Family concert features young musicians; a 17-year-old composer

| 05 Mar 2012 | 02:57

SPARTA — The New Sussex Symphony continues its tradition of performing symphonic music that reaches out to music lovers of all ages. On Saturday, March 10, a family concert will be held at the Sparta High School Performing Arts Center starting at 3 p.m.

More than 180 student musicians will join the orchestra in a concert featuring music from Mozart and Weber to Bizet and Mancini.

The concert will highlight youth from the Sparta High School string program under the direction of Loni Bach, playing with the orchestra as section compliments. The New Sussex Symphony is also featuring the talents of Barbara Wolfe, a high school senior from Branchville, performing the Weber Viola Concerto. Barbara began playing viola at the age of 7 at the Sussex County Christian Home Schoolers Fine Arts program, joining the Sussex County Youth Orchestra two years later. Most recently, she was one of 10 violists selected for the ASTA National High School Honors Orchestra which will rehearse and perform at the national ASTA convention in March. She has also been selected to perform in numerous New Jersey Region and All-State Orchestras and Choruses. She has played flute in the Sussex County Honors Band as well.

She has many awards for viola performance. She is now in her second year at the Manhattan School of Music Pre-college program studying viola and voice. She has held the position of principal and co-principal Viola in the Pre-College Philharmonic Orchestra. She hopes to pursue a career in viola performance and is actively applying to various college music programs and conservatories.

Saturday's program also features a young composer Gabriel Ivanov, a 17-year-old junior at Wallkill Valley Regional High Schoo,l who has been studying classical piano under the direction of Edward Korczynski since 2001. Gabriel competed for several years in the Sussex County Music Foundation’s competition where he earned first, second, and honorable mention awards. He has also performed over the past seven years in the Walter Engle Festival of Young Performers, a concert featuring outstanding young, classically-trained musicians form northern New Jersey. Having played alto saxophone with the Wallkill Valley High School band for three years, Gabriel played piano in the pit orchestra at this year’s high school performance of Beauty and the Beast.

In addition to all these accomplishments, Gabriel has been studying guitar as well as music composition and theory under the direction of Vern Miller. “Levantar,” the composition featured on the March 10 program, is one of three pieces he has composed. Gabriel has plans to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, majoring in film scoring and composition.

Young string musicians For the finale, the orchestra and the Sparta Alpine Fourth Grade Strings, under the direction of Cindy Kimon, and Reverend Brown students, under the direction of Szu-Han Chuang-Tsay, will be joined by some of the very youngest area musicians — students from the Crescendo Suzuki Violin Studio and the Szu-Han Chuang-Tsay Cello studio — in “Farandole” by Bizet.

Funding Funding for this concert has been made available in part by the NJ State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, through the State/County Partnership Block Grant Program, as administered by the Sussex County Arts and Heritage Council and supported by the Freeholders of Sussex County.