Program Notes: Stravinsky's Firebird with Christopher Dragon

CLASSICS 2023/24 STRAVINSKY’S THE FIREBIRD WITH CHRISTOPHER DRAGON PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor COLIN CURRIE, percussion Friday, March 8, 2024 at 7:30pm Saturday, March 9, 2024 at 7:30pm Sunday, March 10, 2024 at 7:30pm Boettcher Concert Hall KORNGOLD

Theme and Variations, Op. 42

DANNY ELFMAN Percussion Concerto Movement 1: “Triangle” Movement 2: “D.S.C.H.” Movement 3: “Down” Movement 4: “Syncopate” — INTERMISSION — STRAVINSKY The Firebird: Suite (1945) I. Introduction II. Prelude, Dance of the Firebird & Variations III. Pantomime I IV. Pas de deux V. Pantomime II VI. Scherzo (Dance of the Princesses) VII. Pantomime III VIII. Rondo IX. Infernal Dance X. Lullaby (Berceuse) XI. Final Hymn CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 45 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION Friday’s concert is dedicated to Stephens & Enders Fund Saturday’s concert is dedicated to Denise & Scott Hasday Sunday’s concert is dedicated to Sharon L. Menard PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES CHRISTOPHER DRAGON, conductor Australian conductor Christopher Dragon is the Music Director of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra and Resident Conductor of the Colorado Symphony. He joined the Colorado Symphony in the 2015/2016 Season as Associate Conductor – a position he held for four years. For three years prior, Dragon held the inaugural position of Assistant Conductor with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, which gave him the opportunity to work closely with Principal Conductor Asher Fisch.

Dragon has a versatile portfolio ranging from live-to-picture performances including Nightmare Before Christmas, Toy Story and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, a wide variety of collaborations with artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Bell, to standard and contemporary orchestral repertoire such as Danny Elfman’s Violin Concerto, Eleven Eleven; all areas of which he has become highly sought after. Christopher has become known for his charisma, high energy and affinity for a good costume, consistently delivering unforgettable performances that has made him an audience favourite.

Recent highlights include his successful debut with the San Francisco Symphony, performances of Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton with Danny Elfman reprising the role of Jack Skellington and historic performances with Nathaniel Rateliff at Walt Disney Concert Hall and David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. Upcoming debuts include the WRD Funkhausorchester, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Greensboro Symphony Orchestra.

Christopher is highly sought after as a guest conductor and has worked with San Francisco Symphony, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Utah Symphony, Omaha Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Philharmonic, Modesto Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. In Australia, he has guest conducted the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. His 2015 debut performance at the Sydney Opera House with John Pyke and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was released on album by ABC Music and won an ARIA the following year He has also conducted at numerous festivals including the Breckenridge and Bangalow Music Festivals, with both resulting in immediate re-invitations. At the beginning of 2016 Dragon conducted Wynton Marsalis’ Swing Symphony as part of the Perth International Art Festival alongside Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Christopher began his conducting studies in 2011 and was a member of the prestigious Symphony Services International Conductor Development Program in Australia under the guidance of course director Christopher Seaman. He has also studied with numerous distinguished conductors including Leonid Grin, Paavo and Neeme Jarvi at the Jarvi Summer Festival, Fabio Luisi at the Pacific Music Festival and conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula.

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES COLIN CURRIE, percussion Colin Currie is a solo and chamber artist who champions new music at the highest level, hailed as being “at the summit of percussion performance today” (Gramophone). Currie is the soloist of choice for many of today’s foremost composers and conductors and performs with the world’s leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Philharmonia Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestras.

A dynamic and adventurous soloist, Currie’s commitment to commissioning and creating new music was recognized in 2015 by the Royal Philharmonic Society who awarded him the Instrumentalist Award. Currie has premiered works by composers such as Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Louis Andriessen, HK Gruber, Sir James MacMillan, Jennifer Higdon, Brett Dean, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Helen Grime, Kalevi Aho, Julia Wolfe, Andy Akiho, Andrew Norman and most recently Bruno Mantovani, Nicole Lizée and Danny Elfman.

