NPR Classical Music Show to Feature Young Virtuosos

By Richard Scheinin, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Feb. 4–People have this idea that classical music is dead, or withering away. It’s a lie. The Bay Area — the whole country, really — is swimming with kid virtuosos, happily perfecting their Paganini after doing their algebra. The problem is, hardly anyone pays attention to them. It’s a Paris Hilton world.

Still, young classical musicians do have a forum: “From the Top,” a National Public Radio show with a weekly audience of about 750,000, including 60,000 in the Bay Area, its strongest market. Now in its seventh season, it has become the most popular classical music show in the history of public radio, carried by about 250 stations, and this weekend it’s coming to Stanford.

The show lets kids ages 8-18 perform — and also speak their minds about siblings, parents or high school sports. It’s hosted by hipster concert pianist Christopher O’Riley, who looks something like Conan O’Brien and makes CDs of transcribed Radiohead tunes. It debunks “the idea that classical musicians are stilted or otherworldly,” said John McCarthy, director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s preparatory division.

One of McCarthy’s star students, 13-year-old violinist Stella Chen of Palo Alto, will be among the performers at Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium tonight when “From the Top” is taped for broadcast in April (locally on KDFC, one of the few commercial stations that carry it, at 102.1 FM, and on KAZU, 90.3 FM).

Most of the students will be from the Bay Area; all will be from the West Coast. Stella, who took up her instrument at age 6, will play a crazily difficult piece, “Tambourin Chinois” by Fritz Kreisler, a master violinist from early in the 20th century.

The daughter of a chip-designer dad and a mom who stays at home with the children, Stella isn’t your stereotypical music geek. She’s a regular kid — albeit an A student — in the eighth grade at Terman Middle School in Palo Alto. She has braces, enjoys skating and soccer.

It’s just that she has “always loved the sound of the violin,” she said, and thinks classical music is “just really beautiful. And I like playing it because it poses many challenges for me, and I like having challenges. And the music is, like, so happy.”

The concert has been sold out for a while now; it’s the hottest concert of the season for Stanford Lively Arts. How come?

A lively show

For one thing, listeners respond to “From the Top” because it’s always fun to cheer for talented young people like Stella, who practices two or three hours a night, depending on the homework situation. Beyond that, the program is lively, at times even goofy, with a teenage roving reporter and live skits (the musicians participate) alongside the music.

It sends the message that classical music is thriving at a grass-roots level, even though few realize it these days. When McCarthy was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” with the New York Philharmonic were being broadcast on network television. Classical music has been pushed to the media’s margins in the decades since.

“From the Top” is something of a corrective. This fall it begins production of a weekly, half-hour public television show, again hosted by O’Riley and with a concept similar to the hour-long radio program. The first season of “From the Top” for television is scheduled to be taped live this fall at Carnegie Hall for broadcast in the spring of 2007.

O’Riley contends that national “interest in classical music is pretty healthy” and that the show is sparking an additional “rejuvenating” effect. In its early days, the show drew a lot of talent from the preparatory divisions of major conservatories, like San Francisco’s, but “the shock and joy,” he said, “has been discovering stellar kids who are privately taught in little towns in North Dakota and Nebraska. Classical music training in America has never taken a back seat.”

He admits, of course, what can’t be denied, that classical audiences, in general, are graying; that numerous major American orchestras are struggling with ticket sales and finances; that arts and music funding is off, and that music training in the public schools has widely vanished.

Still, “From the Top” is a window into a media-starved yet still active sub-culture. These kids are out there: about 500 at the San Francisco Conservatory’s preparatory division, including Stella Chen, and about 4,000 if you include those divisions at the seven other major conservatories in the United States. And that’s only the very tip of the iceberg.

Less quantifiably, symphony orchestras and professional music organizations around the country are involved with educational outreach to schools. And youth symphonies are thriving: There are a dozen or so in the Bay Area, some with multiple ensembles, in which hundreds of children rehearse and perform. Multiply that nationally to get a sense of how widespread musical activity is, remembering that thousands of independent music schools and studios also operate around the nation.

But because arts funding in general, and public school funding for music in particular, are “continually cut back, what gets attention are the cuts,” said Nicholas Isaacs, director of the music school at Mountain View’s non-profit Community School of Music and Arts, where about 800 music lessons and 70 music classes happen weekly and a “Young Musicians of the Bay Area” concert series takes place in a new concert hall.

Stella Chen isn’t the only kid from around here involved in “From the Top.” Ariadne Smith, a 16-year-old guitarist from San Jose who studies at the San Francisco Conservatory, is being flown to Tallahassee soon to tape a segment.

Decided to try out

Late last year, another guitarist from San Jose at the conservatory, 16-year-old Guillaume De Zwirek, heard the show would be holding local auditions and decided to try out. He had been listening to the program for five years with his father and long dreamed of performing on it.

He made the cut — and was flown to Maui for a taping on Jan. 13. In front of a sold-out house, he performed a virtuoso arrangement of “La Foule,” a French song made famous by Edith Piaf.

Guillaume, who plans to major in music and drama in college, also talked on-air to O’Riley about his hero, actor Jim Carrey, and found “From the Top” to be “such an energy rush, probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” he said.

“It’s helped me focus in on what I want to do with my life: making people love what I love. It’s made me like guitar so much.”

Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5069.

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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

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