Three string musicians and a vocalist, winners of the Concerto Competition gathered in Kresge Auditorium for a riveting display of DePauw’s top musical talent on Sunday.
Every year, the School of Music hosts a competition open to any DePauw student. According to the program brochure, this year they had “40 entrants performing in the categories of string instruments, voice, woodwinds, and percussion.” In two rounds, the top scoring musicians are selected to be featured in a concert of the DePauw Symphony Orchestra.
This year, the concert featured Peter Kim, a senior cellist; David Young, a first-year vocalist; Amelia Smerz, a first-year cellist; and Jackson Bailey, a junior violinist. Music students don’t receive many opportunities to perform as soloists with an orchestra, so the concerto is an opportunity to gain that experience.
Kim appreciated the chance to show his parents that all of his hard work had paid off for the second year in a row–he won the competition last year as well.
“Because I won, my parents got to see me play on a big stage with an orchestra and that’s what was most rewarding about it,” Kim said. “So when I was playing I imagined my parents sitting in the audience and listening to me play, and I think that gave me a lot of motivation to practice and it gave me greater joy.”
The Dvořák piece that Kim selected added to his positive experience. “The piece is a piece that I’ve wanted to play all my life… if there’s a piece a cellist wants, it’s that piece for the cello,” Kim said.
Like the other students, he emphasized how grateful he was to play with the orchestra supporting him. “To be able to play [the piece] with an orchestra was such an honor and such a blessing for me… I think it’ll bode well for the future that I’ve played it now,” Kim said.
Young said he was “shocked but definitely excited” upon hearing that he had won. Especially as a first-year student, he did not expect to be picked over so many talented vocalists. “I was definitely just shocked that, you know, these other people have been here for years and their voices are so much more developed than mine,” Young said.
It was Young’s first time performing in front of such a large audience with the orchestra backing him. “It was a completely new experience, being on a really big stage in a big hall. I’ve done musicals since I was eight, but it was never a hall that big and it was never a full orchestra,” Young said. “So that was awesome.”
Smerz enjoyed the unfamiliar opportunity of playing with an orchestra. She was calmed by her observation that “the soloist themself is not the important part; it’s the music,” Smerz said. “I think connecting with that really, not just in an abstract way but in a real way on stage, helped the music to move through me more easily.”
Though Smerz admitted that she had some nerves, she was calmed by the orchestra behind her. “I wasn’t worried about being impressive or hitting all the notes because it wasn’t about that,” Smerz said. “It was a really nice transcendent experience.”
Bailey said that in the past, he got bad stage fright, but during the concert, he was comfortable. He relaxed and took the chance to showcase his hard work. “I was just like ‘I’m just gonna share what I have with you,’” Bailey said.
Like the other performers, Bailey enjoyed showing off the long hours that he spends practicing. “I felt really good,” Bailey said, “It was kind of a validation for all of the hard work that I’ve been putting in.”
