Chamber Orchestra Puts Student Soloists In The Spotlight

Anthony Akambe, a student soloist with the New Haven Chamber Orchestra. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Anthony Akambe leaned back in his chair, his hands glowing against the smooth, dark wood of his bassoon. He planted his feet firmly on the floor, rolled his shoulders back and took a deep breath in. Around him, Antonio Vivaldi had started to take hold of the stage, one clean, bouncing note at a time. Akambe pressed his mouth to the reed and joined in, the notes measured and crisp as they traveled over the seats, and out into the building's empty hallways.

An eighth grader at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School, Akambe is one of 13 New Haven Public Schools students joining the New Haven Chamber Orchestra Tuesday night, as the group holds its spring concert with a focus on intergenerational music-making and arts education beyond the classroom. Held at Fair Haven School, the concert will feature four soloists from three different New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), as well as Fair Haven students playing side-by-side with NHCO musicians. 

The concert, which includes work by Joseph Haydn, Antonio Vivaldi, Gabriel Fauré, Edward Elgar, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Antonín Dvořák, takes place at 7 p.m.; a virtual option is available for those who cannot make it in person (more information is available here). It could not come at a more important time for arts education: many of the 13 students risk losing their music instructors if the proposed NHPS budget cuts go through in the next year.

"I'm so excited to play [with the orchestra]," said Akambe, who picked up the bassoon at the beginning of this school year, after years of playing the saxophone and the flute. "I feel honored.”

His presence, and that of his peers, represents a full-circle moment for the NHCO. Roughly a decade ago, the orchestra began building out its relationship with NHPS teachers and musicians, working closely with initiatives like Music Haven and Yale Music In Schools. By 2019, it was a flourishing collaboration, with student performers who sometimes came back as section members. Even during Covid, the orchestra continued to innovate, finding ways to celebrate young musicians even as they braved the online pivot and struggled with remote learning. 

In the years since, the NHCO has welcomed young soloists back onto the stage—but never this many in a single show, said NHCO Board President Jessica Sack. This concert is also the first since pre-pandemic times to feature the NHCO's side-by-side mentorship model, in which students and musicians sit next to each other, making their way through a piece together. This year, they include nine seventh and eighth graders from Fair Haven School, all students of band teacher Eliel Martinez.

“Mentorship is central to our work at the orchestra because we’re intergenerational, and when we have young musicians perform with us, play with us, and sometimes join the orchestra, we learn from each other,” said Sack, a violinist with the group. “Playing in the orchestra for these young people complements many of the opportunities in New Haven … the orchestra is committed to ensuring music is a part of young musicians’ lives."

She added that it’s powerful to see young musicians return, which they often do, after their introduction to the NHCO as student soloists. Among the strings, for instance, she now knows that she’ll spot Cristofer Zunun and Dio Oakley, both former NHPS and Music Haven students who have since graduated from college, and returned to the group. Outside of the orchestra, the two also play in the Fairfield-based Legacy String Quartet.   

“They want to be part of this musical community and they want music to be part of their lives,” Sack said of former soloists who return.

At a rehearsal last week, that was fully on display as students trickled into the auditorium, popping open their instrument cases as they took in the wide, bright stage. In the half-light of the first few rows, conductor Kevin Zheng buzzed among the seats, checking in on a virtual setup before making his way to the stage. Prior to his time as the group’s conductor, Zheng served as NHCO concertmaster and also studied alongside Maestro Heejung Park.

No wonder, then, that the stage—where the group has performed for years—is a place where he looks completely at ease, able to check in with musicians and teachers one moment, and half-dance through conducting a movement the next. As musicians settled into place, he directed them to what would become the end of the program, the finale of Dvořák's "Symphony for the New World."

In the violin section, student Rhayn Brown got comfortable, exchanging a quick, tight smile with Martinez from the stage. Nearby, eighth grader Kelly Mendez made sure she was in tune, settling in just feet from where Zheng would stand. Someone called out for the timpani, and the curtains parted, exposing a whole section of instruments that hadn’t been visible a moment before.

It was time; the orchestra came to attention. Zheng, back at the front of the stage, lifted a baton in his right hand and cued musicians in. Baaaaah-bum! The strings rang out, dripping with suspense. Baaaaah-bum! Ba-da ba-da ba-da! Horns came rolling in, ringing the space into being. Beneath them, strings swirled into their response, straightening out and marching forward. Drums boomed from the percussion section.