The Colin Currie Group was formed by Colin in 2006 to celebrate the music of Steve Reich and made its five-star debut at the BBC Proms. Since then, with Reich’s personal endorsement, Currie and his virtuosic ensemble have performed at many venues and festivals internationally. A major highlight of Currie’s 2022/23 season is the North American and Japanese premieres of a substantial new work by Steve Reich, Traveler’s Prayer, written for the Colin Currie Group and conducted by Colin Currie at Carnegie Hall, CAL Performances and Tokyo Opera City, following last season’s co-commissioned premieres at The Concertgebouw, Royal Festival Hall, Elbphilharmonie and Philharmonie de Paris. Colin Currie Group also perform a new program of works by Iannis Xenakis at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of Xenakis centenary celebrations.

In October 2017 Currie launched Colin Currie Records, in collaboration with LSO Live, as a platform for recording his diverse projects. He has released two Colin Currie Group discs including Steve Reich’s Drumming, hailed as “thunderously exciting” (The Times), a duo disc with Håkan Hardenberger and HK Gruber Percussion Concertos with the BBC Philharmonic, Juanjo Mena and John Storgårds. Forthcoming plans include the release of a single track, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature.

Currie will give the world premiere of two new concertos this season – Luke Bedford’s Staggered Nocturne with the Philharmonia Orchestra/Michael Francis, and a new work for family audiences by Gavin Higgins at the Royal Festival Hall. Other highlights of Currie’s season include the European premiere of Nicole Lizée’s percussion concerto Blurr is the Colour of My True Love’s Eyes at the BBC Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Austrian premiere of Bruno Mantovani’s Allegro Barbaro with the Tonkunstler Orchestra. He performs the German premiere of Danny Elfman’s Percussion Concerto in Frankfurt with MDR Leipzig and conducts Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble in Reich/Richter, a special project touring Belgium and the Netherlands. Currie also performs Joey Roukens’ Percussion Concerto conducted by Chloe van Soeterstède in Sweden and Spain, and an innovative chamber SOUNDINGS 2 0 2 3/ 24

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES program at King’s Place exploring the spatial effects of music with the Colin Currie Quartet.

Colin Currie is co-Artistic Curator of the Grafenegg Academy alongside Håkan Hardenberger, where in summer 2022 he performed the Austrian premiere of Helen Grime’s Percussion Concerto as well as coaching, conducting and performing chamber music with Academy musicians; he is Artist in Association at London’s Southbank Centre, where he continues to perform every season, Ambassador of Chamber Music Scotland and Artist in Residence at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Colin Currie plays Zildjan cymbals and is a MarimbaOne Artist.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD (1897-1957) Theme and Variations, Op. 42 Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born on May 29, 1897 in Brünn, Austria (now Brno, Czechia), and died on November 29, 1957 in Hollywood, California. His Theme and Variations was composed in 1953 and premiered on November 22, 1953 in Inglewood, California, conducted by Ernst Gebert. The score calls for two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings. Duration is about 7 minutes. This is the premiere performance by the orchestra.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (his middle name honored Mozart) was the younger son of Julius Korngold, one of Vienna’s most influential music critics at the turn of the 20th century. By age five, Erich was playing piano duets with his father; two years later he began composing, and at nine he produced a cantata (Gold) that convinced his father to enroll him at the Vienna Conservatory. When Gustav Mahler heard Erich play his cantata the following year, he proclaimed the boy “a genius” and arranged for him to take lessons with Alexander Zemlinsky.

Korngold made remarkable progress under Zemlinsky — his Piano Sonata No. 1 was published in 1908, when he had ripened to the age of eleven. The following year he wrote a ballet, Der Schneemann (“The Snowman”), which was staged at the Vienna Royal Opera at the command of Emperor Franz Josef. In 1911, the budding composer gave a concert of his works in Berlin, in which he also appeared as piano soloist. Korngold was an international celebrity at thirteen.

In 1915 and 1916, Korngold wrote the first two of his five operas: Der Ring des Polykrates, a comedy, and Violanta, a tragedy. Following a two-year stint in the Austrian army playing piano for the troops during World War I, Korngold turned again to opera, producing his dramatic masterpiece, Die Tote Stadt (“The Dead City”), which was premiered simultaneously in Hamburg (where he served as conductor for three years after the war) and Cologne on December 4, 1920; Die Tote Stadt was the first German opera performed at the Met following World War I. After Korngold returned to Vienna in 1920, he was appointed professor of opera and composition at the Staatsakademie.

