Boltz Middle School orchestra invited to perform at music festival in San Francisco
While two other local school orchestras were performing at a national festival in Indianapolis, another was in San Francisco as an invited participant in the Festival of Gold.
Boltz Middle School’s Chamber Orchestra was asked to send in an audition tape and then selected to participate Saturday through Tuesday in a variety of clinics run by top orchestra musicians from throughout the country and then perform at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, director Melissa Claeys said Thursday.
It was the perfect opportunity to showcase the musical talents of “a really special group of kids,” said Claeys, now in her 11th year at Boltz.
Boltz was one of three school orchestras participating in the Festival of Gold in San Francisco, she said. The organization hosts similar events in Chicago and Nashville, Tennessee. High school and middle school orchestras, bands and choirs can qualify by earning a qualifying score from judges at state or regional competitions, she said, or through a submitted audition tape, as Boltz did.
Claeys said she has an unusually talented group of musicians in the Chamber Orchestra, an audition-only ensemble that meets before school three days a week, and was trying to find opportunities for them to perform on a larger stage outside of Fort Collins when she received a call from Festival of Gold organizers asking her to submit an audition tape.
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She credited the success of the Fort Collins High School orchestra program and its director, John Hermanson, for raising the profile and talent level of young orchestra musicians in the area. Hermanson serves as chair of the Colorado American String Teachers Association’s annual large group festival.
“We work closely with John, and John does such an amazing job with our ASTA festival, bringing in national-level clinicians, so word has spread about the orchestra programs in Fort Collins,” Claeys said.
The Festival of Gold judges listened to the Boltz Chamber Orchestra, liked what they heard, and invited the group to participate along with two other orchestras and a variety of others in the four-day event. Students attended workshops and clinics with top musicians, rehearsed for their performance and joined an orchestra from a California school on stage for a combined performance under the direction of well-known music educator Robert Gillespie, a retired professor from Ohio State University’s School of Music.
Four members of the Boltz orchestra were also selected to provide musical accompaniment for a school choir that was performing at the festival, Claeys said.
Judges, all respected musicians, provided feedback on the students’ performances.
Boltz’s trip overlapped by two days with the Music for All National Festival in Indianapolis, where Hermanson’s top orchestra from Fort Collins High and the top orchestra from Lesher Middle School, which like Boltz feeds into Fort Collins High, were performing as invited participants.
The Festival of Gold workshops, clinics and rehearsals were all held at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis hotel, where the Boltz orchestra stayed.
Sightseeing excursions, Claeys said, included walking on the Golden Gate Bridge, visits to Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, Golden Gate Park and a San Francisco Bay cruise. The group used San Francisco’s trolleys and street cars exclusively to get around the city for one full day, she said.
“It was just a really well-rounded rich experience for our students, with a lot of facets,” she said.
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Boltz Middle School orchestra performs at festival in San Francisco
