Two Samohi Students To Play in Carnegie Hall

   Two Santa Monica High School students, Senior Joseph Corral and Junior Devon Pratt, have been chosen to perform with the National Festival Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on January 16, 2005, under the direction of the renowned conductor/composer Lukas Foss.
   The National Festival Orchestra brings together outstanding music students from all over America for intensive training in New York, which culminates in a performance on the world's most famous concert stage. The orchestra is created anew every year and its members are chosen through auditions.
   The January 16 performance is the orchestra’s ninth annual incarnation.
   The concert will also feature the Crane Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Lanz.
   The National Festival Orchestra will perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major.
   The orchestra was founded with the mission of identifying talented music students from across the country who demonstrated their musical ability and commitment to the art and to provide them with an intensive orchestral training residency in New York.
   National Festival Orchestra Performers have come from every state in America and have gone on to attend prestigious music schools and to perform as professionals. In 2003, the National Festival Orchestra instituted the Lukas Foss Young Artist Competition to recognize an outstanding instrumentalist.
   Foss is a unique figure in American music, with an extraordinary history as conductor, composer, pianist, and pedagogue. He has conducted some of the most celebrated orchestras in the world, including the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Leningrad Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome, and Tokyo Philharmonic.
   As Music Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic and the Jerusalem Symphony, Foss has been an effective champion of living composers.
   He has held the position of composer-in-residence at Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, Manhattan School of Music, UCLA, Boston University, the Tanglewood Institute, and in 1986, delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
   He is the recipient of 15 honorary doctorates, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, the Prix de Rome, three New York Critics Circle Awards, and is a member of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.