In 1934, Austrian director Max Reinhardt was conscripted by Warner Brothers in Hollywood PROGRAM IV

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES to film a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He chose to use Mendelssohn’s incidental music as background, and took Korngold along to arrange the score. Korngold, who, as a Jew, felt increasingly uneasy in Austria, accepted other offers in Hollywood, and, when the Nazi Anschluss in 1938 prevented him from returning home, he settled permanently in California. (He became a United States citizen in 1943.) For the next seven years, he devoted his talents to creating a body of film music unsurpassed by that of any other composer in the genre, and won two Academy Awards (for Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood) for his efforts. His father’s death in 1945, however, caused him to re-evaluate his career, and he returned to writing concert music with concertos for violin (for Heifetz) and cello, as well as a large symphony. Korngold died on November 29, 1957, and his remains were interred in the Hollywood Cemetery, within a few feet of those of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., D.W. Griffith and Rudolf Valentino.

Korngold composed his last significant works — the Theme and Variations and Straussiana, arrangements of some lesser-known melodies by Johann Strauss, Jr. — on a 1953 commission from Affiliated Musicians, a short-lived publishing firm in Los Angeles seeking to add some pieces to the repertory of America’s school orchestras. Both works are modest in their instrumental complement and congenial in their expression without sacrificing Korngold’s unerring sense of sonority, harmonic sophistication and lyrical invention. He said that he wrote the theme “like an Irish folk song” and then worked upon it seven variations of complementary nature, from graceful to martial, from nostalgic to majestic.

@ DANNY ELFMAN (b. 1953) Percussion Concerto Danny Elfman was born on May 29, 1953 in Los Angeles. He composed his Percussion Concerto in 2022; it was premiered on March 25, 2022 at Royal Festival Hall in London by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Ludwig Wicki, with Colin Currie as soloist. The score calls for solo percussion, orchestral percussion, piano, celesta and string orchestra. Duration is about 38 minutes. This is the premiere performance by the orchestra.

Anyone who has seen Milk, Good Will Hunting, Big Fish or Men in Black (all Oscar nominees), The Simpsons (Emmy nomination), Desperate Housewives and Live from Lincoln Center on PBS: Films of Tim Burton (Emmy winners), Batman (Grammy Award) or Alice in Wonderland, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Dick Tracy, Flubber, A Civil Action, Instinct, Frankenweenie or Oz the Great and Powerful (which collectively earned him a Disney Legends Award) knows the music of Danny Elfman. Elfman has scored well over a hundred feature films, and contributed music and theme songs to twice that number of TV shows and specials, short films, video games, live performances and Disney theme rides, as well as the Cirque de Soleil show Iris. He has developed a special collaboration with director–producer–screenwriter Tim Burton since scoring his 1985 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, going on to provide music for fifteen more of Burton’s idiosyncratic films, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, SOUNDINGS 2 0 2 3/ 24

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CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mars Attacks, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes and Corpse Bride. “Every one of those films opened up a new door, artistically and commercially,” Elfman recalled. “I went from the comedy guy (Pee-wee) to the oddball quirky guy (Beetlejuice) to the big dark film guy (Batman) to the melodic romantic guy (Scissorhands). They were critical doors to walk through.”

Daniel Robert Elfman was born in 1953 in Los Angeles and developed a love of music and movies as a kid, haunting the neighborhood movie house to hear the scores of Waxman, Herrmann, Rota, Korngold and other Golden Age greats. In high school, he and his brother Richard (who became an actor, director and screenwriter) developed a new wave band/ performance art group called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, for which Danny wrote original music. When Richard left in 1979 to go into filmmaking, Danny took over direction of the troupe, made it more of a rock band, shortened its name to Oingo Boingo, and enjoyed considerable success with the group into the 1990s. After teaming up with Tim Burton in 1985 for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the self-taught Elfman’s composing career flourished — over the next four years he scored nine movies and capped that period by writing the theme for TV’s The Simpsons. Elfman has since been among Hollywood’s musical elite, composing and recording prolifically (a sixteen-CD 25th Anniversary Box of his scores for Burton’s movies was released by Warner Bros. in 2011), touring internationally in concerts of his music, providing the voices for characters in the Corpse Bride (Bonejangles), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Oompa Loompa) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (Jack Skellington), and winning a total of 35 awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Composers & Lyricists in 2022.

