The Western Michigan University School of Music presents its annual Concerto Concert on Sunday, Apr 26 at 7 p.m. in Miller Auditorium, featuring three student soloists selected through the WMU Concerto Competition. Graduate assistant conductor Josh Zallar, pianist Alan Cary, cellist Charlie Mueller, and pianist Zerui Pan joined Cara Lieurance to preview the performance.
Zallar, who is completing his graduate conducting studies this week before heading to Indiana University's PhD program in musicology, opens the concert with Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture. "It's humorous in sections," he says of the brief, crowd-pleasing work. "There's lots of trading off between the winds and the strings and the brass." He studies under WMU Symphony Orchestra music director Bruce Uchimura.
Cary, a junior transfer from Shenandoah Conservatory who now studies with Dr. Yu-Lien The, performs the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 — his first foray into Beethoven concertos after years focused on Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin. He credits a calm pre-audition ritual for his focused performance: "I got a nice hot tea before to calm me down — I made sure it was uncaffeinated, of course."
Mueller, a Chicago-born junior cellist studying with Uchimura, tackles the first movement of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1. He draws inspiration from the composer's fraught life in Soviet Russia: "I just like to think of the environment that Shostakovich was composing in — how he was always paranoid of what Stalin would think of his music." Sunday will mark his first time performing with a full orchestra.
Pan, a first-year master's student studying with Professor Lori Sims, closes the concert with the final movement of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 — a piece he polished just one week before the competition. He describes Prokofiev's sound as "very energetic, virtuosic," and notes the concerto is "very playful, with lots of contrast between the soloist and the orchestra."
Tickets are available at the door or at www.wmich.edu/music/events.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
