Joshua Brown, 23, won the second prize and both audience awards at the 2024 Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels. He also received first prizes at the 2023 Global Music Education International Violin Competition in Beijing, China, and the 2019 Leopold Mozart International Violin Competition in Augsburg, Germany. In addition, he has received the Kronberg Academy’s 2023 Manfred Grommek Prize and been named a Pirastro Artist, Yamaha Young Performing Artist, and Luminarts Fellow. He is currently studying for an artist diploma at the New England Conservatory of Music with Donald Weilerstein, having previously studied with Almita and Roland Vamos at the Music Institute of Chicago. He plays a c.1635–40 Nicolò Amati violin.

Cuban–American cellist Tommy Mesa received the Sphinx Organization’s 2023 Medal of Excellence. In January, it was announced that he would be joining the strings faculty of the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) as of the autumn 2025 semester. Mesa is an alumnus of the MSM, having received his Doctor of Musical Arts there in 2023. As a performer and recording artist, he has premiered and toured concertos by composers including Terence Blanchard, Michael Abels, and Jessie Montgomery’s cello concerto, which he recorded for Deutsche Grammophon in 2023. He performs on a 1767 Nicolò Gagliano cello with a bow by Andre Richaume.

The Manhattan School of Music (MSM) recently announced that the Cuban-American cellist Tommy Mesa will join the school’s strings faculty in the Fall of 2025.

As a soloist, Mesa has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Indianapolis, Madison, New Jersey, San Antonio, and Santa Barbara – and at the Supreme Court of the United States on four occasions.

Mesa is highly committed to new music and has given the premiere performances of works by Terence Blanchard and Michael Abels. He was also the soloist for the premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s cello concerto, which he also recorded on the Deutsche Grammophon label in 2023.

As a pedagogue, he has held positions at the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, Sphinx Performance Academy, The Heifetz Institute’s Junior Division and PEG Program, Music Mountain Festival and School, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Montecito International Music Festival, St. Petersburg International Music Academy, and The Mozart Academy at John Jay College in New York City.

“We are thrilled to welcome Tommy Mesa to the cello department at Manhattan School of Music,” said JT Kane, Dean of Instrumental Studies and Orchestral Performance. “Tommy’s artistry and versatility as a cellist, combined with his innovative spirit and dedication to teaching, will bring tremendous energy and inspiration to MSM. His presence will undoubtedly enrich our students, and his innovative approach to performance and dedication to nurturing the next generation of musicians make him a perfect fit for the MSM Community.”

“I’m honored to join the MSM cello faculty and energized by the opportunity to build a studio among colleagues who I’ve admired for decades,” Mesa said. “There is nothing more gratifying than mentoring the next generation of young artists and giving them the tools they need to succeed as professionals.”

On Friday night, in the first of two performances of its “Haydn and Brahms” concert at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Tucson Symphony Orchestra went the distance with that philosophy.

We got a talented new-to-us guest conductor leading the orchestra in gems by Mozart, Haydn and Brahms alongside a dramatic new work we’d never heard before performed by a guest soloist we were just introduced to in November.

And then there was the surprise: The return of the former TSO concertmaster Steven Moeckel sitting in his old seat.

We haven’t seen Moeckel in that chair since he left us for the Phoenix Symphony in 2008.

The orchestra has been hosting guest concertmasters since Concertmaster Lauren Roth took a sabbatical this season after landing the assistant concertmaster role with the Atlanta Symphony in Georgia.

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

In old movies, cigar-chomping trainers give their boxers a brisk volley of slaps to get them into the zone.

“Bravado,” by Ann Arbor-based composer Gala Flagello, served much the same purpose at the Lansing Symphony Orchestra’s season opener on Thursday (Oct. 3). It’s a punchy little piece, with off-kilter accents and syncopations thrusting in all directions, like a bag of cats packed into a small orbiter and launched into space. The sonic splendor was spent before you knew it, but it did the trick. Suddenly, you were all ears.

With a rich sound hewn from solid oak and finished in velvet, the string sections got down to real business, taking center stage in a nimble yet grand reading of Mozart’s Symphony No. 31, “Paris.” Architecturally, the piece is buttressed by heavy, stern chords and rigid cross-bracing straight out of Beethoven’s playbook. (Beethoven was only in the single digits when the symphony was written but already building cathedrals out of toy blocks, no doubt.) Nevertheless, the overall impression was one of lightness, sunshine and bone-deep joie de vivre. Maestro Timothy Muffitt and the orchestra gave the sonic structure all the gravitas it could bear but somehow kept it aloft, flipping it like an image of a scowling man to produce a smile. The finale zoomed giddily downhill like a bobsled, and when it suddenly came to a full stop, you could almost hear the exhilarated laughter of the sledding party ringing into the air.

The LSO has a knack for bringing in compelling and charismatic soloists, but cellist Tommy Mesa is in a category all his own. Cellists generally skew toward the serious side, but Mesa had a witty, droll stage presence, even when he was just sitting there waiting for his entrance, curiously scrutinizing the orchestra and audience.

He did strange and wonderful things to the melody of Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” He took it on a grand walk or two in a distinctive, Buster Keaton-esque gait; he wooed it in a Venetian gondola with gorgeous, cantabile strains of song; he even chopped it up into pieces like an insect and watched the pieces walk off in several separate directions.

