Review: The Dekalb Symphony Orchestra lets itself be well served by youth

The Dekalb Symphony Orchestra’s concert Tuesday night at their usual haunt, the Marvin Cole Auditorium at Georgia State University’s Perimeter Campus, saw the orchestra honor the winners of its Young Artists Concerto Competition. For the four teenage winners, it was an opportunity to be a soloist with a live orchestra. But for the spellbound audience, it was an evening to be spent in awe of some of the state of Georgia’s most promising classical upstarts.

“Just a few short years ago I was reminded how fragile music education can be in the face of something like a pandemic,” Paul Bhasin, the orchestra’s music director, said in his introductory remarks. In the wake of the pandemic, playing wind and brass instruments was often verboten for fear of spreading Covid. For an aspiring musician in high school, that’s especially significant in terms of an interruption to their development.

“Tonight’s concert affirms before a live audience that music education is alive and well,” Bhasin declared.

The concert opened with a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slav,” an uncharacteristically moribund work from a composer whose most memorable melodies are joyous and full of fiery energy. This orchestra has a tendency to lumber along at times and, ironically, this nature served them well in the performance of such a dense and heavy handed piece.

“Marche Slav” was followed quickly by Albert Franz Doppler’s “Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy,” op 26. The piece featured the evening’s first soloist, Chloe Park, who shares the third place honor in the competition with harpist Emma Burnsworth. A sophomore at Walton High School in Marietta, Park has played the flute for only five years. She is a current member of the Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Georgia Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Park’s graceful command of the instrument — especially across a long series of technically treacherous passages — was something to behold. But the fact that the composition itself rooted in a harmonic palette of traditional Hungarian music made Park’s deft virtuosity all the more impressive. In the harrowing instant of silence that transpired between Park completing her piece and the audience erupting in enthusiastic applause, a single cry of “Wow!” was heard somewhere in the house. Truer words could not be spoken.

Park was followed by cellist and second place winner Jihoon Kim, a senior at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee and a member of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. His performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor was easily the most emotive work in an evening that favored the technically demanding. While Kim’s capacity for accommodating those technical rigors was undeniable, he more than any of his fellow soloists seemed keenly aware of the sheer importance of tonal vocabulary in the pursuit of emotive delivery. Such a statement took a commendable degree of confidence and restraint.

Harpist Emma Burnsworth, also a member of the Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra, followed with a stirring performance of George Fredric Handel’s Harp Concerto in Bb. Her elegant command of the instrument was undeniable and the arrangement — which has the orchestra lay out to the point of nearly vanishing altogether — gave her plenty of room to command the stage.

First place winner Sunny Kim, a violinist also from Walton High, closed out the night with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major. Despite being a highly technical piece that offered little room for emotive playing, there was nevertheless something truly remarkable in Kim’s delivery. 

While the piece scarcely settles down, it does have moments where the overall volume and tone become quiet and subdued. This was Kim at her finest. She never lost her command of the complex phrases no matter how softly they were delivered. Kim’s willingness to step into the spotlight in such a revealing manner shows that she commands her instrument with the skill of a far more mature player.

The concert showed Bhasin was right. If these four budding masters are any indication, then we needn’t be concerned about the pandemic’s effect on the next generation of musicians

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.