“Most people know me as a film composer,” Elfman said, “but I have done several non-film concert commissions, and each time found them to be incredibly liberating and relieving — like opening a pressure valve and letting out steam that had been building up for years. I was free from moving images, free to let musical ideas run amok. Most importantly, these works pushed me to new places far beyond my comfort zone.” Those works have come to include Serenada Schizophrana in 2004 for the American Composers Orchestra, The Overeager Overture (2006, originally titled “Overture to a Non-Existent Musical”) for the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, a four-movement composition (2017) for the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet, and the Violin Concerto, “Eleven Eleven” for Sandy Cameron.

“Shortly after we premiered my Violin Concerto in Prague in June 2017,” Elfman continued, “I had a chance meeting with percussionist Colin Currie during a film scoring session in London.

We decided it could be fun to create a piece together. I was excited to take the plunge again into the challenge of another large symphonic composition and at the same time to go back to my roots with wood and metal, mallets and sticks and hands to let loose and have some fun with it. I also knew Colin was an extraordinary musician who would be great to collaborate with.

Thankfully, SOKA University in California and the London Philharmonic Orchestra were eager to give us an opportunity to create this Percussion Concerto, and it was premiered on March 25, 2022 at Royal Festival Hall in London.

“Percussion has always been an important part of my life. On my travels though West Africa when I was only eighteen, I started collecting and learning to play ‘balafons’ (the African version of a marimba), through my years of playing in metal-based Indonesian gamelan ensembles in my twenties, as well as building my own strange metal and wood percussion ensembles in my early theatrical performance years, percussion has been a lifelong obsession.”

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CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES Elfman’s Percussion Concerto comprises four movements — Triangle, D.S.C.H., Down and Syncopate. Triangle refers not to the small, metal, three-sided percussion instrument but to the stage arrangement of two orchestral percussionists around the soloist. D.S.C.H. was inspired by the music of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who “autographed” several of his late works by inserting into them a motto made from the pitches representing his initial: DSCH, the notes D–E-flat–C–B. (The note D represents his initial. In German transliteration, the composer’s name begins “Sch”: S [ess] in German notation equals E-flat, C is C, and H equals B-natural.)

The third movement, Colin Currie said, “is the most intimate, and harmonically the most adventurous, with possible influence from Arnold Schoenberg…. The finale is a humdinger. It’s fast, it’s exciting, it’s fireworks, and it’s a roof raiser.”

@ IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) Suite from The Firebird (1945 Version) Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, and died on April 6, 1971 in New York City. He composed The Firebird in 1909-1910 and the ballet premiered on June 25, 1910 at the Paris Opéra, conducted by Gabriel Pierné. The score of the 1945 version of the suite extracted from the ballet calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings.

Duration is about 31 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece January 20-22, 2017 with Andrew Litton conducting.

Fireworks. There could not have been a more appropriate title for the work that launched the meteoric career of Igor Stravinsky. He wrote that glittering orchestral miniature in 1908, while still under the tutelage of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows all the dazzling instrumental technique that the student had acquired from his teacher. Though the reception of Fireworks was cool when it was first performed at the Siloti Concerts in St. Petersburg on February 6, 1909, there was one member of the audience who listened with heightened interest. Serge Diaghilev was forming his Ballet Russe company at just that time, and he recognized in Stravinsky a talent to be watched. He approached the 27-year-old composer and requested orchestral transcriptions of short pieces by Chopin and Grieg that would be used in the first Parisian season of the Ballet Russe. Stravinsky did his work well and on time.

