This soloist’s moves boggle the mind.
Marley Erickson, the Port Townsend teen violinist who is the guest artist at two Port Angeles Chamber Orchestra concerts — first in Port Angeles, then in Sequim — this weekend, has chosen one of Mozart’s most challenging pieces of music.
It’s “infamous for its difficulty,” Erickson wrote in an email.
The girl doesn’t fear a challenge. Are you ready for this?
In the past year, Erickson has won prizes in competitions including Il Piccolo Violino Magico in San Vito al Tagliamento, Italy, and the Louis Spohr competition in Weimar, Germany.
She took part in Mit Music-Miteinander, a chamber workshop at Germany’s Kronberg Academy, and performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
In March, Erickson created and performed a full-length solo program at the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts.
Later this month, she’ll fly to New York City for the Juilliard School’s Starling-DeLay Symposium on Violin Studies.
Oh, and she’s also working on what she calls “an amazing piece,” “Six Cantos for Amplified Violin,” written for her by Whidbey Island composer Jerry Mader.
First, though, Erickson will join the 25-member Port Angeles Chamber Orchestra for a pair of public performances on her home turf: Port Angeles’ Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, 301 E. Lopez Ave., is the venue today and the Sequim Worship Center, 640 N. Sequim Ave., is the place Saturday. Both concerts will start at 7 p.m.
Tickets, available at Port Book and News in Port Angeles and The Joyful Noise Music Center in Sequim, are $12 for adults. Those 16 and younger will be admitted free with an adult. Any remaining will be sold at the door.
Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra conductor and music director Jonathan Pasternack invited Erickson to appear as guest soloist when she won the symphony’s Young Artist Competition in January 2016.
“After I heard her play at the competition, I said, ‘We have to do something,’ ” he recalled.
So music lovers on the North Olympic Peninsula have a chance to hear her play a masterwork, twice — while she is still just 13 years old.
“I asked her to do a Mozart concerto, and she asked for this one,” said Pasternack, adding that this fourth concerto is a supremely difficult piece.
“There’s nowhere to hide with Mozart. It needs to have an elegance, and it needs to sparkle,” he said.
Erickson said she’s not so much nervous as excited to get up there.
“I always look forward to any performance,” she wrote, “and sharing the stage with an orchestra is even more special. [It] creates an energy that is almost indescribable.”
The teen added that all of Mozart’s concerti thrill her, but the No. 4 is the one she loves best. The second movement has “some of the most beautiful melodies ever written,” along with a rich range of emotions that unfold, measure after measure.
Erickson’s Mozart shares the concert program with Henry Cowell’s “Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10,” featuring another Port Townsend musician: oboist Anne Krabill.
“It is such a pleasure,” said Pasternack, “to have somebody of Anne’s caliber playing principal oboe, a crucial part of the orchestra.”
Krabill plays a new oboe made for her, an instrument of cocobollo wood; she creates “a gorgeous sound,” said the maestro.
To complete the experience, the Port Angeles Chamber Orchestra will play Schubert’s Fifth Symphony in B Flat Major, a work of music, Pasternack said, that “is so lyrical and wonderful.”
Lest all of this sounds a bit elite, Erickson extends a hand to newcomers.
To love live music, “you don’t have to know anything in advance,” she writes.
“Just come to listen, watch, and enjoy music that is part of our shared human history.”
For her own part, Erickson calls this pair of performances — the last ones before the Port Angeles Symphony goes on summer break — a “big highlight of my 2017 calendar.”
She urges music lovers to “make it a family outing.
“Any way you slice it,” Erickson wrote, “I’d love to see you there.”
For information about this concert and the symphony’s forthcoming 85th season, phone the office at 360-457-5579 or visit www.PortAngelesSymphony.org.
