The winners of this year’s David Hochstein Recital Competition were Andrew Guo, a Frisbee-playing violinist who edits his school newspaper, and Sam Reeder, a track-running clarinetist and mathematician who has created his own language.
You can hear them on the radio Wednesday November 27th, at noon (and again at 10pm) as Live from Hochstein takes a break for the Thanksgiving week holiday. They were recorded in concert at The Hochstein School on May 10th 2019 by Carl Pultz of Alembic Productions.
Sam Reeder, of Pittsford, was a senior at The Harley School when the concert was recorded – and he is now in his first year at Case Western Reserve University, where he’s pursuing a double major in Applied Mathematics and Music Performance, through the university’s joint music program with the Cleveland Institute of Music. He has been playing the clarinet since age 8. He has studied with Tiffany Valvo and Andrew Brown and currently studies with Kenneth Grant at the Eastman School of Music. Reeder has performed with the Hochstein Youth Symphony Orchestra, Hochstein Youth Wind Symphony, All-County and All-State Bands and Orchestras, and the Conference All-State Symphonic Band, as principle in 2018. He has also participated in the New York State School of the Arts Orchestral Studies program where he received the Dean L. Harrington Memorial Scholarship for Musical Achievement in 2018. He currently performs with the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and the Eastman Honors Wind Quintet. He also composes music and plays piano and tenor saxophone.
Andrew Guo of Brighton, is now a junior Brighton High School, began playing the violin when he was 8 years old and studies with Renée Jolles at the Eastman School of Music. In addition to being selected as the winner of the string division in the David Hochstein Recital Competition, Guo has been honored with a number of musical accolades, including a gold medal in the 2016 International Musicians’ Performing Arts Cultural Troupe Young Soloists Competition, and performed abroad in Spain as part of the 2016 Burgos International Music Festival. He was also the winner of the 2018 Finger Lakes Symphony Orchestra Young Artist Competition, for which he was given the opportunity to perform as a guest soloist, and runner-up of the 2018 Genesee Symphony Young Artist Competition. This year, he received the Ruth and Sidney Salzman Award for Strings in the Rochester Philharmonic League Young Artist Competition. He is in a Hochstein piano trio – with cellist Jackie Hager and pianist Raymond Feng – that won the 2019 Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music Youth Chamber Music Competition and received the honor of performing alongside the worldrenowned Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. He is first violinist in the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and participates in the Seneca Summer Music Festival Orchestra.
The annual David Hochstein Recital Competition recognizes outstanding musicianship and performance skills of advanced student musicians in grades 10-12 who reside in the nine-county region surrounding Greater Rochester. The students who win this competition perform at a recital at Hochstein each spring.
