When the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra flew to Europe this June, its ranks included some veteran travelers. But for a few members of the Pittsburgh-based ensemble, the journey to Vienna, Budapest, and Prague marked their first trip outside the United States—or even their first airplane flights.
In Vienna, some of the budding musicians visited Schönbrunn Palace, onetime home of Empress Maria Theresa. Lindsey Nova, the youth orchestra’s executive director, shepherded one group as they reached the Mirrors Room—the glittering chamber where the young Mozart once played for the court. The story goes that when the six-year-old prodigy finished, he jumped onto the empress’s lap and gave her a kiss. As the young Pittsburgh musicians listened to this tale on their audio guides, Nova stood near one of the first-time world travelers. “I’m watching her as she hears this story, and her eyes get bigger and bigger,” Nova says. “And then she looks down at the ground. I asked her about it later. She said, ‘I couldn’t believe I was standing where Mozart stood. I was there, and he was there!’ She was making a connection with a composer whose music she has studied for years and years. She was talking about it for the rest of the tour. She’ll never forget that.”
The Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra experienced a similar revelation in Prague. The group played Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 in the Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall—performing on the same stage where the composer once conducted. “That hall is magnificent. It’s stunning,” Nova says. “You couldn’t have faked the looks on our musicians’ faces when they walked in. It was just awe. And they have never sounded like they did in Dvořák Hall.”
While the trip was that orchestra’s first overseas tour, some ensembles have been globe-trotting for decades. This summer, a large number of youth orchestras hit the road. In addition to hoping to inspire their young musicians with the a-ha moments that touched the Three Rivers group, motivations for tours include artistic enrichment, improvement from playing a lot of music in a concentrated period, cultivating a sense of musical ensemble, cultural diplomacy—and sampling food you won’t find at Safeway. Like their adult counterparts, tours for today’s youth orchestras go beyond the former play-and-move-on format. Young musicians meet their foreign peers, do side-by-side rehearsals or performances with local ensembles, interact with residents in community engagement events, and get coached by leading professional musicians.
So the leaders of youth orchestras willingly take on the challenges of planning itineraries, preparing the young musicians and raising money. “I started touring with youth orchestras in 1995, and it has gotten more difficult and much more expensive as time goes on,” says Elisabeth Christensen, managing director of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. Even instruments can cause a logistical headache. “When I started, we took everything—all the harps, all the timpani, all the basses,” she says. “Today, the airlines just won’t take such large and heavy items. But the experiences are life-changing for the kids. So we keep pressing forward and doing it.”
Motivations for tours include cultural enrichment, improvement from playing a lot of music in a concentrated period, building a sense of musical ensemble—and sampling food you won’t find at Safeway.
Experience and Excitement
An offshoot of the Boston Philharmonic, the youth orchestra has traveled nearly every year since its founding in 2012. June’s European tour in part commemorated the centennial of World War I’s end: The program included The Banks of Green Willow by Britain’s George Butterworth, one of the millions killed on the battlefield. The tour also was a “musical pilgrimage” helping the young musicians bond with the work and life of composer Gustav Mahler, Christensen says. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony capped off all the concerts. The students visited Mahler’s birthplace and the town where he spent his youth; Prague, where he led the city’s opera house; Vienna, setting of his greatest successes and heartbreaks; and Amsterdam, one of the first places his music was esteemed. The orchestra performed in Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, legendary concert halls where Mahler himself conducted.
“It was very powerful for the kids to actually be there where he had worked,” Christensen says. And the young musicians absorbed one of Mahler’s most eloquent works. “To take a piece like Mahler’s Ninth, which is such a behemoth, and play it nine times for different audiences in different halls—that’s an enormous growing experience for the musicians,” Christensen says. “By the final concert, when we were sitting in the Concertgebouw, it was just a different orchestra. It was partly that they had played the program a lot. But also, they had lived together for two weeks. They had become more aware of other people in the orchestra—and more aware musically of other people in the orchestra.”
California’s Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra not only performed this June in cities rich with history—Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest—but it tasted Europe’s present-day musical culture. During its Vienna stop, the members of the youth orchestra were coached by the Vienna Philharmonic’s principal second violin, Christoph Koncz. Taking to the podium, Koncz rehearsed the orchestra in Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture and works by Liszt and Johann Strauss. “In the first few minutes, he put the orchestra on an entirely different level,” says Wendy Cilman, the Santa Rosa Symphony’s education director. “He made a few comments, and they understood. They were hungry for it, and they responded. It was pretty dramatic.”
The National Youth Orchestra of the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s education projects through its Weill Music Institute, ups the ante when it comes to podium guidance. Each summer, the group brings young musicians from across the U.S. to New York for intensive rehearsals and a subsequent tour headlined by an internationally known conductor. Michael Tilson Thomas led this summer’s trip to China and Korea. Many of the musicians had never played for a conductor of his stature.
