Youth orchestra collaborates with ballet dancers
All four Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra ensembles will be represented during the nonprofit organization’s season-closing performance.
The May 1 concert at St. Kieran Catholic Church in Chicago Heights includes students from Enduring Strings, the Incredible Opportunity Program, Suburban Youth Symphony Junior Orchestra and Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra as well as dancers from Crete Park District’s ballet program.
“I believe we are going to make a beautiful moment on May 1,” said David Forsman, who has been music director of Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra since 2019.
“We’re going to be presenting the first look at the direction our whole organization will be going for the next little while. We’re going to look different than we ever have. We’re going to be in more places collaborating with more groups like we are with Miss Teresa Anderson’s (ballet)
company for this concert.
“We’re showing how our students integrate with somebody else, and we’re going to do that because that’s how you’re going to make a musical community.”
Anderson will direct the Crete Park District ballet dancers during their performance to Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra playing “Sérénade champêtre” by Joseph Guy Marie Ropartz.
“He is a great composer. This piece is not insubstantial especially for our kids but this piece is wistful. It’s beautiful. You’ll remember it. I love this piece and Ropartz is a really great composer,” said Forsman, of Crete.
The concert also features Enduring Strings performing with Suburban Youth Symphony Junior Orchestra, which prepares performers ages 8-17 for Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra.
“Both Enduring Strings and the junior orchestra will be playing a piece called ‘120 Allegro Parkway’ by Robert S. Frost. It’s a march,” said Forsman, who teaches Enduring Strings, a music education program hosted by Crete United Methodist Church before school for kindergartners to fifth graders.
“For them it’s the first multi-section piece where you can play one idea and move on to another idea and then maybe develop that idea. Maybe they get combined or you go back to the first idea. It’s the first kind of piece that any of them have played like that that has any form.”
The Glenwood Incredible Opportunity Violin Club from Brookwood School District 167 also performs at the concert and is part of the Incredible Opportunity Program led by Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra assistant director Brian Ostrega, who provides beginning string group lessons for ages 8-13.
The show also features Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra, which is for performers ages 8-17 and is the namesake program of the organization. The group of approximately 15 students includes residents of Crete, Homer Glen and the Olympia Fields area.
“I’m really impressed with our kids,” said Forsman, a cellist who performs with pianist Melinda “Mindy” Sondag, who is orchestra manager of Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra, in the Forsman Sondag Duo.
“Every kid in our orchestra has done their work. They have sat down and said, ‘What is required of me here?’ and they have attempted to deliver it. We have no shirkers. I love our kids and they’re pretty cool. They know some stuff that I don’t know.”
A raffle basket fundraiser takes place before the Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra Spring Concert and proceeds will benefit the students of the organization, which has been welcoming students from beginner to advanced for more than five decades.
“All of these programs fall under the roof of Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra,” said Forsman, who has been a freelance cellist for nearly four decades in the Southland.
“Our concerts should be a place for our donors and friends of the organization to get together and to meet each other and greet each other. Our purpose is to make the community a better place.”
“It’s a privilege to do this work and I am very aware that people go out of their way to give kids a musical experience. It’s very important to me that this organization succeed.”
The Suburban Youth Symphony Orchestra Spring Concert, which closes the organization’s 202122 season, will be livestreamed via Facebook at facebook.com/ suburbanyouthsymphonyorchestra.