The Gustavus Symphony Orchestra, Dr. Ruth Lin, conductor
With the 2013 commencement service only hours away, the Gustavus Symphony Orchestra and Conductor Ruth Lin will present the Department of Music’s season finale concert featuring the winners of the 2013 Gustavus Concerto/Aria Competition, Saturday, June 1 at 8:00 p.m. in Jussi Björling Recital Hall in the Schaefer Fine Arts Center. This year’s winners include three graduating seniors who won the honor of performing in the finale concert through an audition held in February. The soloists are Taylor Frey, violin; Elizabeth Hauer, euphonium and Ben Whalen, trombone. Tickets are not required for this performance and the concert is open to the public.
This Finale Concert for the 2012-13 season in the Department of Music concludes a calendar that has included over 140 concerts, recitals, guest artists, colloquium presentations and clinics, along with five major concert tours with performances in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota. Over the past four years, members of the Symphony Orchestra, the Choir, the Wind Orchestra, the Jazz Lab Band and the Choir of Christ Chapel, have presented concerts from New York to Florida, Texas to California to Washington and many of the states in between. They have traveled to, and performed concerts in Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy and South Africa. They have been invited to perform four times at the Minnesota Music Educator’s Annual conference and for the American Choral Directors’ Association. They have recorded and produced five solo ensemble recordings, participated in four Christmas in Christ Chapel celebrations and feted the King and Queen of Sweden and Nobel Laureates. No other department on the campus is called on more often when it is time to showcase the talents and demonstrate the marvelous abilities of the members of this student body. The department is pleased to play such a pivotal role in the life of Gustavus community on the hill and to present that excellence to the extended community around the country. It is an honor for the faculty to work with such talented and enthusiastic student musicians and to be such an integral part of the Gustavus liberal arts experience.
For the Finale Concert under the direction of Conductor Ruth Lin, the Symphony will open with a performance of Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes, S. 97. Senior religion and music performance double major Ben Whalen will then join the Symphony to perform the first movement of Launy Grondahl’s Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra. Whalen, a native of Germantown, Wisconsin, is currently a member of the Symphony, along with the Gustavus Wind Orchestra, the Christ Chapel Brass, the Choir of Christ Chapel and is a former member of the Gustavus Jazz Lab Band. He has studied with Scott Moore and Larry Zimmerman.
Elizabeth Hauer, a senior music education major, the Department of Music Presser Award winner and an NCAA post-graduate scholarship winner from Little Falls, Minnesota, is next on the program with the Symphony to present the Adam Frey arrangement for euphonium of Phillip Sparke’s Pantomime. While at Gustavus, Hauer has been a member of the Gustavus Wind Orchestra, the Tuba-Euphonium Ensemble, the Trombone Choir, the Gustavus Jazz Lab Band and the Lucia Singers. She has studied with Paul Budde.
To complete her third and final season as concertmaster of the Gustavus Symphony Orchestra, violinist Taylor Frey, Fairbanks, Alaska, will take center stage on Saturday to perform the Finale movement of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op. 35 by Peter Tchaikovsky. Frey, performing as soloist in the Concerto/Aria Competition Concert for the second time, is a senior biology major and music minor with plans to enter graduate school in epidemiology and public health in the fall of 2014. This is Taylor’s second performance of a major work with the orchestra in just eight weeks. On the Symphony’s spring concert tour through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan in April, she performed the challenging lead violin role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Op. 35. Taylor has studied with Peter McGuire, Justin Knoepfel and Brian Buckstead.
The 2013 Department of Music’s Finale Concert will begin at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 1 at 8:00 p.m. in Jussi Björling Recital Hall. This performance by the Gustavus Symphony Orchestra, directed by Dr. Ruth Lin and featuring the winners of this year’s Concerto/Aria Competition is free and open to the public.