“All of us were pretty scared, just to see what he would think of us,” says Alyssa Tinsley, a flutist from Kingswood, Texas. “But right when he walked onstage, he was like a gentle giant. He would look at you, and you’d feel comfort.” Tinsley came to the group after two years in the Houston Youth Symphony Orchestra. That organization’s main ensemble and woodwind quintet cultivated her intonation, ability to blend with her section, and other skills, she says. Tilson Thomas then added an extra excitement. Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, in which Tinsley played principal flute, “was like a new piece each time. He liked to change it up,” says Tinsley, now a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. “He would try to get new musical ideas out of us—colors or feelings. It was refreshing. We always had to be on the lookout for what was going to be new. It kept us intrigued and connected with him.”
In Prague, the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra played Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 in the Rudolfinum’s Dvorák Hall—on the same stage where the composer once conducted.
Making It Happen
The Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra’s leaders met to plan tour fundraising one night in October 2017. “Sitting outside, we were all commenting how hot and windy it was,” Cilman recalls. A few hours later, area residents had to flee as wildfires swept in. The inferno consumed thousands of homes.
“Some of the folks who were there lost their homes that night,” Cilman says. “I couldn’t imagine people figuring out how to get back on track when so much happened. I was concerned that the whole tour would fall apart. I was completely astounded when we had the next meeting, and the same people showed up—more people showed up.”
Now the group had to not only raise money for the trip, but to replace instruments destroyed by the fires. Thanks to a fundraising auction, an appeal from the stage during one of the professional Santa Rosa Symphony’s concerts, and fees paid by parents, money came in. The tour stayed on track. “Everybody wanted to make it happen,” Cilman says. “I think because everyone had been so traumatized, they wanted the kids to have something wonderful in their lives after all this.”
When it comes to raising money, each youth orchestra harnesses the motivations and resources at hand. Like most groups, the DC Youth Orchestra Program typically asks members’ families help cover tour costs by paying a fee—typically $2,000-$2,500 per tour, Executive Director Elizabeth Schurgin says—but it also offers financial aid to those who can’t afford that much. That’s where DCYOP calls on its tens of thousands of alumni. Many of them nurture their own memories of foreign travel, thanks to the orchestra’s long history of touring: 23 international trips, reaching back to 1960.
“Tours resonate very strongly with our alumni community,” Schurgin says, “so we almost entirely crowdfund our tours. It’s an opportunity for alumni of various giving capacities to support a project they feel very strongly about. That’s something we hear about from alumni all the time. ‘I remember when we were in Switzerland,’ or ‘I remember going to China.’ It’s exciting for them to give back, and to ensure that this generation of students has the same opportunities.”
Being based in the national’s capital can yield opportunities for touring and funding alike, Schurgin says. After hearing the orchestra, Chile’s ambassador to the United States—Juan Gabriel Valdés, brother of Puerto Rico Symphony Music Director Maximiano Valdés—invited the group to tour his homeland in 2017. The orchestra partnered with musical and government institutions in Chile, and a performance with young Chilean musicians in the country’s Presidential Palace marked one of the high points. The U.S. Department of State helped with funding. “Each tour is a law unto itself in terms of planning,” Schurgin says. “When opportunity presents itself, you need to jump on it.”
The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra is a rare group that requires no fee from the musicians. “We solicit the families to contribute, but there’s no mandatory fee. There’s no giving expectation,” Christensen says. “Some of them give generously, and some don’t have the resources to do so. We don’t want that to be a barrier to participation.” So the orchestra’s leaders have to raise $400,000 to $1 million for each tour, Christensen says. That’s on top of being tuition-free during the regular season. “We’re constantly fundraising,” Christensen admits. Some donors to the professional Boston Philharmonic help with the youth side, too. Other sources include Kickstarter, which brought in $45,000 for the June tour.
“Fortunately, we have a very unusual situation,” Christensen says. Benjamin Zander, music director of both the pro and youth orchestras, has turned his experience on the podium into a sideline as a motivational speaker for business groups. That introduces him to corporate leaders he can enlist to support the youth orchestra. “What we do wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” Christensen says.
Even when musicians don’t speak a common language, sharing a music stand with a musician in a foreign country can forge a connection.
New Approaches
After twenty-plus multi-city tours over the years, the DC Youth Orchestra gave its top ensemble a fresh experience this July. An invitation from northern Italy’s Musica Riva Festival enabled the group to spend its entire trip in one place—and a spectacular place at that, tucked between mountains and the rippling waters of Lake Garda. As a resident ensemble, the group shared the spotlight with participants in programs for aspiring opera singers and for entry-level professional conductors. The schedule included four concerts: one of Russian music; one of Beethoven; one devoted to music of the Americas; and one featuring excerpts from Verdi’s La Traviata. All that came within eleven days.
