Three young finalists in the fifth annual Elizabeth Loker International Chamber Competition performed as featured soloists with the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra for top prize in a matinee concert Sunday at Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center.
Violinist Sophia Werner, winner of the 2024 concerto competition at Juilliard School in Manhattan, where she’s also a Kovner Fellow and has played with the Julliard Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, performed Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. Another Juilliard student, pianist Brielle Perez, who is pursuing her master’s in music, played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major. She is also first-prize winner in Juilliard’s Mieczyslaw Munz Piano Scholarship Competition and has performed extensively in the United States and abroad, including Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Mozarteum in Salzburg and Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. The youngest of the three, Mio Imai, selected Dvorak’s Violin Concerto. At 15, Imai has already played as a soloist with major orchestras across the U.S. – from the Nashville Symphony to Vancouver’s. She is also a multiple international competition laureate studying with her hometown Philadelphia Orchestra.
From the first note of Barber’s Violin Concerto, the star-turn allegro defines the piece’s lyrical character before the orchestra has lifted a bow, brass instrument or bass-drum beater. At 22, Werner confidently commanded our attention despite a stirring second-movement oboe solo by MSO’s Noelle Drewes. Werner counters with a rhapsodic passage before rejoining the full orchestra in a rephrasing of the oboe melody. The finale puts the violin soloist in full charge again with her exploration of virtuosic potential as principal interpreter of the composer’s intent, which Werner owned in winning not only first prize in the competition but also the audience-favorite award.
After a brief on-stage appearance by last year’s competition winner, Britton-Rene Collins, Dvorak’s sole violin concerto opened the concert with an orchestral forte of a few bars before Imai boldly won us over with melodic cadenza-style solos that display the mastery demanded in a wide range of the composer’s inventiveness. The finale, as you’d expect from Dvorak’s Czech roots, leans on derivations of folk-dance rhythms to exploit the talents of both the soloist and the orchestra led by maestro Repper and concertmaster Kimberly McCollum.
The Mozart piano concerto presented a sharp contrast for soloist Perez, 24, in terms of the concert program. The opening movement is among the most symphonic of his concerto intros, often compared to the Jupiter Symphony. One early march-like passage will remind you of “La Marseillaise,” the French National Anthem that may have been inspired six years earlier (1786) by Mozart’s Austrian concerto. Orchestral winds are featured alongside piano riffs that intensify in the middle movement, followed by an operatic theme to open the finale building toward a joyful happy ending – no less dramatic than the typical opera tragedy.
The competition, it seemed, came down to the two violinists, while pianist Perez chose a piece that was more orchestral than solo-oriented. By popular vote, perhaps the deciding factor was the captivating beauty of the one-and-only violin concerto created by 20th-century American Samuel Barber. Together, the orchestra and soloist collaborated most effectively on his modern masterpiece.
The panel of judges – Edward Polochick, music director of the Lincoln (Nebraska) Symphony Orchestra; Laura Colgate, concertmaster of the National Philharmonic, and Qing Li, principal second violin of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra – determined the top prize-winner of $5,000, $2,500 for second prize and $1,000 for honorable mention, along with a $500 audience-choice award and the opportunity to play with the full Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Repper, its Grammy-winning music director.
In its five years, the Elizabeth Loker International, named for the former Washington Post executive and MSO supporter who died of cancer in 2015, the competition has drawn more than 400 contestants from across the country and 16 countries in Europe, Asia, North America and the Pacific Rim. It is one of the few such competitions in which final contestants perform with a full, highly professional orchestra. Together with such young soloists, this event gives us hope for the future of great music.
ELIZABETH LOKER INTERNATIONAL CONCERTO FINAL
Sunday, March 15, Todd Performing Arts Center of Chesapeake College, Wye Mills. midatlanticsymphony.org