By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When four of the top undergraduate and graduate musicians at BGSU take the stage as soloists Saturday night, they will have plenty of support. The winners of the Competitions in Music – sophomore saxophonist Mary Borus, sophomore pianist Isabella Brill, doctoral student flutist Shannon Lotti , and first year graduate student pianist Apostolos-Angelos Konstantakis – will perform with the Bowling Green Philharmonia, Feb 10 at 8 p.m. in Kobacker Hall. Tickets are $10. The concert will also be live streamed.
For three of the four soloists, this will be their first performance in front of an orchestra.
“My dream has been to perform with an orchestra,” Konstantakis said. He will play Concerto for Piano No. 2 in A Major (in one movement) by Franz Liszt. Emily Freeman Brown, the director of orchestral activities, will conduct.
The concerto “fits my character,” Konstantakis said, “It’s virtuosic. It’s powerful. It moves a lot.”
Back in his native Greece, he played the piece with orchestra in a competition, which he won, but that was not a performance. This appearance with BG Philharmonia is especially appreciated because in May he returns to Greece to perform it with an orchestra there.
Flutist Lotti has plenty of experience in orchestral playing, but never as the soloist in a concerto. She will perform Concerto for Flute (in one movement) by Joan Tower with Eden Treado conducting.
“It’s like a rollercoaster ride,” Lotti said. “It’s like you always at the top ready to fall down. … having the orchestra behind me has the potential to motivate me and keep my energy up through the 17-minute piece. It can be exhausting at times.”
She selected the Tower concerto because “I wanted to do something that would make me feel like I was standing on top of the world on stage, and this concerto is so fast and powerful and in its slow sections, it’s so devastating. Those qualities really give me that opportunity.”
She noted that at her two previous schools, she had competed unsuccessfully in those concerto competitions. Those failures fueled her desire to improve as a musician.
Brill said that performing with the Philharmonia requires a lot of listening. Unlike playing solo, she has to be attentive to the tempo, neither rushing, nor slowing down. “It’s amazing. It’s another feeling.”
Borus is an exception, not just on the program, but to most of the others who have won the BGSU competition: This will be her third time soloing with an orchestra. Last winter she performed with the Toledo Symphony as the winner of its Young Artist competition, and also with the Royal Oaks (Michigan) Orchestra. Those were different concertos, one my Darius Milhaud and one by Ralph Vaughn Williams. She’s also performed as soloist with a wind ensemble.
On Saturday she will play the Energetic movement from Concerto for Saxophone by Paul Creston, conducted by Kyle Wendling.
“It’s the most exhilarating experience,” Borus said. “This piece has a very dramatic opening where it has all these long runs, all these virtuosic things for the saxophone. I liked all the opportunities for expression in this piece. I love the really singing moments. This piece has so many opportunities to show the lyricism in my sound.”
Borus started taking saxophone lessons just before she began sixth grade. She took lessons with her mother, a clarinetist, who gives private instruction and works as an arts administrator.
She comes from a musical family. Her parents and her brother play clarinet. Her uncle plays bass trombone in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and her grandfather plays saxophone and had been a clarinetist in a U.S. Army Field Band.
Her grandfather’s experience is one reason her career goal is to join one of the service bands. She plans to audition for all of them.
“I’m driven by that and seeing the military bands,” Borus said. “I’ve seen the Air Force, Navy, and Army bands. I’ve seen them all. They sound so magnificent, and the musicianship is so high. I want to be a part of that.”
In the next couple years, she plans to also learn flute and clarinet to improve her chances.
Borus played in the Detroit Symphony’s youth wind ensemble, which is conducted by BGSU faculty member Ken Thompson, and she liked his approach to leading the band.
That led her to BGSU where she found a welcoming environment. “I was greeted with open arms,” she said.
That included from Professor of Saxophone John Sampen.
Lotti came to BGSU because she wanted to continue studying with Terri Sánchez with whom she studied during her undergraduate years at the University of Texas at Arlington. After getting her master’s degree, she decided to apply for BGSU’ doctorate in contemporary music program in order to further explore new music and to continue to study with Sánchez.
Lotti started studying flute in fourth grade after having dabbled in piano and violin.
She selected flute, she said, because it fit in her backpack. Her parents were divorced, and she spent a lot of time bouncing between households.
“I really stuck with it because of how versatile it is,” Lotti said. “You get to play all these soaring melodies, but then when you get into contemporary music there’s so much that’s not characteristically flute things that can be done on the flute,” she said. “That made it very interesting to me.”
Brill, a native of Brazil, started playing piano at 5. Her parents wanted her to play an instrument, so she had something to occupy her time after school. She didn’t study classical music until she was 11, she started classical music. She was drawn to the challenge. Then she discovered classical composers. “I fell in love with their music and the drama, especially Rachmaninoff.” That’s why she wanted to perform the movement from his No. 1.
She wanted to go to America or Europe to continue her studies because of a lack of support for classical music in Brazil. She met BGSU Professor of Piano Solungga Liu while she was visiting Brazil. That encounter and a major scholarship convinced Brill to attend BGSU.
Konstantakis also started playing piano at 5. He’s not from a family of musicians, but he was inspired to continue playing by “all this beautiful music. I just loved the music.”
At Ionian University, Corfu, Greece, he studied with Lambis Vassiliadis, whom he considers his mentor. “He changed my life , my way of thinking about music, my way of practicing.”
The university hosted a number of seminars bringing faculty from several American universities, including BGSU. That’s where he met Liu. He was impressed by both her playing and his teaching. Though not a native speaker, he is an American citizen, and he wanted to study in the United States. He decided he wanted to study with Liu.
While this is his first experience playing a concerto with an orchestra, he dreams of playing with orchestras around the world, and the Competitions in Music gives him the opportunity to get a start on realizing that dream.
