Tucson violinist Jacqueline Rodenbeck is on a roll.
Fresh from her late January win at the prestigious Sphinx Competition in Detroit, the 17-year-old Pusch Ridge Christian Academy senior on Feb. 9 won the Gold medal in the Tucson Philharmonia Youth Orchestra Competition at Catalina Foothills High School.
Days later she received news that she had been selected for the 2025 National Youth Orchestra of USA (NYO-USA), Carnegie Hall's prestigious summer training program happening July 5-Aug. 7 in New York City.
The teens spend weeks training with professional orchestra musicians leading up to performances in the prestigious Carnegie Hall and an international tour. This summer, the group, under Conductor Gianandrea Noseda, will tour Asia including the orchestra's first-ever trip to Japan.
The honors are an exclamation point to Jacqueline's journey, which started when she was 5 and has included multiple wins in young artist competitions with Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Civic Orchestra of Tucson and Southern Arizona Symphony, as well as placing in several international competitions held online including Bach International Music competition, the International Moscow Music competition and the Clara Schumann International competition chamber division.
Tucson violinist Jacqueline Rodenbeck won the junior division of the prestigious Sphinx competition in early January. She followed it with several other wins.
Winning the Sphinx was a long time coming for Jacqueline, who was 11 when she attended her first three-week Sphinx summer training program. Sphinx is committed to providing training and career opportunities for young African-American and Latino string musicians.
"That's how I got exposed to the Sphinx competition," she said. "A lot of people encouraged me to put in an application. A lot of the teachers there and the friends that I made there, so I decided to put in an application when I was, like, 13."
She didn't make the cut, so she put those ambitions on hold until last December.
"I just decided to put in an application because it's my last year that I'm eligible for the junior division," she said.
The application included performing four or five orchestral excerpts and a solo piece of her choosing, which she recorded on her mom's cell phone.
When she got the email saying she had made it to the semifinal round in Detroit, "I was pretty excited," she recalled.
"The last time I didn't even make it past the preliminaries so I was really excited that I had got into the semifinals," she said.
Jacqueline and eight other semifinalists in the junior division competed before a panel of judges and a small audience in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center.
"It's always kind of surreal walking onto stage because there's so much work that goes into just putting together one piece of music," she said. "It's like the big moment is this moment. So it kind of just doesn't feel real at first because I'm so nervous. But I think as soon as I start playing the first few notes, I start to just kind of relax a little bit and just focus on making the music and enjoying it and having fun."
In the semifinals, Jacqueline played excerpts from William Grant Still's "Summerland," a Mozart violin concerto and the first half of the Bach Chaconne.
"It felt like an audition," she recalled. "Basically I went in and I played my piece and I walked out."
Jacqueline thought she had a fair shot at advancing to the final round, but when she heard her competition playing, some doubt started creeping in.
"I just kept thinking that they were so much better than me and that I didn't have a big chance of getting to the next round," she said. "I was kind of doubting myself a little bit."
The next day, she learned she made the cut.
She had 24 hours to prepare for the final round, performing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 with the Sphinx youth orchestra.
She had played the Mozart years earlier, but for the biggest competition of her young life, she had to relearn it.
"I kind of had to get over how I played it as a kid in order to start playing it in a more mature way with better choices for musicality and things like that," she explained.
She worked on the piece the day before the competition and all the next morning leading up to the noon competition start.
"I felt pretty good about it because I had been practicing and I had been fixing some stuff that I knew wasn't that great in the semifinals," she said. "So I felt pretty good about it."
When she walked onto the Fisher Music Center stage that day, "I honestly was super nervous," she recalled, especially since she was the first of three finalists to perform.
But when she finished playing and the loosely full hall erupted in deafening applause, something told her she might just win this thing.
The Sphinx win came with a $10,000 prize and opportunities to perform with orchestras. Jacqueline is the second Tucsonan in recent history to win a Sphinx. In 2018, Tucson cellist Levi Powe won the junior divison.
Jacqueline plans to double-major in violin performance and environmental science in college; She said she plans to take a gap year after graduating from Pusch Ridge and is considering a number of colleges, including USC and Arizona State to continue working with her longtime teacher.
