by Mike Telin
“How could I possibly enter into our twentieth season without him being a major part of this concert?” Contemporary Youth Orchestra Music Director Liza Grossman exclaimed over the phone. The man Grossman is referring to is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Bernard Rands. On Sunday, December 7 at 7:00 pm in Waetjen Auditorium at Cleveland State University, CYO will present a concert honoring the composer.
The program will include Rands’s London Serenade and Danza Petrificada as well as the world premiere of his Music for Liza and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra: Theme for CYO. The evening also includes the world premiere of Stefan Podell’s Concerto for Two Violas and Orchestra featuring violists Lynne Ramsey and Jeffrey Irvine, and Richard Hill and Chris Barber’s Concerto for Jazz Trombone and Orchestra with CYO concerto competition winner Rachel Waterbury as soloist.
Genuine beaming smiles are a rare sight among high school students, those supremely self-conscious paragons of effortful cool. But on June 2, dozens of delighted adolescent grins shone forth from the stage of Severance Hall, an occurrence even more remarkable for taking place in the decidedly unhip venue of a classical music concert hall. Sharing the stage with such an exciting performer as pianist, singer, and songwriter Ben Folds elicited not only unembarrassed smiles, but also head banging and exuberant playing from the young musicians of the Contemporary Youth Orchestra (CYO), directed by Liza Grossman.
For thousands of years humans believed the earth was flat and if you traveled too far you would eventually fall off the edge. It was the third century Greek scholar Eratosthenes who first began to calculate the circumference of the Earth. In the twentieth century, Ohio and specifically Cleveland, has played an important role in furthering space research. Founded in 1941as the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center actually predates NASA by 17 years and is named in honor of former senator John H. Glenn, an Ohioan who was the first American to orbit Earth.