During that same winter, plans were beginning to stir in the creative wing of the Ballet Russe for a Russian folk ballet — something filled with legend and magic and fantasy. The composer Nikolai Tcherepnin was associated with the Ballet Russe at that time, and it was assumed that he would compose the music for a plot derived from several traditional Russian sources. However, Tcherepnin was given to inexplicable changes of mood and he was losing interest in ballet at the time, so he withdrew from the project. Diaghilev inquired whether Stravinsky had any interest in taking it over, and he agreed. The triumphant premiere of The Firebird in Paris on June 25, 1910, rocketed Stravinsky to international fame.

The story deals with the glittering Firebird and the evil ogre Kashchei, who captures maidens S O U N D I N G S 2 0 2 3 / 2 4 PROGRAM VII

CLASSICS BIOGRAPHIES and turns men to stone if they enter his domain. Kashchei is immortal as long as his soul, which is preserved in the form of an egg in a casket, remains intact. The plot shows how Prince Ivan wanders into Kashchei’s garden in pursuit of the Firebird; he captures it and exacts a feather before letting it go. Ivan meets a group of Kashchei’s captive maidens and falls in love with one of them. The princesses return to Kashchei’s palace. Ivan breaks open the gates to follow them, but he is captured by the ogre’s guardian monsters. He waves the magic feather and the Firebird reappears to smash Kashchei’s vital egg; the ogre expires. All the captives are freed and Ivan and his Tsarevna are wed.

Stravinsky drew three orchestral suites from The Firebird. The third, from 1945, uses the reduced orchestration of the more familiar 1919 suite (the 1911 suite requires the very large orchestra of the original ballet), but incorporates several additional scenes from the full score. The first two, Introduction and The Dance of the Firebird, accompany the appearance of the magical creature. There follow three Pantomimes, the Pas de Deux of the Firebird and Ivan Tsarevich and the Scherzo: Dance of the Princesses. Next comes the Round Dance of the Princesses, which uses the rhythm and style of an ancient Russian dance called the Khorovod. The Infernal Dance of King Kashchei, the most modern portion of the score, depicts the madness engendered by the appearance of the Firebird at Kashchei’s court after the revelation to Ivan of the evil ogre’s vulnerability. The haunting Berceuse is heard when the thirteenth princess, the one of whom Ivan is enamored, succumbs to a sleep-charm that saves her from the terrible King while Ivan destroys Kashchei’s malevolent power. The Finale, initiated by the solo horn, confirms the lifeforce that had been threatened by Kashchei. ©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

PROGRAM VIII C O LO R A D O S Y M P H O N Y.O R G

PUBLIC BENEFIT CONCERT 2023/24

DENVER YOUNG ARTISTS ORCHESTRA SIDE BY SIDE WITH YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY WILBUR LIN, conductor Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 7:00pm Boettcher Concert Hall

WAGNER

Die Meistersinger: Prelude, Act 1, WWV 96

SIBELIUS Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 I. Allegretto II. Andante; ma rubato — INTERMISSION — SIBELIUS Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 III. Vivacissimo IV. Finale: Allegro moderato ELGAR

In the South, Op. 50

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 40 MINUTES INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION

FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 19 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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PUBLIC BENEFIT BIOGRAPHIES

PHOTO: LAI YUEH-CHUNG

WILBUR LIN, conductor Known for his creative programming and inviting stage presence, Wilbur Lin’s career has taken him to symphony halls and opera theaters across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Taiwan. Recently appointed Music Director of the Missouri Symphony, Lin also joins the conducting staff of the Colorado Symphony as assistant conductor in 2023.

Lin’s 2022/23 season saw his debuts with the Rochester Philharmonic, Oak Ridge, Ann Arbor, and Elgin symphonies, and a return to Indiana’s Richmond Symphony. His other recent highlights include his debut with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, opening its 2021/22 season, a new studio recording with pianist Eric Zuber and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, and conducting and covering the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Pops where he recently finished his tenure as assistant conductor (2019-2022).

In addition to his positions with the Colorado, Cincinnati, and Missouri symphonies, in recent years, Lin has conducted the Chamber Philharmonic Taipei, Manchester Camerata, Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil (El Salvador), Taipei Philharmonic, Taipei Symphony, Liverpool Mozart, Academy Orchestra of Taiwan Symphony, Richmond Symphony (IN), and LaPorte Symphony orchestras. As a cover conductor, Lin has worked with, notably, the Taiwan Symphony, Cincinnati Ballet, and Minnesota orchestras. In his role as the assistant conductor of the Colorado Symphony, Lin also serves as the Music Director of the Denver Young Artists Orchestra.