Zheng, somehow watching it all unfold at once, brought the sonic blaze down a notch, teasing out Dvořák’s ability to shock the audience in one measure, and then tiptoe gingerly through the music just a few later. 

In the back of the auditorium, soloist Mathais-Li Nuñez drifted in and found a seat, holding his cello case with one hand. Later in the evening, he tapped into the tenderness of Fauré’s “Elégie in C Minor, Op. 24,” letting the sheer feeling of the piece drift from the stage out into the front rows. The work, which Fauré composed in the 1880s, is indeed elegiac, with a kind of haunting melody that comes straight from the belly of the cello, and can fill a whole room.

Back on stage, student soloists were all in, shoulder to shoulder with their mentors as the sound swelled over the group. Flutes sang their gentle, swooping hello, and strings flew back in, enveloping everything in their sound. Woodwinds trilled, and horns reminded them that there was drama to be discovered yet. Strings picked up the pace, and students swayed along. When Zheng ushered in the final, climactic notes of the work, it was only seconds until an inevitable, enthusiastic round of applause burst from the stage.

That sense of support, palpable in the claps, cheers, and gentle affirmations that wove in and out of each piece, remained brightly on the stage as Akambe stepped up and took a seat, missing only a spotlight as the piece began around him. Written in the early eighteenth century, Vivaldi’s “Concerto for Bassoon and Strings in G major” has neither the drama of the Dvořák nor the sentimentality of the Fauré, opting instead for a sort of lively, vivid romp through music history that can be a sprint, but at rehearsal was more of a jog.

As the orchestra brought Akambe in, they slowed it down, keeping all the bob and verve for which the piece is known. In the audience, teachers Darius Farhoumand and Marissa Iezzi watched with the wide-eyed wonderment of two expectant parents, so awed that at times it seemed as though they were not in Fair Haven, but maybe at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center.

Like Sack, they are proof of how music-making can be a team effort: Farhoumand is a graduate student at Yale and teaching artist through the Music in Schools program, and Iezzi is the band director at Mauro-Sheridan. While she teaches Akambe in school, Farhoumand keeps him going outside of it. At one point, he approached the stage, and expanded his arms to their full wingspan. He mimed breathing, shoulders rising and falling, then stepped back.

Back on stage, Akambe had almost finished his first run-through with the full orchestra, notes jumping over themselves with increasing speed. When he rounded the final bend, Zheng turned to him, smiling. The orchestra burst into applause; some musicians stomped their feet. Then Zheng jumped back to measure 133, where the piece had seemed just a tiny bit wobbly.

If Akambe wanted to slow it down or speed it up, he explained, that was up to him. “Just come in at whatever tempo you want, and we’ll follow,” he said.

“We’re your back-up band!” Sack chimed in from a few rows behind him.

Akambe nodded, ready to run it again. He later said that despite his initial nerves, he was excited to play with the group. At home and at school, music often helps him clear his head, relieve stress and concentrate on his academic work. So too with the orchestra, which he felt very much a part of as he took the stage.

Since coming to Mauro-Sheridan last year, he added, he’s looked forward to band practice, opting for the bassoon when baritone sax wasn’t an option. He’s an amazing student, Iezzi said: he taught himself to play it over a single weekend. When he plays, "I feel like I can do anything," he said.

Minutes later, Akambe switched spaces with violinist Mikayla de Leon, a student at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School who is playing Mozart’s “Violin Concerto in G Major.” A participant in Music In Schools, the Connecticut All-State Orchestra, and Morse Summer Music Academy, de Leon started playing the violin in sixth grade, while making her way through Covid-era learning at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS). When her teacher, strings instructor Henry Lugo, made the jump to Co-Op, she headed there with him.

Before any of that was her reality—her life now is basically school and music, she said—she saw an orchestra play, and was totally captivated by the performance. She’s still thrilled that she gets to be part of it, so many years after a similar concert inspired her to do the work she does now.

“I’ve always loved music, but I’ve played it for so long it’s like, attached to me,” she said. “It was definitely one of my goals to do something like this.”

The New Haven Chamber Orchestra’s spring concert will take place on Tuesday, May 6 at 7 p.m. at Fair Haven School, 164 Grand Ave. in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood. A virtual option is available for those who are unable to attend in person. Find out more at the group’s website.