Austin sweeps top awards at Orchestra Hall! Lucas garners the Schmitt Prize.

Yesterday, our sixteen year old Junior, Austin Frohmader, won the coveted First Prize of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Young Peoples’ Symphony Concert Association (YPSCA) Concerto Competition. It is one of the most difficult and prestigious competitions in the nation, and Austin is the first of our many finalists – over the years – to win the top prize.  It has been a long time coming!  It has been a long and gruesome road to the top of this one!  Austin was awarded six performances (with the possibility of 2 more) with the world renowned Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis.  He will be presented in a series of concerts for young people in the 2012 concert season.  He will be performing Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra. As part of the top prize, he received $1,500.00.  Austin also received the prestigious Thelma Hunter Award ($200.00) and the Minneapolis Music Teachers Forum Recital Award ($200).  He will present a solo program for this organization on March 1, of this year.  I believe Austin has amassed at least $2.600.00 in winnings so far this year.  As Jo Anne and I like to joke . . . “Play piano – get check!”

Jo Anne and I had a great time yesterday!  Since teachers are prohibited from accompanying their own students, we were able to just sit in the Hall and enjoy hearing our young men’s performances.  Austin gave an absolutely definitive and compelling performance of the Fantasy. He filled that huge place with layered, kaleidoscopic colors.  The cadenzas were very expansive and sensuous as well as explosive.  It was as if he was sitting on a powder keg of musical dynamite.  The vivace (closing section) is a Hungarian Can-Can of sorts, and he drove it right to the edge, without ever going over – always in control.  It was thrilling fun.  We could tell that he had absolutely captured the audience from the first note to the final octaves.  Jo Anne reported to me that the man behind her said he had “goose bumps” throughout the performance.  This is what it is all about!

Our dearest Lucas Jones, a fifteen year old Freshman, was the youngest performer in the final field of twelve musicians (along with another fifteen year old).  Lucas and Austin were two of just four pianists selected for the finals, as it is for all instruments.  Lucas received the very important Schmitt Prize ($500.00).  Lucas’ Chopin exhibited a deeply musical and artistic poetry.  And, although Lucas’ sound is completely unique and different from Austin’s, he also had the power to fill Orchestra Hall with sound.  This was an incredibly important experience for Lucas.  It will be an important part of the mosaic of his manly, artistic character, and his burgeoning virtuosity.  I received a wonderful note from the President of the Minneapolis Music Teachers Forum effusively praising both boys.  Believe me, Lucas’ development, as a young artist, will be watched closely.  One funny thing: Lucas’ mom, the beautiful, amiable, and intelligent Margaret Jones, was no-where to be found, although Lucas’ dad and sister were sitting right next to us.  Jo Anne and I brought brown paper bags (just kidding) in case of Margaret’s possible hyper-ventilating.  But no one could find her.  We think she was hiding in one of the doorways along the long corridors of the first tier – or perhaps in one of the Ladies restrooms!!  Well, hopefully, next time, Margaret!!

One twinge of wistful regret: that our own beloved teacher and mentor, Martin Marks, could not be there to hear the boys yesterday.  He was our musical father and the greatest influence on our artistic and personal lives.  We were incredibly close to him from the time I was fourteen to when he passed away six years ago.  Jo Anne and I thought of him so much yesterday.  He was a magnificently gifted and powerful artist, almost too sensitive to live.  He had the deepest, most compelling interpretive insight into the great piano literature of anyone I have known.  His too infrequent performances made everyone crazy with awe and excitement.  I think we thought of him so much yesterday, because the boys exemplified, so beautifully, our studio’s philosophy of service to the music first, last, and always.  Mr. Marks always talked to us, from the time we were teenagers until his physical passing, that if we wanted to serve ourselves and others – serve the music first.  Austin and Lucas played without any histrionics of any kind.  They made the event about the music – not about them.  They were there to deliver the body and soul of the music, and deliver it they did!!  He would have been thrilled how the boys played yesterday and would have talked about it for weeks.  Somehow, I know he heard it, as he lives on in Jo Anne and me.

Yours in Music –

Joe & Jo Anne