A graduate of Riccardo Muti‘s Italian Opera Academy, Lin’s operatic endeavors include conducting Verdi’s Macbeth at Teatro Alighieri (Ravenna, Italy), Die Zauberflöte and Barber of Seville with the Winter Harbor Music Festival (Winter Harbor, Maine), Menotti’s The Medium and Amelia Goes to the Ball as the conductor of Northern Illinois University (Dekalb, IL), and has coached and performed as a pianist with the Indianapolis Opera, Indiana University Opera Theater, Reimagining Opera for Kids, and the Cincinnati Ballet. In 2022, Lin led a new workshop production of Robeson by Scott Davenport Richards at the Cincinnati Opera.

Lin held the position of Taiwan Symphony Orchestra International Talent Fellow (2019-2021), Weiwuyin Opera (Taiwan) Conducting Fellow (2019-2020), Lord Rhodes Scholar (2013-2014), was a two-time recipient of Mortimer Furber Prize for Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), and holds a doctoral degree in orchestral conducting from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Lin has studied with Arthur Fagen and David Effron at Jacobs, Clark Rundell and Mark Heron at the RNCM, and Apo Hsu at the National Taiwan Normal University.

He has also received conducting coaching with, notably, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Riccardo Muti, Sir Mark Elder, Helmuth Rilling, and has assisted Louis Langrée, James Gaffigan, and John Morris Russell, among others.

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PUBLIC BENEFIT BIOGRAPHIES DENVER YOUNG ARTISTS ORCHESTRA Founded in 1977 with the support of the Denver Symphony Orchestra, the award-winning Denver Young Artists Orchestra has been the premier option for aspiring young musicians in the front range for over 45 years.

Now operating as an educational affiliate to the Colorado Symphony, the organization’s three orchestras, educational workshops, and after-school Tune Up violin classes train nearly 300 students, ages seven to twenty-three, from approximately 100 schools across Colorado. DYAO performs throughout the Denver metro with large-scale, collaborative, and outreach performances.

Members of the orchestras graduate into conservatories and universities across the country including Brown University, The Eastman School of Music, Harvard University, The Juilliard School, Stanford University, and Yale University. Alumni who continued to professional music careers are found in many major orchestras across the country including the Atlanta Symphony, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, and Metropolitan Opera. To learn more, visit dyao.org.

VIOLIN I Ella Bygrave Isabella ChangNunley Giovanna Golan Lydia Hagerman Sam Hardman Aidan Hodges Jason Hwang Luciana Lee-Cheng Lisa Park Sierra Plowman Akshaye Sankholkar Audrey Shia Mingming Song Ginevra Strasser VIOLIN II Maggie Bevans Mariel Bochner Madeline Hadley Sadie Han Charles Hutchings Joseph Kim Brooke Ma Vittoria Pugina

Jordan Scoville Elliana White Josette Wu Austin Zhang VIOLA Lily Brustkern Nava Goldstein Jane Hanselman Benji Reichler Sebastian Saiz-Harrison CELLO Eva Bochner Will Fitzpatrick Charlotte Gelwick Hannah Gruis Madeline Herring Isabelle Howard Zoë Keith Sawyer Payne Alexander Peterson Saverio Strasser Alaya Vaughan

BASS Jenna Baillargeon Charlotte Cochran Lucas DelgadoCheers Claire Koch FLUTE Lily Dinsmore Joshua Rascón OBOE Nathan Lessard Ellie Parsons CLARINET Caitlin Dong Kaitlyn Nohara * Cole Quint BASSOON Ian Gair Alexander Zhao

HORN Finn Moore Joseph Rupprecht Delaney Sutherland * TRUMPET Davey Aguilera Mariella Franklin Abby Nelson Joel Newquist

TROMBONE Fatima Bahraini Timothy Dombrowski Micah Newquist TUBA Fiona Stever PERCUSSION Aidan Lenski Gabby Overholt Ella Zimmermann HARP Lucy Sotak

* Denotes DYAO Fellow

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