The Civic Orchestra of Tucson is hosting a fundraising concert tonight to support its annual Young Artists’ Competition.
So it’s only natural that the multigenerational community orchestra is tapping into some of that young talent to showcase the importance of the competition, now in its 30th year.
The highlight of tonight’s concert will be the world premiere of a work composed by a past winner, cellist Clark Evans, and performed by another past winner, cellist Levi Powe.
Evans graduated from Sabino High School in 2012 and finished his first year at Brigham Young University before going on his two-year Mormon mission to Texas last spring.
He composed “To Move a Mountain” as a Christmas gift in 2012 for his longtime teacher, Mary Beth Tyndall.
“I had been asking him over and over and over again. I was delighted,” said Tyndall, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s assistant principal cellist.
The concerto started as a work for cello and piano geared toward advanced cello students. But there were parts that Tyndall felt might be beyond their level of experience. So she and Evans reworked the piece before Tyndall took it to Colorado’s Rocky Ridge Music Camp, where she and members of her Southwest String Quartet — which includes her TSO colleagues, violinists David Rife and Wynne Wong-Rife and violist Ilona Vukovic-Gay — are on the faculty. Tyndall said the piece was a hit and she gave it to several students to work on throughout the school year.
But she wanted to take it to the next level — performing it with an orchestra. The opportunity came when Powe, who also is her student, was invited to perform with the Civic Orchestra for its fundraiser on tonight.
Evans finished the orchestration before leaving for his mission and Powe, 13, started working on the piece last spring.
Tyndall, who will conduct Levi and the Civic Orchestra in the performance, described “To Move a Mountain” as a work that could find a place in the cello repertoire for students.
“The beginning is perky and fun: Bum, bum, bum, ba, dah, ba, dah, dah, dah dah. It almost has a jazz flavor,” she explained. “Then in the middle part he moves into a beautiful melody ... called ‘Full Moonlight Dance.’ Actually he borrowed it from somebody else; he attributes it to that person (Karen Beth). … And then it returns to the main theme at the end, but it adds an exciting ending, which goes into mixed meters. ... It kind of crescendos to the end with a big scale and the whole orchestra doing those rhythms together.
“I just feel like the best part of this has been the ability to breathe life into it over the last year,” said Tyndall, who has played cello with the TSO since 1980. “It starts out as notes on a page. When you work with kids on that part and you see how they respond to it and you add retards or expression, and you kind of think of what skills it’s teaching and how to work with it that way, it’s just really fun to bring something new.”
