“Claire Fox Hillard, music director and conductor of the Albany Symphony Orchestra, remembers well the first time he heard young violin virtuoso Hannah White play,” on a Sphinx Organization program at Carnegie Hall two years ago, writes Jim Hendricks in Tuesday’s (2/6) Albany Herald (Georgia). White, now 17 and a 2015 junior-division winner of the Sphinx Music Competition, “ ‘played a solo violin piece and it filled Carnegie Hall with sound,’ he said.… White will share the stage with the Albany Symphony Orchestra on Feb. 17 … to perform [Saint-Saëns’s] Violin Concerto No. 3…. ‘We’ve had a long association with Sphinx,’ Hillard said. ‘That’s an organization that promotes black and Latino string players, hopefully in a way that will get them to careers in major orchestras so there’s diverse representation in orchestras.’ ” Also on the Albany Symphony program, entitled “Classical Women,” will be Double Play by T.J. Coles, an Athens, Georgia native; the work was commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2016. “Coles has also been commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony. In 2014, she was composer in residence at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.”
Posted February 8, 2018
