PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT FOR FROST WIND ENSEMBLE

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Musical conductor: Gary Green, left, professor and chair of instrumental performance, will conduct the Frost Wind Ensemble at Carnegie Hall.

Performing at Carnegie Hall has been a dream of University of Miami student Andy Roseborrough ever since he decided to make music his lifelong profession.

“Any time I would read a major soloist’s program notes, there would
be a list of important venues they had performed in, and Carnegie Hall almost always topped the list,” says Roseborrough, a graduate student at the Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music. “Performing there not only became an impressive thing to hear about but a dream of mine.”

On March 29 Roseborrough’s dream will come true when he and 47 other students in the Frost Wind Ensemble perform in the music hall where giants such as Leonard Bernstein and Leopold Stokowski have conducted and where jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and popular entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, The Beatles, and Stevie Wonder have performed.

The ensemble will perform the world premiere of Wolf Rounds, a score written specifically for the group by acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Christopher Rouse. Wolf Rounds is the most recent in a series of commissioned works made possible by the Abraham Frost Commission Series, an endowment established by UM Trustee Phillip Frost in honor of his late father. The wind ensemble’s two-hour performance will also consist of works by Bach, Stravinsky, German composer Paul Hindemith, and French composer André Jolivet.

“This is a very important opportunity for these students. We’re asking them to rise to a very high level of performance, and I think that’s a very good thing for them,” says Gary Green, professor and chair of instrumental performance, director of bands, and conductor of the Frost Wind Ensemble.

For the past year, Frost Wind Ensemble students have practiced hundreds of hours for the upcoming performance, rehearsing three days a week in class and many times on their own. They have been mentored not only by Green but also by several other faculty members in the Frost School of Music. Assistant professor of trumpet Craig Morris, former principal trumpet with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will perform with the ensemble.

The group’s Carnegie Hall performance has been years in the making. About four years
ago, Green contacted Rouse to see if the renowned composer would be interested in writing a musical score for the Frost Wind Ensemble. Rouse initially said no, but over the last two-and-a-half years, their talks intensified and Rouse agreed to write a piece for the group.

“It’s very difficult to get prominent composers to write for university students,” Green says, “but [Frost School of Music] Dean William Hipp had a vision that he wanted to see compositions of a very high level written for the Frost Wind Ensemble.”

“For the students who will be performing, this will be a profound life experience never to be forgotten,” Dean Hipp says. “They will be making history, since this will be the first time in the Frost School’s 80-year existence that a student ensemble has performed in this prestigious venue.”

While Green, who has been teaching music for more than 40 years, has been to Carnegie Hall on several occasions, this will be the first time he has ever conducted there. “I’m always in awe of its history and tradition,” he says. He calls his upcoming conducting appearance “a realization, a culmination of work coming together in one cohesive performance.”

For the students, the performance will be the stuff of dreams. As a youngster growing up in a small, rural Ohio town, Frost School doctoral student Shawn Vondran would watch performances from Carnegie Hall on the PBS television network and dream about performing in the famous concert hall. Vondran will play the euphonium, a brass instrument that looks like a small tuba, in one of the pieces that will be performed by the ensemble. Says the Ohio native, “Stepping on that stage will be the realization that all dreams, big and small, have the potential to become reality.”