Friday, May 23, 2025, at 7:00 Buntrock Hall
YOUNG COMPOSERS INITIATIVE 2024–25 SEASON FINALE CONCERT
Musicians from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago
Jessie Montgomery Host
Ahmed Alabaca Conductor
GANS Fantasy for Piano and Strings
Marilyn Gans, piano
MUHAMMAD Prayer through Trial
PINE War for Wind Quintet
KRAVCHENKO Theme and Variations on a Ukrainian Folk Melody
MERTZ Asylum
Christopher Mertz, bass
FRANTZEN American Theme
The Young Composers Initiative is generously supported by Margo and Mike Oberman.
The 2024–25 Civic Orchestra season is generously sponsored by Lori Julian for the Julian Family Foundation, which also provides major funding for the Civic Fellowship program.
Jessie Montgomery
Host,
Violinist, Composer, and Lead Mentor
Jessie Montgomery, Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator whose music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of twenty-first-century American sound and experience. She served as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence from 2021 to 2024. In 2024, Jessie Montgomery won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Rounds, recorded by Awadagin Pratt and A Far Cry for New Amsterdam Records. She was named American Public Media’s Performance Today 2025 Classical Woman of the Year.
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works, as well as collaborations with distinguished choreographers. Recent premieres include CSO commissions Hymn for Everyone (2021), Transfigure to Grace (2023), and Procession (2024); The Song of Nzingha (2024), part of soprano Karen Slack’s evening-length recital African Queens alongside other composers from the Blacknificent 7; Five Freedom Songs (2021), a song cycle for soprano Julia Bullock; a set of concertos—DIVIDED (2022), Rounds (2021), and L.E.S. Characters (2020); and a site-specific collaboration for Bard SummerScape and Pam Tanowitz Dance (2021).
Ahmed Alabaca Conductor
Ahmed Alabaca is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, conductor, and facilitator. Over the past twenty years, Alabaca has worked with all kinds of artistic communities from scoring plays in New York’s fringe theater scene to working with young Black and Latine music students on the north, south, and west sides of Chicago—composing and arranging music for professional and community orchestras throughout the United States, to building a cabaret theater in the middle of the desert for Burning Man. Some of the ensembles Alabaca has worked with include the Florida Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Janáček Philharmonic, Fort-Dodge Symphony, Colour of Music Festival Orchestra, D-Composed string quartet, the Mizzou Wind Ensemble, Odin Quartet, Arlington Symphony, Accord Symphony (DC Strings), and, most recently, the Fayetteville Symphony. Last year, Alabaca premiered their first string quartet, commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festival. Ahmed’s music has been featured on programs and stations as APM/MPR’s Performance Today, The Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline, MPR, WFMT, and WQXR. As the music director of the South Loop Symphony Orchestra, Alabaca’s focus is to present new music, specifically music written by women and people of color. Alabaca believes in the transformative power of music, and if you do as well, please support your local music organizations, composers, and performers.
Marilyn Gans Composer, Piano, Home School
Marilyn Gans is a composer, pianist, and violinist. Pursuing her performance studies, she has been a member of the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra’s first violin section for three years, during which she was selected to perform in the 2024 Ravinia El Sistema rehearsals with Gustavo Dudamel. As a young composer, Marilyn received both bronze and gold medals consecutively in the National Carol Klose Composition Competition, was a selected finalist in the National Young Composers Challenge, and received two silver medals in the 2024–25 Illinois Music Teachers Association composition competition. Throughout high school, Marilyn has received music lessons from Jim Kendros.
Malik Ali Muhammad Composer, Muhammad University of Islam
Malik Muhammad is a violinist, violist, and composer studying at the Merit School of Music’s Alice S. Pfaelzer Conservatory.
Beginning violin lessons at age ten at A Touch of Classical Music School, he soon joined the Hyde Park Youth Symphony. A Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative Student Fellow since 2020, Malik has studied composition through the Chicago, From Scratch program in collaboration with
the Civic Orchestra. In 2022, he joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Young Composers Initiative. His composition Magnitude earned him national recognition on NPR’s From the Top as a 2025 Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award winner and Nois’s Young Creators Fellowship.
Sylvia Pine Composer, Home School
Thirteen-year-old Sylvia Pine has won first prize in more than forty international competitions as a composer, violinist, and singer. She has soloed with the Tel Aviv Soloists and the Syracuse Orchestra, and given solo performances in Carnegie Hall, the Musikverein, and Royal Albert Hall. She is currently the youngest member of the CSO’s Young Composers Initiative and the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy where she is a Vamos Scholarship Fellow. Her work for string orchestra, Rising Storm, was performed at the 2025 Guadalajara International Music Festival in Mexico in addition to performances by six youth orchestras across the United States last season.
Gloria Kravchenko Composer, Chicago Academy for the Arts
Gloria Kravchenko is a junior in the visual arts department at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She is a Chicagobased composer and
violinist, originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, where she moved from before her freshman year. Gloria studies violin with Jasmine Lin at the Music Institute of Chicago and piano with Marianne Parker. She plays in Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, where she also studies with Eric Malmquist at the CYSO Composition Seminar. Her music has primarily been inspired by her cultural heritage and visual art, and she has created gallery installations at her school to display visual art and music in combination.
Christopher Mertz Composer, Bass, Adlai E. Stevenson II High School
Double bassist and composer
Christopher Mertz, age fourteen, is a member of the Midwest Young Artists Conservatory’s Symphony Orchestra and is a regular substitute for the Highland Park Strings. He has had the honor of collaborating with performers, conductors, and pedagogues such as Gustavo Dudamel and Alexander Hanna. Christopher is active in early music performance and serves as a member and composer for his school’s
historically-informed performance groups, which will present at the 2025 Boston Early Music Festival. He will participate in NYO2, a National Youth Orchestra summer program this summer. He currently studies with CSO bassist Ian Hallas.
Clara Frantzen Composer, Oak Park & River Forest High School
Clara Frantzen is a violinist, composer, arranger, and conductor in their second year with Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Young Composers Initiative. Clara has played with Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras for the last eight years and currently plays in CYSO’s Symphony Orchestra and CORE as principal second violin. Clara joined the top jazz band at Oak Park and River Forest High School last year and was awarded an Outstanding Soloist Award at the Purdue Jazz Festival in January. Clara studies violin with Rachel Brown and orchestration and conducting with Anthony Barrese. This fall, Clara will study violin performance with Sharan Leventhal at Boston Conservatory.
Musicians from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago
Ken-David Masur Principal Conductor
The Robert Kohl and Clark Pellett Principal Conductor Chair
Kimberly Bill, Keshav Srinivasan violins
Mason Spencer,* Sava Velkoff* violas
David Caplan, J Holzen* cellos
Nick DeLaurentis+ bass
Natalie Man+ harp
Wiktoria Godawa flute
Will Stevens** oboe
Elizabeth Kapitaniuk clarinet
William George bassoon
Mark Morris horn
Sean Whitworth trumpet
Cameron Marquez* percussion
Marissa Kerbel piano