In Cal Poly’s Performing Arts Center (PAC) on Saturday, Mar. 9 at 7:30 p.m., the Cal Poly Symphony will perform their winter concert, titled “Romeo and Juliet.” Four student soloists and one composer will be performing in the show.
The four soloists are seniors Jayden Perez, Melissa Scarpelli, Simone Gabriel and sophomore Helena Fuller, and the composer is senior Wyatt Willard. All five students are music majors.
The students will perform pieces from Sergei Prokofiev’s symphony “Romeo and Juliet.” Perez will be the first performer and will play William Walton’s Viola Concerto on the violin. Gabriel will follow Perez with a piano performance of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16. Scarpelli will then sing Antonín Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon” and the final solo will be Fuller’s vocal performance of “I Could Have Danced All Night” from “My Fair Lady.”
The show will end with the entire orchestra performing “Falling from Sky,” composed by Willard.
Every student in the music department is assigned one professor as a private instructor to take applied lessons with and the symphony performers have been working with theirs to fine tune their performances. The soloists have not practiced together yet.
“Getting into character is kind of a big part of [practicing],” Fuller said. “And I watched the movie, too, which is ‘My Fair Lady.’”
The student performers were picked because they won the Cal Poly Symphony’s annual solo competition in November, which occurs in front of a panel of music faculty members. This competition occurs every year on the Friday afternoon of week seven during fall quarter and the requirements are for students to be music majors, to not have won the competition in the previous year, to be in good academic standing and to be taking lessons with a member of the Cal Poly music faculty.
The panel decides who is going to perform in the concert after the competition.
“[The decision is] not like a rubric,” David Arrivée, the Cal Poly Symphony director, said. “It’s just that I noticed this about the projection and insisted. Their phrasing, the musicality, I noticed this about their memory or lack of memory. This is what concerns me, this is what I think is working really well.”
Tickets are between $15 and $20 for the public, $10 for students and Cal Poly staff and faculty will receive a 20% discount off their ticket. Tickets can be purchased from the Cal Poly Ticket Office between noon and 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays or by phone at (805) 756-4849.
“Come see the concert,” Arrivée said. “It’s really one of my favorites every year because some of these people are really not used to doing solos, so they’re rising heroically to this totally new challenge in their life.”