“That’s a big leap for any orchestra, not to mention a high-school-age orchestra,” Schurgin says. By negotiating repertoire with the festival, the group was able to include a few pieces it had played in recent seasons. In preparation for the Russian night, it changed its regular-season finale at home to include Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Eight full days of rehearsal came right before the trip.
“Four programs was a lot,” Schurgin says, “but now we know what our kids can do.” She notes another challenge: The Verdi evening marked not only the orchestra’s first foray into opera, but its first exposure to vocalists at all. Singers, Schurgin notes, inject their own liberties into the musical mix. The players have to focus on a conductor who’s trying to lead them and meld with the singers at the same time. “I think the orchestra members were a little surprised at first,” Schurgin says with a laugh. “There was a moment of, ‘Oh! This is how it’s going to be.’ They matured over the next couple of days. You have to learn to follow the conductor and anticipate what’s going to happen—and be flexible and in the moment. That can be hard for student musicians. But they did it.”
After nearly 30 international tours, the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras (BYSO) also wanted a new ingredient. “It’s a constant challenge to make the tours more relevant to the orchestra and to the changing times,” Executive Director Catherine Weiskel says. Music Director Federico Cortese zeroed in on the way to aim June’s trip to Germany toward a longer-term goal: The orchestra would make its first foray into Baroque music. “Young American musicians are extraordinarily good, whether music is their professional goal or not,” Cortese says. But he notices a gap: “The string players play Bach’s solo sonatas or partitas for violin or his suites for cellos. But they have no idea about the St. Matthew Passion. I’m not blaming them. They’re wonderful, but they’re young. And these are some of the pillars of Western music.”
So the BYSO partnered with Bachfest in the Baroque master’s longtime home of Leipzig. Though the organization is separate from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it drew on the latter’s links to Leipzig: its Gewandhaus Orchestra is led by Boston Symphony Orchestra Music Director Andris Nelsons. The linchpin of the youth orchestra’s week in Leipzig was a performance of Bach’s exuberant Magnificat. “At the first rehearsal, they didn’t sound very good,” Cortese says. “They could play the notes, but they had no idea how to shape Baroque music. At the beginning, there was even some resistance. Not everyone loved it. That’s why I think it’s important to do this—to broaden their musical experience.” The orchestra gradually got more of a grip on Bach’s style.
“It’s always good for young people to explore something that their teacher or conductor loves,” says Cortese, who had previously added opera to the group’s musical diet. “I’m not saying that doing opera or Bach is a must. But it’s what I love. I think they sensed that. And they responded to that.”
The orchestra tipped its hat to another Leipzig icon, onetime Gewandhaus Orchestra leader Felix Mendelssohn, by performing his “Scottish” Symphony. Meanwhile, spending a week in Leipzig let the students immerse themselves in the historic city, Weiskel says. They stayed with local families. They visited the Bach Museum, the St. Thomas Church (where Bach was Kapellmeister), the Museum of Musical Instruments, and Mendelssohn’s home. As the young musicians flew home, the Leipziger Volkszeitung published a review declaring the orchestra “a damn good one.”
The paper hailed “strings full of shine and enamel, woodwinds without any flaws, and an almost scary professionalism and sophistication.” The reviewer ended by saying that the “frenetically acclaimed concert … should give reason to broaden the trans-Atlantic musical bridge.”
Back and Forth
For the BYSO, that bridge had already been traveled in both directions. The two Leipzig choirs that sang the Magnificat—the Gewandhaus Youth Choir and Leipzig Opera Youth Choir—went to Boston in April 2018. They joined the orchestra in a concert that included Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, in honor of the Boston-area native’s centennial. Some orchestra members who got to know choristers during that visit went on to meet the singers’ families in Leipzig. “It was a really wonderful combination of things,” Weiskel says.
Other American youth orchestras have invited young musicians from other countries to experience the United States. In June, the San Diego Youth Symphony hosted its fourteenth annual International Youth Symphony Program, inviting seventeen musicians from ten countries to perform within its ranks. The Houston Symphony in 2015 hosted the Colombian Youth Philharmonic—a pet project of Houston Music Director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, a Colombia native—in a side-by-side concert and other Texas events.
Even when musicians don’t speak a common language, sharing a music stand can forge a connection, according to the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra’s Christensen. “They have a great time, figuring out how to communicate,” she says. “Having something to do together, even if they can’t communicate verbally, is a really powerful experience for them.”
Christensen recalls taking another youth orchestra to Venezuela in 2005. “There were extreme tensions between our countries at the time,” she says. “I was watching a side-by-side between the American kids and the local kids. You realize how much we really have in common, whatever is going on between our countries. To me, that’s one of the most important aspects of touring: being aware of other people and other ways of life, and becoming more at home with them.”
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Symphony magazine.
