Sharing the Joy of Music
Header image: Bryan Zhao ’27 (center) performs “Carmen Fantasy” by Pablo de Sarasate at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, this summer.
Peddie violinist Bryan Zhao ’27 reflects on UK summer tour.
This summer, I traveled to the United Kingdom as a violinist with the Stretto Youth Chamber Orchestra. Alongside more than 70 fellow musicians, I spent 10 intense yet fun days performing in nine different locations. Founded in 2002, Stretto is an N.J.-based nonprofit that strives to provide equal music education opportunities to kids of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and this commitment to inclusion is what sets Stretto apart from other music groups in the Princeton region. Every three years, Stretto takes musicians of all ages, including elementary school kids, young adults, and parents, on an international tour, and this year was its seventh.
Throughout the journey, Stretto’s perseverance and professionalism never failed to amaze me. Our flight to London got delayed by over four hours, and we barely arrived in time for our first concert. Despite the loss of pre-planned rehearsal time and the exhaustion from the long international flight, everyone powered through with high spirits to keep the show on the road. The team worked together to unpack the heavy drum kit and bring large instruments and numerous music stands into the quaint St Nicholas Church in Marston, Oxford, a building which dates back to the 12th century. Though the size of the church meant the orchestra had to be set up in an unconventional fashion, the pews were filled with locals, and the performance garnered thunderous applause.
Stretto made connections with schools in England. In Oxford, our orchestra collaborated with skilled musicians from a girls’ school, Headington Rye Oxford, performing pieces from Baroque to contemporary together. In Portsmouth, we held an educational concert for 11-year-old middle school students, most of whom had never learned an instrument before. During our short stay, I chatted with some of the kids. One boy told me that he wanted his parents to buy him a drum kit, while another expressed that he wished to learn the saxophone! I hope our performance inspired some of them to pursue further music education.
We also performed at Sixpenny Handley, a rural village in England. The temperature was sweltering, and it was our second performance of the day. Nonetheless, the joy of sharing music was infectious. Locals brought us glasses of water, decorated their church with American flags, and even made custom instrument case stickers as a memento for us to remember the experience. By the end of our concert, we’d forgotten to feel tired!
In addition to performing as a member of the orchestra, I was privileged to play Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy as a violin soloist, accompanied by the whole orchestra. I played this piece four times in various stunning venues such as St. Davids Cathedral, an almost thousand-year-old cathedral in Wales, and St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, an architectural masterpiece in Edinburgh, Scotland. Highlighting fancy techniques including harmonics, double stops, and left-hand pizzicato, Carmen Fantasy is spun off the traditional theme of Bizet’s Carmen. I’m truly grateful to Peddie’s Arts Program for helping foster both my passion for music and performance skills through numerous concerts, recitals and musical opportunities in the past two years so that I could confidently engage audiences from all over the world.
Stretto’s UK tour was a huge success. We even received a composition from a composer who heard us in Wales! I’m thankful to Stretto for providing me with this invaluable and eye-opening adventure. It was an absolute blast to share my joy and love for music with a wide audience in the UK, which reinforced my belief that music has the power to connect people across cultures, generations and borders. I also had the opportunity to guide and interact with orchestra members much younger than me, and I greatly enjoyed helping aspiring young musicians learn and develop their musical spark. In the new year, I hope to continue making music education more accessible through Stretto and other venues, and to learn together as a community of music lovers, both at Stretto and at Peddie.