Submitted photosLauren Yoon

Central Oregon Symphony will conclude its 2014-2015 season with this weekend’s Spring Concert, which features as soloists winners from the Central Oregon Symphony Association’s Young Artist Competition.

Held in January, the competition invited winners to perform with the symphony in the Spring Concert, in performance Saturday-Monday at Bend High School (see “If you go”).

The concert opens with “Prelude to Hansel and Gretel” by Engelbert Humperdinck.

Among the works written by Humperdinck (not to be confused with the 1960s pop singer) were fairytale operas, conductor Michael Gesme said.

The overture foreshadows the melodies found in the opera.

“It’s like a Broadway overture — ‘Here’s the great tunes you’re going to hear in this next little thing’ — but by the time you get to the end of the overture, Humperdinck is layering three or four of these tunes together at the same time,” Gesme said.

“Hansel and Gretel” was so popular in Humperdinck’s day that a touring company was created around it. “They would literally take it around to different towns,” Gesme said. “Today, that happens all the time — ‘Cats’ on tour in Portland, Seattle and L.A. — but mid-19th century, to put a company together to tour an opera, that was not a likely scenario.”

Ten-year-old Jude Dow-Hygelund is the first soloist to take the stage, performing Haydn’s Piano Concerto in D Major, Hob. XVIII:11.

“What’s wonderful about (Dow-Hygeland) at 10 is that he’s able to do whatever you ask him to do the next time … or he’ll go home and think about it and come back and be able to do it,” Gesme said. “That is so wonderful and will bode so well for him as a student in the future.”

The Piano Concerto is “an effervescent work that brims with classical rhythmic energy and graceful melodic lines,” Gesme said in the press release for the concert.

Up after Jude is Nicholas Dill, a 13-year-old violinist from Hockinson, Washington. He’ll perform Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with its “passionate strains and fingerboard pyrotechnics.”

The third soloist, Lauren Yoon, 16, hails from the Portland area and performs in Yoontrio with her younger sisters. She’ll wrap up the first half of the concert with The Piano Concerto No. 2, by Frederic Chopin.

“Musically speaking, Chopin is all about the piano,” Gesme explained.

“He’s one of the rare composers who is really not very diverse in his output. Almost everything Chopin wrote … was for piano, and most of that was for piano only.”

Which means it will be fun for the audience. “You don’t get to hear Chopin played with an orchestra very often. Even though he’s got these two big concertos, you’re most likely to hear Chopin at a piano recital or something like that,” Gesme said.

The concert’s second half is devoted to Symphony in E Minor, or “Gaelic Symphony,” by composer Amy Beach, “a piece I have wanted to do for about 20 years,” Gesme said.

Born in 1867 during the Romantic Era and living until 1944, “she is an absolute prodigy of the first rank,” Gesme said. “The stories about her as a young person are mind-blowing.”

When she was less than 2 years old, “her mother, who was musically inclined, was singing lullabies to her. And she’s singing these lullabies back to her, and she’s singing harmony with her mom,” Gesme said. “It starts there.”

By 4, Beach was playing piano and composing, and she appeared with the Boston Symphony as a soloist when she was still in her teens.

Gesme notes that, in her day, female composers didn’t necessarily get their due.

“I found out about (her) in graduate school. I’d never heard of her before. Somewhere in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, there’s this wonderful, I mean awesome, renaissance of music historical studies (researching) women who were writing music — where are they?” Gesme said. Scholars located “amazing people,” bringing to light “all of this great stuff.”

While Gesme is interested in the politics and gender bias that might lead to history’s forgetting some composers such as Beach, “I’m like, ‘I get it. Let’s look at the music. Let’s see what she wrote.’”

The “Gaelic Symphony” is one of the larger pieces Beach wrote, in terms of instrumentation.

“This is really, really well put together music. She’s a great orchestrator, and she’s a great tunesmith,” Gesme said. “I’m not going to start a revolution by doing this by any stretch, but I feel strongly that it is music that needs to be played, and it needs to be heard.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com