David Lockington and Dylana Jenson take the stage March 2-3 at DeVos Performance Hall.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Dylana Jenson, the Grand Rapids Symphony’s most frequent guest artist of the past 20 years, returns to DeVos Performance Hall as soloist in Sergei Prokofiev’s serene and elegant Violin Concerto No. 2 in March.
Jenson began studying violin at age 2, and by 17, she won the Silver Medal at the 1978 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, becoming the youngest woman and the first American woman ever to win the Silver Medal.
The Los Angeles native, who formerly served as a distinguished professor of music at Grand Valley State University, made her own Carnegie Hall debut in 1980 playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Her recording of the Sibelius with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra for RCA Red Seal later was nominated for a Grammy.
On the podium will be Jenson’s husband, David Lockington, the Grand Rapids Symphony’s longest serving music director in its 88-year history.
Now music director laureate, Lockington will lead the symphony in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, the sixth concert of the 2017-18 Richard and Helen DeVos Classical series, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 2-3, in DeVos Performance Hall.
Lockington, who served as the symphony’s music director for 16 years from 1999 to 2015, leads the orchestra in three works all composed or premiered in 1935. The program includes American composer Aaron Copland’s Statements for Orchestra, a virtuoso showpiece for orchestra, and English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4, a work filled with a dark, brooding energy that, years later, listeners called a premonition of the cataclysm yet to come with the Second World War.
Jenson first appeared as soloist with the Grand Rapids Symphony in April 2000 with the Barber Violin Concerto followed by a second appearance with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in March 2001.
Her subsequent solo appearances with the symphony included a New Year’s Eve Program in 2003 with Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole. The following fall, she opened the orchestra’s 2004-05 season with Karl Goldmark’s Violin Concerto in A minor and she closed with an encore performance of the Goldmark when the Grand Rapids Symphony made its Carnegie Hall debut in May 2005.
Lockington and Jenson last were on stage together in Grand Rapids in October 2014, performing Sibelius’ Violin Concerto during Lockington’s final season as music director of the orchestra.
During Lockington’s tenure in Grand Rapids, he led the symphony in Detroit’s Orchestra Hall in 2003 during the opening season of the Motor City’s Max M. Fisher Music Center. His five recordings with the orchestra include the CD and DVD Invention & Alchemy, featuring harpist, singer and songwriter Deborah Henson-Conant, which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Crossover Album in 2007.
Lockington’s legacy includes launching the symphony’s Symphony with Soul, an annual community collaboration promoting diversity and inclusion, and LiveArts, a multimedia, multidisciplinary show in April 2015 that featured more than 1,500 performers in the Van Andel Arena.
Lockington now serves as music director of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra in California, a post he’s held since 2007, and the Pasadena Symphony, where he has headed since 2013.
Inside the Music, a free, pre-concert, multi-media presentation will be held before each performance at 7 p.m. in the DeVos Place Recital Hall.
The complete Prokofiev Violin Concerto program will be rebroadcast on Sunday, April 29,2018, at 1 p.m. on Blue Lake Public Radio 88.9 FM or 90.3 FM.
Tickets start at $18 and are available at the GRS box office or online at GRSymphony.org.
Full-time students of any age are able to purchase tickets for only $5 on the night of the concert by enrolling in the GRS Student Tickets program. This is a MySymphony360 eligible concert.
