High school musicians get tips from Grammy-nominated violinist, JSO conductor

Feb. 10—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Reza Shayesteh and Boyi Chen played Johann Sebastian Bach's "Double Violin Concerto" on Friday on Richland High School's auditorium stage, while four-time Grammy Award nominee Curtis Stewart attentively watched and listened.

When they completed the song, Stewart smiled, applauded and immediately started offering pointers to the young musicians.

His lesson was part of an educational forum in which Stewart and the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra's Grammy-winning music director, James Blachly, shared some of their knowledge with more than 100 members of the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association District 4/6 high school orchestra.

"It's a super-big honor to be playing with a violinist of the caliber of Curtis Stewart," said Shayesteh, a Bishop McCort Catholic High School student. "I've been a fan of his for a long time now. It's awesome that we get to work with him."

Chen, who attends Richland, added that he was "really excited to just go ahead and play with such a great and talented person."

The experience reminded Stewart of when he was a young student and professional musicians would come to his classes.

"I'm just happy to share the energy and kind of spirit of music-making, to reinvigorate, just get them to continue to be inspired to practice and dig into their instruments in different ways," Stewart said.

JSO Executive Director Erin Codey said that having Stewart and Blachly work with the students from several counties "was just a really wonderful opportunity for us to continue with our education initiatives."

PMEA's district musicians had been practicing together for weeks in preparation for an annual concert that is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Richland auditorium.

Coincidentally, Stewart was in town preparing for his concert with the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra that is set to take place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown's Pasquerilla Performing Arts Center.

"We don't normally have this opportunity to bring a famous guest in, so that just happened to work out," PMEA District 4/6 orchestra coordinator Angela Brumbaugh said.

The performance by Stewart and the JSO is titled "Mountaintop Masterpieces by Perry and Brahms." It will include "Concerto for Violin," a piece by the 20th- century Black classical composer Julia Perry.

"This is a piece that we both feel very strongly about, that it should be in the repertoire, that it should be performed around the world — but right now this is the third public performance of the piece in history, so this is kind of a historic night for us as an orchestra to be performing this piece, and Curtis is a great champion of it," Blachly said.