Cover image: Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra performing in April 2017 (Photo: SYSO)
I’m always bowled over by the quality of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra’s playing and am inspired by its professionalism and the dedication given to classical music by the young performers. It is not easy, in these days of heavy homework and multiple demands on their busy lives, to find the time to practice so diligently and successfully as to earn a place in this excellent orchestra.
It is excellent, by any standards, including professional ones. Sunday’s well-attended final performance this season by the organization’s premier ensemble is a case in point (there are three other ensembles of increasing ability, plus the summer Marrowstone Music Festival in Bellingham which draws young performers and teachers from across the country, and the in-city program now just called SYSO Summer Music). There were only two works on the program, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 and his Violin Concerto for which the soloist was Adrian Steele, a recent concertmaster of the orchestra and winner of multiple awards, local, national, and international.
Since 1990, the orchestra has encouraged young players or would-be players in many schools across the city and its environs to take part in its Endangered Instruments Program, sending first class teachers into schools to help coach musicians in viola, double bass, bassoon, oboe, French horn, trombone, tuba, and now percussion, a program which has helped increase and diversify band members as well as school orchestras.
The results were clear in Sunday’s concert, which fielded six oboes, six bassoons, six French horns and 15 violas. How many professional orchestras wouldn’t give their eye teeth to have 15 violas? There were fewer flutes, clarinets, trumpets, and trombones present but plenty for the works played.
There was one drawback only to the plethora of woodwinds and horns in the violin concerto, in that Steele’s playing was sometimes overwhelmed by their sound. He is not a flashy player and he never played at flat-out loudness, which may have been why the winds particularly made his sound almost inaudible at times.
Steele performed the concerto by memory. His playing was remarkable for his ability to give firm, decisive emphasis on the many chords without every making a scratchy sound. These chords can at times seem dug out of the instrument, and he did none of that. Some of the part for the solo instrument is high on the highest string, and his warm resonant sound was perfectly in tune in that stratosphere, while the whole of his interpretation was musical, well phrased, seemingly technically at ease, and all of it an excellent overarching conception.
Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, who has been music director of SYSO since 2006, has a gift for working with and educating young musicians. His conducting is meticulous, so that every player—for whom every work played by SYSO is probably a premiere—knows his or her role exactly, and it shows in the synchronization between instrument groups, their dynamics, the absolute togetherness of the plucked sections and the overall quality of sound. Both violin concerto and symphony had all these. Solo opportunities, of which there are many, showed off different wind players to their advantage, particularly the two oboe principals, one for each work, with their extended and beautiful solos.