One minute, he seemed to be balancing a teacup on the tip of his bow; the next, he was wrangling a walrus. From subterranean cello rumbles to near-dog-whistle register, his tone was never less than gorgeous. It got extra buttery in a solo cadenza toward the end, just before the vodkas became too numerous and the music sank into melancholy. But never fear, the Russians have a remedy for that — dance it off; the faster, the better. Despite the vein-bursting Cossack tempo, the orchestra stayed in uncanny lockstep all the way through the furious finale.

To slam the night shut, Muffitt brought out an even grander set of variations. The evening’s design — a meta-set of variations on the “theme and variations” form — was not just clever on paper but made for an emotionally satisfying experience.

Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” take the listener to many different places, from meditative to mournful to whimsical, ending in an organ-like swell of overwhelming grandeur. But at the heart of it all is a modest little melody that pokes up like an early spring crocus.

Muffitt and the orchestra made sure that this melody, or the echo of it, stayed in your mind every minute despite the blizzards, hurricanes, stomping armies and other vicissitudes that threatened to overwhelm that plucky little flower. One variation was like the best day you ever had, the day you bubble up like a fresh pot of coffee and flex every muscle in your body and brain with energy and purpose. A couple of variations later, a sadly subdued variation, grim as the gray days of late autumn, seemed to presage lethargy, decay and death. Then, all of a sudden, the wheel turned again, the power surged back, and that tiny crocus grew to the proportions of a Russian mammoth sunflower.

Muffitt excels at guiding the listener through these epic journeys, not only because he has the big picture in mind, but also because he takes the time to give each shift in mood and turn of fortune his close and loving attention. It’s impossible to fix on any one molecule in a universe of orchestral details, but there was an uncanny moment late in the game when principal percussionist Matthew Beck picked up a pair of sticks and walked over to the timpani, borrowing a corner of one of the drums from the LSO’s new principal timpani player, Sarah Christianson (who kicked several species of ass that night, by the way).

Starting from silence, Beck produced a tightly controlled, spine-chilling drum roll at the threshold of hearing, as if a hissing, 400-foot-long serpent had encircled the entire hall and was about to strike. That’s the kind of detail no recording can reproduce.

On the way home from the concert, I happened to pull up next to Beck at a stoplight on Kalamazoo Street.  (How did I know it was him? The vanity plate said “PRCSSN.”) I gave him a honk and a thumbs-up. I don’t care if it embarrassed him. I was happy to find another way to celebrate the magic in our midst.

Chilean American composer and guitarist Javier Farías (B. 1973) penned the only-slightly-longer Abran Paso, another new work for Sphinx. The composer writes of “…moving the strings of the guitar, the most representative instrument of Chile, to the strings of the orchestra, so that the richness of our musical traditions can be shared with the world.” Its more aggressive nature reflected the meaning of its title, “Make way,” a term used by master dancers and choreographers when they wish to take the floor. He wove the musical motives so as to depict the solo dancers demonstrating their art and then inviting the entire ensemble to contrast virtuosic and expressive solo instrumental lines with the tutti; he similarly twisted strands of polyphony against the homophonic (chordal) textures of the combined players, often imitating the strumming sounds of guitars or the stomping of dancing feet.

Publication is the “-Boston Musical Intelligencer”

The upcoming Lansing Symphony Orchestra season, announced this week, runs a breathtaking gamut, from a gala gospel-music extravaganza in December to a much-anticipated visit from British piano star Benjamin Grosvenor next May. Along the way, music director Timothy Muffitt has deftly nestled many brand-new or relatively unfamiliar works he feels will resonate with local audiences alongside familiar classics from Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Gershwin and others.

“LSO at the Robin,” at the Robin Theatre in REO Town, returns with a full schedule of chamber and pops concerts. The adventurous series sold out last year.

The season kicks off Oct. 3 with a concert anchored by Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” with guest cellist Tommy Mesa.

Mesa, a young and charismatic Cuban-American cellist, tears into each piece of music like there’s no tomorrow and has already performed with top orchestras worldwide. In 2023, the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, dedicated to supporting young Black and LatinX classical artists, awarded Mesa its highest honor, the Medal of Excellence.

“He has a unique voice on the cello, a beautiful sound, great facility, but also that X factor of nuance and expression,” Muffitt said. “There’s something very personal in his playing that I think will really resonate with the audience.” The concert opens with “Bravado,” a celebratory blast from a very much living composer (under 30, in fact), U of M-based Gala Flagello, a finalist last year for the position of LSO composer-in-residence. Music by Elgar, Tchaikovsky and Mozart will round out the evening, all written in a theme and variations style.

For this weekend’s Masterworks concerts, guest conductor Vinay Parameswaran had the podium for a program in which Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 and a work by the young composer Quinn Mason bookended two works for cello and orchestra. Cellist Tommy Mesa was on hand for Dvořák’s hauntingly beautiful Silent Woods (Waldesruhe) and Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33.

Mesa, a much-heralded and awarded young Cuban-American cellist, found both the forest and the trees in Silent Woods, painting his sound with thoughtfully considered details rather than long, unbroken brushstrokes. Something of the opposite seemed to be true in the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations, where Mesa treated the individual variations as specific characters and sought to illuminate the idiosyncrasies of each with intriguing tone and technique. And, following the seventh variation, when one’s lyrical attention begins to drift amid a strange orchestral sameness of texture, Mesa stoked the fire for a heart-stopping Coda that is Tchaikovsky at his most exciting—one that spiritedly yanks the audience out of whatever reverie they had settled into. In both works, Mesa made it clear that both marvelous technique and captivating interpretation are a part of his musical storytelling ability.