb Alpert School of Music and has been active in campus music groups.
“Music allows me to express myself in ways that I cannot do in words,” Weston said.
Ariel Campos is a first-year graduate student studying percussion performance and will be showcasing his talent on the extended range marimba for the performance.
Campos began studying percussion while in high school and soon transitioned to touring nationally with different groups.
“Eventually, I ended up in London in a show called Blast! in the fall of 1999,” Campos said. “It’s a show like STOMP or the Blue Man Group, where they took American Drum and Bugle Corps and put it on stage.”
After touring for a year, Campos finished his undergraduate degree at Cal State Northridge and enrolled at UCLA.
Campos will be performing a piece written for an international marimba competition by Emmanuel Sejourne.
“It’s a fairly new piece, and I was really lucky to find it,” Campos said. “The piece has a very physical and visual element, but is also musically solid and listener friendly.”
Another soloist, first-year graduate music performance student Sara Marsh, will be playing the clarinet. The audition was Marsh’s first experience with a formal concerto competition, and she said she went in to the process hoping to gain some experience.
“Once I found out I got it, I called my parents, my boyfriend, everyone,” Marsh said.
“I turned on the radio and just danced around in my room because I was so excited. It was kind of a shock that I won.”
Marsh began playing the clarinet in the sixth grade and had many of her early performances at her church.
“Church is really the perfect place to learn to deal with nerves,” Marsh said. “Even when I thought I didn’t perform well, I still got positive reinforcement.”
Marsh will be performing Claude DeBussy’s “Premiere Rhapsodie,” written for clarinet and piano.
“Usually concertos are huge three movement pieces of work, but this one is only one movement,” Marsh said. “It starts off dreamy and slow, but it gets pretty exciting right before the end. It’s a very pretty piece.”
Violinist Luke Santonastaso is a third-year music performance student. He began playing the violin at the age of 5 and gradually grew more serious and began to play in orchestras both inside and outside of school.
Santonastaso will be performing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Violin Concerto,” on UCLA’s more than 270-year-old Stradivarius violin nicknamed “Duke of Alcantara.”
“The concerto is one of the main solo works for violin,” Santonastaso said. “It’s completely lush and very “˜heart on your sleeve’ emotional. Tchaikovsky wrote the best melodies.”
Santonastaso, whose father has a degree in physics, said he shares his father’s passion for physics and mathematics, but he views music as something deeper.
“It’s kind of like skipping a stone on a pond, everything kind of happens on the surface, but it sinks at the end,” Santonastaso said. “For me, music is on a different, deeper level of expression and learning. It helps everything else.”
