Four violin students at the Jacobs School of Music took the stage at the Simon Music Center’s Ford Hall on Saturday for a competition they’d spent months practicing for. Each played for nearly 40 minutes.
The competition heard each’s performances of Dmitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 99, an extremely technically demanding piece written by Shostakovich in 1947-48.
After the general competition Friday, Jacobs students Arthur Wang, Rachel Yi, Hyejin Kim and Jose Hernandez made it to the finals.
A jury of faculty members and a guest judge assessed the competitors: viola professor Li-Kuo Chang, cello professor Emilio Colon, and award-winning violinist Ayano Ninomiya, who served as the guest judge.
Hernandez said Saturday was his first competition like this.
“This is such a competitive and stressful work, but I really wanted to start getting into it,” Hernandez said. “There was no better chance than to start with this one.”
Hernandez is from Venezuela and had been playing Shostakovich’s music since he was a child in El Sistema, a national network of children’s orchestras in his country.
Now, he’ll be performing the lengthy concerto alongside guest conductor Joseph Young and the Jacobs concert orchestra on Jan. 31 at the Musical Arts Center.
“It's gonna be a wonderful experience,” Hernandez said, “With such a wonderful orchestra surrounded by wonderful musicians.”
After the winner was announced, Wang said that he felt a bit of relief simply because the event was finally over. He said that being the first performer of the evening was not too nerve-wracking — after all, Wang had been practicing this concerto for a whole semester. But he also admitted that it had taken “guts.”
Wang also said he had a strong support system in the audience.
“It was my friends, and lots of my friends’ friends who came to support me,” Wang said.
One of the faculty members in the audience, violin professor Itamar Zorman, remained in the recital hall to watch all four performances.
“It’s just very powerful music," Zorman said, “and it has many things: it's sarcastic, but there's also very heartfelt movements and moments in the third movement, especially.”
Zorman said he has performed this piece before, as well as others from Shostakovich's repertoire. He described the concerto as incredibly taxing to perform, given its length of 40 minutes and that it is "emotionally intense.”
Professor Simin Ganatra, the chair of the strings department and coordinator of the event, said she was impressed by each of the performers.
“It's such a wonderful achievement just to be able to get up and play this whole concerto,” Ganatra said. “And we had four people do that really beautifully.”
