Chamber Music competition - April 28

 Noctua Wind Quintet

The Finals of the 28^th annual Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition for Emerging Professional Ensembles will take place at 7:30 Sunday, April 28^th in the First Presbyterian Church.  This is a public concert in which two under-30 professional ensembles will each perform before the audience and three judges for $7000 in prize money. 

This year’s finalists are the Calidore String Quartet, in residence at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, and the Noctua Wind Quintet, who are students at the Shepherd School at Rice University in Houston.  The Calidore,  Jeffrey Myers, Ryan Meehan, Jeremy Berry, and Estelle Choi, will play the first two movements (each) of the Haydn Op. 76 No. 3, the Mendelssohn Op. 13, and the Hindemith Op. 22 quartets.  The Noctua, Kayla Burggraf, Michelle Pan, Nicolas Chona, Thomas Morrison, and John Turman, will play Samuel Barber’s Summer Music, J. P. Rameau’s Gavotte et Six Doubles, and the John Harbison Quintet.  Both ensembles have been performing together for years and have won major awards.

The judges for the Finals will be Richard Waller, impresario and former principal clarinetist of the Cincinnati Symphony, Jackson Leung, DMA, conductor of the WSU Chamber Orchestra, and Sujean Kim, concertmaster of the Springfield Symphony and former member of the Corigliano Quartet, which won the CMYS Competition 15 years ago.

The purposes of the CMYS Competition are to give a boost to outstanding young ensembles in this difficult market for classical musicians, and to have a great concert in Yellow Springs.  The musical standards of the younger generation of musicians are astonishingly high, and the excitement of a competition often produces inspired performances.

There will be a free pre-concert lecture at 6:45 by Charles Larkowski, and a post-concert dinner and reception, for which a reservation is required.  Tickets are $20 for adults and $7 for students.  WDPR-FM (88.1) will broadcast the concert at10:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 24^th.

For further information or to make reservations, please phone (937) 374-8800 or visit www.cmys.org.