Photo provided Elizabeth Laws, a winner of the Laura Showalter Youth Concerto Competition, will perform with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 15 at The Commons.
There’s many different ways composers throughout history have written music about love, from the platonic to the romantic.
The Columbus Symphony Orchestra will show these kinds of love through music in their upcoming concert titled “Love is in the Air,” at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 15 at The Commons. The concert will also feature 16-year-old Elizabeth Laws, a winner of the Laura Showalter Youth Concerto Competition, playing her concert piece with the orchestra.
“I’m really excited to be playing with an orchestra, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” Laws said. “It’s definitely not an experience I’ve had before and I also really like the piece and the expression that it requires. And the conductor, of course, working with him.”
Tickets for adults cost $15 and senior and student tickets cost $10. Children under 12 have free admission. Tickets can be purchased at csoindiana.org.
A home school student, Laws began playing violin in 2020, but she also has a history playing the piano. She comes from a musical family, with her father Aaron Laws also playing french horn in the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. She will be playing alongside him during this upcoming concert, she said.
“I really like how much you can express yourself in (music),” Laws said. “It’s really incredible how many different emotions can be portrayed with different styles of music, especially.”
Laws auditioned for the Laura Showalter Youth Concerto Competition, an opportunity for high school aged students to prepare a musical piece and receive a $500 scholarship, with the piece “Rieding Concerto No. 2 in B Minor.” That piece was recommended by her teacher Jason Chen in Bloomington, and she said she was really excited to be named one of the winners in the competition.
“I put a lot of work into my piece so I wasn’t incredibly surprised. I originally had planned to play a certain piece and worked really hard on that and then a week before, we found out that it didn’t have orchestral accompaniment so we had to switch to a different piece,” Laws said. “So I didn’t have as much preparation as I had hoped, but it still went really well.”
The first and third movements of that piece will be what Laws performs at the upcoming concert. Because she doesn’t know exactly what tempo the orchestra will be playing at during the concert, she has been rehearsing it with different tempos in recordings.
“… I think that will get me well prepared to be able to adapt to whatever tempo they decide to take it in the end,” Laws said.
In addition to Laws’ piece, the orchestra will perform the nostalgic and melancholy “My Funny Valentine” by Richard Rodgers, Bizet’s “Carmen Suite No. 1” and selections from “West Side Story.” A movement from “March to the Scaffold,” a piece written by Berlioz about him falling in love with an Irish Shakespearean actress, will be performed as well, Columbus Symphony Orchestra music director Christopher Bade said.
“The problem was he didn’t speak English and she didn’t speak French, so that’s a love story that goes awry because the march to the scaffold is the cutting off of the head of the artist who’s taken too much opium,” Bade said. “So it’s just looking at different ways that composers have written music about love. Obviously, some of them are sentimental and some of them are morbid, but that’s the way music goes sometimes.”
Laws will be performing in this concert, while the other winner of the Laura Showalter Youth Competition Gabe Boggs will play at the next concert in April.
Bade looks forward to collaborating with the players in the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and conducting a young people’s concert. He said it’s always rewarding and satisfying to conduct those, as he believes that the young people’s concert is always the most important out of any in an orchestra’s season as it can help develop an interest in music in the younger generation.
“You know, when you’re like 8, 9, 10, 11 years old, that’s when you get a chance maybe to play an instrument for the first time,” Bade said. “And if you can make a positive impact on the kids and then on the parents, then we’re going to have more young people involved in music.”
