Dozens of teen Quad Cities musicians will get the thrill of a lifetime this weekend, and then again many times over in a special tour of Europe in June.

The Quad City Symphony Youth Ensembles (QCSYE) — to perform on Sunday, April 30 at 3 p.m. at Davenport’s Adler Theatre — consists of four school-year orchestras for musicians of all ability levels, ages 7 to 18. The program offers a rigorous and inspiring learning environment founded on musical excellence for string, woodwind, brass, and percussion musicians. Students develop valuable musical, social, and leadership skills which set them up for success in school and beyond, according to the QC Symphony website.

Some of the highlights of Sunday’s concert will be:

• Performances with the QCSO by the winner of the 2022-2023 Concerto Competition Grand Prize — pianist Jack Stremlow, a junior at Davenport Central High School, playing the first movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, and the Youth Symphony Orchestra (YSO) Prize winner — violinist Xin-Yan Chan, a sophomore at Pleasant Valley High School, doing the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor.
• The 80-student YSO playing side-by-side with the QCSO in Wagner’s “Rienzi” overture and Copland’s Four Dance Episodes from his 1942 ballet “Rodeo.”

“We have made great progress, I think artistically, but also the students have made a ton of progress socially,” YSO conductor Ernesto Estigarribia (and QCYSE music director) said this week. “There’s an incredible, beautiful culture of camaraderie. I am very happy, very proud of creating that culture — not only the love of music, but a place where people value each other.”

Of the Concerto Competition winners performing with the QCSO, he said: “It’s a huge deal for them. I mean, performing with a professional orchestra of this level, it’s incredible.”

It also will be a priceless experience for the YSO students to play side by side with the QCSO members.

“Music is one of those things that you learn by osmosis,” Estigarribia said. “There are very few activities that you learn alongside those who are more experienced than you are. It’s an integral part of being a musician.”

Rather than feeling pressure performing alongside pros, the students get inspired, the conductor noted.

“I would say it creates a welcoming environment and inspiring environment, where you have full understanding of what is possible — where you realize maybe things that were possible that you didn’t know before and you basically elevate the bar,” Estigarribia said.

“I think it’s a great activity. I don’t think students are intimidated by sitting with an adult that is more experienced,” he said, noting the YSO and QCSO rehearse on Saturday at the Adler, before Sunday’s concert, with about 150 musicians playing together, all under the baton of Estigarribia.

“The Youth Symphony has been working on this repertoire virtually the entire year, on and off since August,” he said. “It’s been more intensely in the last two months. The way I plan rehearsals is I pretty much rehearse everything all the time.”

He programmed the iconic Copland since that’s a major piece that will be performed on the June tour, to represent America.

The tour plans

The tour (the first in the YSO’s 73-year history) will be June 17-27, 2023, and include performances in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany, and Prague, Czech Republic.

“What’s very touching to me is not only we are gonna do a performance tour, but we’re also gonna have a cultural tour and we’re gonna try to experience all the things that those cities have to offer,” Estigarribia said.

Before the last concert in Prague, the group will tour the Terezin concentration camp about 30 miles north of Prague.

The Nazi camp held primarily Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as tens of thousands of Jews deported mainly from Germany and Austria, as well as hundreds from the Netherlands and Denmark. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there, including 15,000 children, and held there for months or years, before being sent by rail transports to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland, as well as to smaller camps elsewhere.

“That will be a touching experience, a transformative experience,” Estigarribia said. “And those are the types of transformative experiences that we aim for.”

“It’s one thing is to learn history from a book; it’s another thing to be there,” he said. “These were human lives that were taken, taken away. This was evil that was present there in those places where you are right now standing, and innocent lives were lost exactly where you’re standing.”

In each of the three tour concerts, the YSO will perform the Copland, a Beethoven overture, a piece from Czech composer Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884), and a new work from Michigan-based Michael Kropf.

The YSO (comprised of kids from many area school districts) is primarily intended to serve students with ensemble experience of 4+ years for winds/percussion and 5+ years for strings (approximately grades 9 to 12, though there is one 7th-grader in the current orchestra).

