Three youth musicians, including two local high school students, won the chance to play as part of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra with their performances Sunday at the orchestra’s 25th annual Young Artists Competition.
More than 60 student musicians 18 and younger from Washington and Oregon submitted recordings to the contest judges — in the piano, string and brass or wind categories — with the top three performers in each section going on to perform at the live final round later this year at Trinity Lutheran Church.
All nine receive some scholarship money, and the gold-medal winners win the right to perform alongside the orchestra.
In the winds category, flutist Julin Cheung, 11, of Shoreline won with his performance from Antonio Vivaldi’s “La Notte,” or Flute Concerto No. 2.
Julin, who was the youngest woodwind player ever for the Seattle Youth Symphony, most recently won in the prestigious Severino Gazzelloni Flute Competition in Italy, and has been invited to play for Irish virtuoso flute player James Galway and Philadelphia Orchestra principal flutist Jeffrey Khaner at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
His pick of music, he said, was tough, making it more enticing to perform.
Mountain View High School student Jenna Tu, 16, won gold in the piano category with her rendition of the second movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus 18.
Jenna’s most recent honors include multiple first-prize performances, and she’s performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
Union High School’s Aaron Greene, 17, won in the strings section, playing French composer Maurice Ravel’s “Tzigane.”
The technical, rhapsodic composition had Aaron picking at his violin and seemingly smacking it with the bow.
It’s an intense and freeing piece to play, he said.
“I also like it because you can kind of play your heart out and people can’t really tell if you play anything wrong, that much, so you can focus more on expressing instead of playing it perfectly,” he added, laughing.
The three will have the chance to join the orchestra at their April 13 and 14 concerts, where the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra will perform Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” a musical adaptation of the “One Thousand and One Nights,” also called “Arabian Nights.”
