The Cascade Symphony Orchestra (CSO) will present its annual Children’s Concert at 3 p.m. on Saturday, February 4, at the Edmonds Center for the Arts (ECA), 410 4th Ave. North, in Edmonds. Admission to the Children’s Concert is $10 for adults and $3 for youngsters and students.
This will be the first live presentation of the Children’s Concert since 2019. The past few years the concert has been presented online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Children’s Concert is suitable for kids of all ages, but is created especially for youth ages 5 to 12, according to Ruth McFadden, president of the CSO’s board of directors. The event’s theme is “Ferdinand the Bull.”
The program will include a performance by the Cascade Percussion Ensemble, led by Ian Alvarez.
The orchestra, led by Music Director Michael Miropolsky, will present “Ferdinand the Bull,” a 1936 work by American author Munro Leaf, that tells a story for children about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight matadors in the bullring. The story will be narrated by longtime radio personality Dave Dolacky, and is set to music from the opera “Carmen.”
The concert will feature musical solos by the young recipients of Cascade Symphony’s 2022-23 “Rising Star” competition, violinist Lin Tokura and pianist Jimmy Huang.
Lin Tokura, 11, was the winner of the Young Talents Gold Prize at the 2019 Paris International Music Competition. She won second prize at the 2022 International Arthur Grumiaux Competition for Violinists in Belgium. Lin has been a top prize winner at the Crescendo International Music Competition and the London Festival International Competition, where she received the Judges Best Performance Award. She also won the New York Concert Festival International Competition, where she received the Grand Prix, and was named International Soloist of the Year for 2019. Lin has performed recitals several times in Carnegie Hall, as well as at Bosendorfer Hall Mozarthaus and Amadeus International School while on an International Concert Scholarship Tour to Vienna.
Jimmy Huang, a fifth-grade student at Lakeside Middle School, won gold medals in the Bellevue Symphony Concerto Competition and the SCMTA Concerto Competition in 2022. He was selected for the prestigious Seattle Chamber Music Academy and performed at Benaroya Hall. Jimmy is one of the youngest students to pass the Comprehensive Level 10 Examination of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada with “first class honors and distinction.” He is secretary of the International Beethoven Society of Young Musicians, which organizes fundraising progams for urgent global causes. Jimmy participated in fund-raising concerts to support human rights and war victims in Ukraine.
The Edmonds-based Cascade Symphony Orchestra has been promoting young musicians and encouraging music education in the schools for many years, according to Holly Sullivan, longtime orchestra member and chair of its “Rising Star” program. The competition is for pianists and violinists 12-years-of-age and younger on the day of the concert, and musicians 15 and younger of other symphonic instruments.
Further information and updates about the Cascade Symphony Orchestra can be found online at www.cascadesymphony.org.
SOURCE: Cascade Symphony Orchestra
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