“Young black and Latino string players from all over the country will gather in Orchestra Hall for the 17th annual Sphinx Competition” finals concert this Sunday at 2 p.m., writes Chris Felcyn in Wednesday’s (2/19) Detroit News. The competition takes place the same weekend as SphinxCon: Empowering Ideas for Diversity in the Arts, a conference that will be streamed live by Detroit Public Television beginning today (2/21) at 3 p.m. and throughout the weekend here. Among the Sphinx Competition contestants is cellist “Sterling Elliot, 14 … born in Newport News, Va., into a musical family.… Elliott is one of nine semi-finalists in the junior division … along with Hannah White, also 14, a violinist from Germantown, Wis. For her, too, it was a family member who sparked her interest in the violin.… Hannah is currently enrolled in a pre-college program at the Music Institute of Chicago. Among the nine senior division semi-finalists” are violinist Clayton Penrose-Whitmore, 20, originally from Springfield, Ill. and currently a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, and bassist Xavier Foley, 19, who “grew up in Marietta, Ga., but now … spends his days in Philadelphia at the renowned Curtis Institute.”
Posted February 21, 2014
