Symphony Orchestra and Choirs: A Sea Symphony

The WashU Symphony Orchestra and WashU Choirs will unite for a special performance! This program will feature selections from Vaughan Williams's epic A Sea Symphony featuring WashU Faculty Benjamin Worley, baritone, and Sarah Price, soprano. In addition, Friends of Music Concerto Competition winner Charles McGrath will perform the 1st movement of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the WashU Symphony Orchestra.

Program:
In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880) by Alexander Borodin (1833 - 1887)

Violin Concerto, Op. 35 (1878) by Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)
     Allegro moderato—Moderato assai

A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1) (1903-09) by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958)
     A Song for All Seas, All Ships

American Salute (1943) by Morton Gould (1913 - 1996)


Violinist Charles McGrath, winner of the Friends of Music Concerto Competition, is a senior from St. Louis, majoring in environmental policy and minoring in history and geospatial science. He started playing the violin at five years old, and currently studies with Kyle Lombard. Charles is a member of the WashU chamber music program as well as the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra. Before attending WashU, he studied with Siri Geenen, Amy Appold, and Brennan Sweet. Aside from the violin, Charles studies satellite imagery in the WashU Radar Lab. He also likes to listen to classical music, play tennis, and go hiking.


Soprano, Sarah Price is a powerful lyrical interpreter of opera, concert works, and the cabaret stage. Winner of the St. Louis Metropolitan Opera Auditions and the St. Louis Artist Presentation Society Competition, Ms. Price has performed operatic and concert repertoire throughout the U.S., Italy, Austria, and Germany. Operatic roles to her credit include the title role in Pucciniʼs Tosca, Liu in Turandot, Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, Hannah in The Merry Widow, Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus, Countess Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, Micaela in Carmen, among others. In addition to her operatic work, Ms. Price is a section leader in the St. Louis Symphony Chorus. She has also been a member of and frequent soloist with the St. Louis Chamber Chorus and can be heard on several solo tracks on their CD American Declarations, recorded by Regent Records. On the cabaret stage, Ms. Price has performed shows at the Kranzberg Art Center, The Bistro, and The Sheldon Concert Hall, produced by St. Louis Cabaret. In demand as an educator as well as a performer, she serves on the voice faculty of Washington University in St. Louis and maintains an active voice studio in St. Peters, where she lives with her husband, composer Scott Price. 


Benjamin Worley is a St. Louis-based multi-faceted musician. Benjamin holds a graduate degree in vocal performance and is completing his thesis for a second graduate degree in musicology from the University of Missouri, where he also holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in anthropology and vocal performance. He has performed locally with Union Avenue Opera and with internationally accredited Sarasota Opera as an apprentice artist for their Diamond 60th Anniversary season in 2019. While in Sarasota, Benjamin performed scenes from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Verdi’s La forza del destino, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and covered the role of Gran Sacerdote di Belo in their mainstage production of Nabucco by Verdi.  In June 2017, he performed the role of Dr. Grenvil in the Missouri Symphony Society’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata while simultaneously music directing for Maplewood Barn Community Theater’s production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He has sung roles with Show-Me Opera at Mizzou, including the title role in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Simone in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and Reverend Hale in Ward’s The Crucible. Not only an accomplished singer, Benjamin was published in the September/October 2018 issue of Journal of Singing, the periodical published in affiliation with NATS, for his paper “Harry Lawrence Freeman: Pioneering the African-American Grand Opera.”