For L.A. area students, National Youth Orchestra a heady experience

PURCHASE, N.Y. — How did nine student musicians from Southern California get selected by Carnegie Hall to perform this week in some of the world’s most prestigious classical music venues?

Practice, practice, practice — and by uploading a video.

The technology of the 21^st century is giving the United States the ability to audition and assemble the best young musicians from every corner of this expansive country.

The new National Youth Orchestra of the United States is the brainchild of Carnegie Hall Executive Director Clive Gillinson. “I played in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain,” he said. “It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life …. When I arrived here, I was baffled that didn’t exist in America.”

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David Yoon, a 16-year-old percussionist from Irvine, is one of nine students selected from the greater Los Angeles area — more than any other city in the United States.

“You think it’s easier than a live audition, but the weird thing about making a video, it’s almost like I have more pressure,” Yoon said during a rehearsal in Purchase, N.Y., where the orchestra had a two-week musical immersion. “It’s like, you have so many chances, it’s hard to be satisfied with what you get.”

The National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, which concludes its first world tour Sunday with a Proms concert from London’s Royal Albert Hall (which can be heard streaming live on BBC3’s website at 1:30 p.m. Sunday) is made up of musicians ages 16 to 19 who were selected from more than 1,000 applicants from the nation’s many regional youth symphonies.

Ha Kyung Jung, one of the five string players selected from Southern California, says, “I worked on my audition video like all last summer.” Jung and the eight other members of the orchestra from Southern California (including Eli Brown, a trumpeter from Santa Monica; Jessie Chen, a violinist from Palos Verdes Estates; Stephen Hart, a violist from Coto de Caza; Nathan Wong, a violist from San Gabriel) received their acceptance letters via email last fall — and the Internet also helped them reach out to each other on social media.

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Mya Greene, a viola player from Mount Washington, said much of the chatter was about what they were going to wear: “We got this email with pictures of the outfits. There was a huge controversy because it wasn’t traditional concert attire and was more on the casual side with sneakers.” Yoon said he connected with other Angelenos he had met at other youth music events in L.A. “I actually flew out with a couple of the guys from LAX.”

They arrived in New York on June 30. The dorm where the musicians were staying was quickly dubbed “Camp Awesome.” There were icebreakers that night, along with realizations that they were not in L.A. anymore.

“There are fireflies out here,” Nathan Kirchhoff, a bassoonist, exclaimed. “There’s no fireflies in San Gabriel. I like practically exploded this morning when I found out about that.”

The summer camp element didn’t recede throughout the two-week immersion, but soon the hard work of playing two major Russian symphonic works began. Only a few days into rehearsing, Ryan Roberts, a 16-year-old oboe and English horn player from Santa Monica, said his head was spinning: “I feel like I’ve been here forever already.” Asked how much he was learning from his peers, Kirchhoff said, “Tons. I’ve learned new fingerings, new ideas about music and stuff about colleges.”

In the first days of rehearsal, James Ross, an associate director of the Juilliard School’s conducting program, led the orchestra. Dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, he presided over the band like a suburban dad coaching a Little League team. (“That’s C sharp, not C natural. Let’s do it again.”) Ross said that one of the challenges for the NYO-USA faculty is steering the musicians away from rote interpretations and toward flexibility: “My job is to prepare them for eventualities.”

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After the first seven days, Ross would hand the baton to Valery Gergiev, the indefatigable Russian conductor — named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and dubbed by “60 Minutes” as “the wild man of music.” Or, as the 17 year-old Kirchhoff put it, “I’m a little nervous about Gergiev. I have no idea what to expect.”

Gergiev arrived in Purchase two days before the NYO-USA’s first concert. Dressed in slacks and suede shoes (standing in front of a band dressed in mostly shorts and sandals), Gergiev rehearsed in a professorial style — interrupting more, suggesting phrasings by humming deep-voiced notes and ruminating on how one must intuit what different composers mean by “legato.”

When Gillinson asked Gergiev to lead the orchestra, Gergiev canceled a vacation to take the job. “What I am doing here is more important than certain things we do with professional orchestras,” Gergiev insisted, “because here you’re investing in the musical future. It’s more impactful — and honestly more needed.”

On July 10, the inaugural concert by the NYO-USA at Purchase College Performing Arts Center was seen as a success. “I think it went very well,” was Roberts’ assessment. “We were all playing as a group. And the audience, the lights and the outfits create an atmosphere that really pushes us and makes us even more ready.”

New York Times chief critic Anthony Tomassini concurred, describing their playing in a positive review as “strong” and “responsive.”

Greene shared another review of sorts: “In the bathroom, I heard some woman talking about getting piano lessons for her daughter …. I guess even if it’s a small change, it’s something.”

As Greene recounted this, she was grabbing a box lunch and rolling her suitcase out to one of three buses taking the musicians overnight to the Kennedy Center, followed by flights to Moscow, St. Petersburg and finally London, for tonight’s Proms concert.

Asked if he was nervous about playing Russian music on their turf, the percussionist Yoon answered with a particularly sunny Southern California disposition: “I think we’re going to bring a bunch of young energy, and I don’t see how they can’t love us. We’re having so much fun. It’s going to be great.”

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