John Fawcett plays on the sidewalk in Eugene
For a town with so many young musicians, Eugene doesn’t very often give them a chance to perform. I don’t mean in a little piano teacher recital – though those are fine. I mean up on a big stage, in concert with professional musicians.
On Saturday evening, the Oregon Mozart Players will take a giant step toward correcting that problem. Two young violinists – John Fawcett, from Bend, and Claire Wells, from Eugene – will each perform as part of a regular OMP season concert in Beall Hall.
They were selected in a two-stage audition, much as adult professional players might be. First, young musicians around the state were invited to submit performance videos. Then a jury picked a handful of finalists, who came here and played in an afternoon-long session in December. And from those nervous performances, two winners were selected – one from each age division, 14 and over and 13 and under.
The inspiration for all this comes from OMP’s artistic director Kelly Kuo. He grew up in rural eastern Oregon and knows first hand how important such artistic competitions are to aspiring performers who don’t live in urban centers.
I first met Claire Wells when she was nine – she’s 13 now – and I wrote an article about her for the Register-Guard. She was an amazing musician four years ago, so it was no surprise to see she was chosen to play on Saturday.
In those days she played a three-quarter size violin. These days she plays a fullsize model. “It’s a very good violin,” she said by phone one day from Austin, Texas, where she is studying with Brian Lewis. “It’s a Strad. It’s a really bright violin. It really responds well and it has many different colors.”
The violin belongs to her father, John Wells. He and his wife, Cheryl Luan, are both violinists; they made the decision long ago to throw everything they could into supporting Claire’s musical talent.
On Saturday she’ll play the second through fourth movements of Alexander Arutiunian’s 1988 Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra.
Claire is already making her way in the professional music world. She performed recently with the Jalisco Philharmonica in Guadalajara, and plays next month with the San Angelo Symphony in Texas.
As to the future? “Obviously I will go to conservatory for music,” she said. “I do want this work to continue, getting better with violin and traveling and paying concerts. I just want to see where it takes me.”
John Fawcett, whom I hadn’t met before, is the kind of bright, not-quite-nerdy kid who can have you in stitches with his sense of humor in five minutes flat.
The 14-year-old is the son of two physicians in Bend, neither of whom is a classical musician but who both love music.
“We have a lot of music stuff,” John said one recent afternoon when he was visiting Eugene with his mother.
Like Wells, he’s been interested in music for longer than he can remember; his parents tell him he became fascinated by the violin at the age of two, after watching a fiddler play. He started lessons when he was three, dropped them because he couldn’t pay attention, and took up instruction once more when he was five.
He’s studying with Eugene violinist Kathryn Lucktenberg, former concertmaster of the Eugene Symphony. “I really like her,” he said. “She can be loopy. She can be warm, she can be cold, she can be many things. When I first met Kathryn she warned me she would be very strict, and I would have to be open to her pushing me a lot.”
John is a member of the Central Oregon Symphony and is co-concertmaster of the Central Oregon Youth Orchestra and first violinist of the Armer Quartet.
At Saturday’s concert he’ll play the third movement of Antonín Dvořák’s 1879 Violin Concerto in A minor.
Also on the program are the overture to Wolfgang Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”; Eric Ewazen’s 1987 Ballade for Clarinet, Harp and String Orchestra, with Carol Robe on clarinet and Jane Allen on harp; and Mozart’s Symphony No. 31, the “Paris.”
Young Soloist Showcase
Oregon Mozart Players
With violin soloists Claire Wells and John Fawcett
7:30 p.m. Saturday, January 31
Beall Concert Hall at the University of Oregon