Two student views

French horn player Isabelle Rosin, a Muscatine High School senior, is the principal horn for the YSO.

She will be attending the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University this fall to major in horn performance and music education. She’s played the instrument for eight years and currently study with Marc Zyla, principal horn of the QCSO.

“I have played in YSO for two years and really enjoy playing diverse and challenging music. I also love that we play original music rather than arrangements, Isabelle said this week. “It provides a wide variety of composers and styles to expand our musical palates. I really appreciate the side-by-side concerts because it gives us a chance to play next to professional musicians, and even though it’s only for one rehearsal and one concert, it still makes a huge difference.

“It gives us a chance to listen to their playing, choose what we like, and incorporate it into our own playing when we go home to practice,” she said, looking forward to travel to Europe.

“I’m going to school to be a performance major, and having the chance to perform overseas is a huge opportunity,” Isabelle said. “I’m also very excited to fly because I’ve never flown before and this will be my first time. I’m really happy that I am in Ernesto’s group because he always has fun little tidbits to give us about places and buildings so I’m excited to see what he has for us this time.

“I’ve never been abroad, and I’m very excited to see the different architecture and find out how culture varies from country to country in Europe, as well as how European culture varies from American culture,” she said.

Katie Jones is a homeschooled high school junior who’s played violin for 12 years. Her teacher is Rebekah Weber and this her third year playing in the YSO.

“My favorite part about playing in the YSO is the music we get to play. I have been able to play two full symphonies and multiple pieces. I also love having such a good conductor like Ernesto,” Katie said. “I have learned so much through him and others.

“I love the Side-by-Side Concert because I get to play with professionals,” Katie said. “I am able to ask them questions. Also, I am able to improve my playing from listening to their playing.”

She also has never traveled overseas and is really looking forward to the tour. “I am also excited about playing in the different locations.”

Background on “Moses”

The Michael Kropf “Moses in Nederland” will have special resonance during the June tour. It was done by the YSO last November as part of the QC “Out of Darkness” series of programs related to the Holocaust. Its world premiere was in New York City Aug. 27, 2022, performed by Contemporaneous with QCSO violinist Sabrina Tabby (who is married to Estgarribia) as soloist.

The 19-minute piece is named for the composer’s great-grandfather Moses Schenkein, who as a European Jew living in Holland, was forced to lead his family on a dangerous and miraculous journey of escape from the horrors of the Holocaust. Kropf found a folder in his family’s home basement, which contained musical sketches left behind by his great grandfather. He based the new piece on those sketches, Estigarribia said.

“The concerto is a great piece of music, and a great way to expose young musicians to 21^st-century musical language,” he said.

“As a composer and violinist myself, I’ve always felt a special kinship with my great-grandfather Moses; each movement of the concerto focuses on one of his melodies found in the aforementioned folder of compositions that my family inherited,” Kropf wrote.

Schenkein had moved to Holland as a young man to escape the religious strictures of his father in Krakow, Poland. The composer wrote: “I imagine a young and optimistic Schenkein who is excited to adopt a new city as his own. Although Schenkein passed away long before I was born, the sense I get from family stories is that he loved Holland very much, in spite of the circumstances in which he was forced to flee it.”

After living in Israel following World War II, Schenkein became one of the relatively few Jews to actually return to Europe; he moved back to Holland.

Kropf is a Michigan-based composer whose work deals with hidden emotions and evocative places, according to his bio. He has collaborated with Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Ann Arbor Symphony, the Apple Hill String Quartet, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. 

Delayed by COVID

The YSO European tour was originally planned for summer 2021, with the first meeting held with parents in February 2020, soon before COVID shutdowns. Since a number of graduating seniors have left the YSO since 2020, there are some students (who are in college) that will be going on this tour, Estigarribia said.

“We have several of those students who will come back, because they are part of our family and it is not their fault that we had a pandemic,” he said.

The QCSO also has helped student families to raise money, to offset the cost for the 40 students going.

“They will get to experience this tour, but they also worked really hard in fundraising for this tour. So, every aspect of this tour — including the planning, including the financing — was a learning experience,” Estigarribia said.

Tickets for Sunday’s concert are $5 to $28, available HERE.