Jacqueline Avent Concerto Competition Finalists Announced

by Bailey Basham, Messenger Intern
Five finalists were recently announced for the Jacqueline Avent Concerto Competition.
Violinist Gustavo Arauz of San Jose, Costa Rica; violinist Ryan Huo from Henan, China; double bassist Bowen Ha from Shanghai; cellist Jared Murray of Lanesville, Ind.; and cellist and last year’s competition winner Bethany Bobbs of Houston will all play with an orchestra specifically formed for the Jacqueline Avent Concerto Competition Concert.
Walter Nance, C’54, and Mayna Avent Nance of Sewanee established the Jacqueline Avent Summer Music Festival Scholarship in 2007, in memory of Mayna Nance’s elder sister.
“My sister was so bound to music, so when the music festival began in the 50s, she devoted herself to being there and to every concert,” said Mayna Nance. “She loved music and books beyond anything else. In my studio, there are stacks and stacks of the recordings she accumulated over the years. It has stayed there just exactly as she left it.”
Gustavo Arauz, a student of Instituto Nacional de Música in San Jose, has been playing the violin since he was four years old. Now 22, Arauz is a finalist in the Jacqueline Avent Concerto Competition.
“It’s 100 percent thanks to my mom that I am here,” said Arauz. “She died four years ago, and she made me play when I was younger. I hated it, and I told her when I turned 15, I would be done. Then I turned 15, and I told her when I’m 17, I’m done. At 17, I told her when I’m 18, I’m done.”
But Arauz did not stop at 18. He got to learn a piece he had always loved—Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in Dm—and from there, he fell in love.
“Before, I hated practicing—I never practiced before—but now I love to practice,” said Arauz. “When you start preparing a piece, you have nothing. You build and build and build, and then you have something amazing. There’s one piece, but there are infinite ways to play it. After you work so hard, it becomes yours.”
Ryan Huo attends China’s leading music school, the Middle School attached to Center Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Huo is currently 17-years-old and has been playing the violin for nine years.
For his audition for the Jacqueline Avent Concerto Competition, Huo played Jean Sibelius’s only concerto ever written, “Violin Concerto in Dm.”
“The reason I played Sibelius’s violin concerto for the audition is that I love the strong passion buried deep in the peaceful melody,” said Huo. “His music is not easy to express—mysterious and frozen on the surface,with fire and flames on the inside. You can just feel the sorrow and the anger in this movement.”
Sibelius’s violin concerto is structured in three movements, and Huo performed the first movement for his audition.
James Murray is currently a student at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, majoring in cello performance.
For the past several years, Murray has been working on Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Opus 10.” For his second year at the SSMF, he auditioned for the concerto competition with movement one of Shostakovich’s concerto.
During the school year, Murray studies under Paul York, accomplished cellist, chamber musician and string faculty member at the University of Louisville.
Bowen Ha is a student at the The Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The 15-year-old has spent much of his life involved with music, first learning to play the piano at just three years old.
“I played for four years, and then I started playing the cello. I played the cello for three years.”
Ha decided to learn to play the double bass after his three years playing the cello.
“At first, I wanted to learn the cello for my major, but I thought it was too difficult so I chose the bass,” said Ha.
Ha auditioned for the concerto competition with Nicolo Paganini’s theme for the violin from Gioachino Rossini’s 1818 opera “Mose in Egitto.”
“When I was younger, my mother always played the accompaniment with the violin and I fell in love with the violin music,” said Ha. “Since then, I have loved playing violin music on the bass.”
Bethany Bobbs is a Houston Symphony substitute cellist and attends the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston.
Bobbs, 14-years-old, has already won five concerto competitions and soloed with five orchestras.
“My whole family is musical. I have seven siblings, and we all know how to play the piano and one other instrument,” said Bobbs. “My sister Susanna plays the violin. I started with the violin, but I decided I wanted to sit so I switched to the cello.”
Bobbs auditioned with Edward Elgar’s “Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85.”
“I picked it because of the main theme. I played the first and fourth movements, and by the time I had gotten it, you could tell it was my piece,” said Bobbs.
Bobbs was the first-place winner of the Jacqueline Avent Concerto Competition last year. Her return to the festival this year falls in line with what the Nance family hoped the concerto competition would bring to the festival.
“One of our major goals was to retain the festival’s very best students,” said Nance. “I hope to see the day when we have some winners come back as instructors so the program not only contributes to their success, but to the overall success of the festival.”
Nance said her sister would have been absolutely thrilled to know the concerto competition was a part of her legacy on the Mountain.
The concert will be performed Thursday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Guerry Auditorium.