Strathmore Hosts Students

More than 10,000 second grade students from Montgomery County Public Schools will experience classical music, many for the first time, when the Music Center at Strathmore hosts the annual Strathmore Student Concerts on November 27-30, 2012. Students fill the 2,000-seat concert hall in droves seven times over four consecutive days for this community tradition, a hallmark of the arts center’s community outreach initiatives.

Through the performance with the National Philharmonic, students learn about the four families of instruments that make up the orchestra. The multimedia experience includes video and images projected onto a large screen hovering above the orchestra, depicting instruments discussed as pieces are being per¬formed. Students also get the chance to sing along with the orchestra and move to the Little Train of Caipira.

The concert also features young instrumentalists from the metropolitan D.C. area high schools who are winners of the National Philharmonic’s annual Concerto Competition, which affords serious young musicians an opportunity to play with a live orchestra. Soloists are violist Aiden Kane (Veritas Press Scholars Academy); Yaeji Shin (Atholton High School in Columbia, MD); violinist Celine Nakpil (Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, MD); and harpist Alyssa Katahara (Langley High School in McLean, VA).

The second grader concerts represent a $124,000 investment in the community. Strathmore also hosts a similar program for fifth graders, bringing the total investment by Strathmore Hall Foundation, Inc., Geico, Jordan Kitt’s Music, Capital One Bank and the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation to $248,000.

The first student concert was held in 2004.

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