Helen H. Cha-Pyo will conduct New Jersey Youth Symphony at three upcoming concerts at The Union County Performing Arts Center in Rahway.
New Jersey Youth Symphony is shooting for the moon in an astronomical partnership with The Union County Performing Arts Center, whose 17-day Festival of the Moon opened on Oct. 4 with a diverse lineup of more than 20 cultural events, centered thematically on the moon.
The Youth Symphony will explore mankind’s connections to the cosmos with two concerts: The Moon Festival Education Concert, Oct. 15, and Lunar Rising: A Symphony in Light and Sound, Oct. 18. And even though the festival wraps on Oct. 20, they will continue the celestial theme with “Galaxies of Joy: The Planets in Concert,” Dec. 13, featuring Gustav Holst’s iconic symphonic work.
KIMBERLY M. WANG
HELEN CHA-PYO
All three performances will take place on the Rahway venue’s Main Stage, and will be led by Helen H. Cha-Pyo.
The festival is one small step for New Jersey arts and one giant leap for the Youth Symphony, who will be featured along with other leading New Jersey-based arts organizations including New Jersey Symphony, American Repertory Ballet, New Jersey Opera Theater and The Chinese Culture Arts Association.
“I think the times are such that we need to come together and share our strengths,” Cha-Pyo says. “If you think about it, New Jersey is a tiny state, comparatively, and I’m just so excited to see the energy behind everyone living up to their own mission and discovering that we share so much of the same when we all get together. That’s where all the excitement and synergy gets created.”
The collaboration fits squarely into the “better together” culture of Wharton Institute for the Performing Arts, which is New Jersey’s largest independent performing arts education organization. The Youth Symphony — founded in 1979 by George Marriner Maull — is Wharton Arts’ flagship orchestra and one of its four main programs, along with The Performing Arts School, The Paterson Music Project and The New Jersey Youth Chorus. Together, they serve 2,000 students from 13 counties, at sites in Berkeley Heights, New Providence and Paterson.
This will be the Youth Symphony’s third education concert with UCPAC, a partnership that began a few years ago to create free concerts for students. The first one took place in February 2024 to celebrate Black History Month, and was followed by a Women’s History Month concert in March of this year.
“Usually our educational concerts are thematic, and this year, the huge moon is going to be both the distraction and the focus!” Cha-Pyo jokes.
RYAN JOHNSTON
A band performs under the Museum of the Moon installation at The Burns & Beyond Festival in Edinburgh in 2019.
She is talking about the Festival of the Moon’s centerpiece, a 23-foot sculpture by Luke Jerram called “Museum of the Moon” that was created with NASA imagery of the lunar surface intended to replicate the moon. The touring exhibition is making its inaugural New Jersey appearance at the festival, which also coincides with October’s supermoon, a phenomenon that makes it appear larger and brighter than usual.
The educational concerts usually accommodate 1000 students from the surrounding communities, but this edition will be limited to 800 because 200 seats in the mezzanine level are blocked by the moon installation, which is suspended in mid-air over the theater’s orchestra section.
The Oct. 15 education concert is limited to elementary and middle school students up to eighth grade, with pre-reservation required. The fast-paced and interactive format will explore the magic and mystery of the moon through classical and contemporary works, including Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune,” the Mars, Jupiter and Venus movements from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” Yukon Nishimura’s “Sweet New Moon” and John Williams’ “Star Wars Medley.”
As the tradition goes, the musicians will wear T-shirts of different colors, according to their orchestral sections, to teach the audience about the distinct families of the orchestra.
TIMOTHY MAUREEN COLE
The Debussy, Williams, Nishimura and Holst pieces will also be played at the “Lunar Rising” concert, a family-friendly celebration of music and stars, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. It will also include an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for orchestra and a student pianist, and “Goodnight Moon” by Eric Whitacre, featuring the wind ensemble and soprano soloist Timothy Maureen Cole, who is the director of theater arts at Wharton Arts.
The Youth Symphony has been performing at UCPAC since before Cha-Pyo came on board as Wharton Arts’ artistic director and principal conductor in 2018. However, the Moon Festival partnership is a new initiative that was developed by UCPAC executive director Danni Newbury.
“When Danni reached out about doing an education concert around the moon and a family-friendly Moon Festival concert, I said, ‘Oh, how wonderful that music, art and science can all come together in such a beautiful way!’ ” Cha-Pyo says. “Rahway is a relatively small city but there is so much happening around the cultural arts because of the presence of this beautiful, historic theater. I hope we can deepen our relationship with the city and UCPAC so that our students, who are born and bred here in New Jersey, can see themselves as professional musicians or teachers, or as anyone else who belongs on that stage.”
Newbury was thrilled to invite the Youth Symphony into the Festival lineup. “It is a shining example of what happens when visionary partners come together to elevate culture in our community,” she says. “These concerts are truly a once-in-a-lifetime event, and we can’t wait for our community, and especially the students both onstage and in the audience, to experience the magic of the moon inside our Main Stage.”
They will continue their exploration of the solar system on Dec. 18 with Holst’s “The Planets,” an orchestral suite of seven movements composed between 1914 and 1916, based on some of the astronomical bodies within our solar system.
Movements will be accompanied by a film by Duncan Copp, made in cooperation with NASA, which displays photographs and videos from various spacecrafts orbiting the planets, synchronized to the score — as it was at New Jersey Symphony’s “The Planets” concert from last season.
Cha-Pyo has performed “The Planets” in its entirety three times in her conducting career, but this will be the first time with the Youth Symphony; the students last performed it more than a decade ago with her predecessor. Students have a say in programming through biannual surveys, and the piece has been requested by them for years, which is one of the reasons it was already in play for the 2025-26 season even before the Moon Festival collaboration came about.
“Programming for Youth Symphony is a joy because the conversation begins from, ‘What would our musicians be so excited to learn and they’re going to work their butts off for because they really want to play this?,’ ” Cha-Pyo says. ” ‘Planets’ is definitely one of those pieces,” Cha-Pyo says.
This year’s membership is more robust than usual — there are 110 musicians instead of the usual number in the high 90s — making the conditions perfect to accommodate the work’s ample orchestration. “The piece is not something we can do often because of the personnel it takes, instrument-wise: There are like four flutes, four clarinets, four bassoons and four oboes, including English horn and bass oboe,” Cha-Pyo says. “But in this case, we have all of those students because there are 10 more musicians than usual and I don’t have to supplement.”
“Planets” also requires a large women’s choir for the mystic “Neptune” finale. They sing wordlessly, to create a sense of transcendence and evoke the fragility of mankind adrift in a vast universe. To create the ethereal effect, Holst stipulated that they must sing from backstage, unseen.
The part will be sung by the students of the John P. Stevens High School Treble Choir from Edison, directed by Regina McElroy and Matthew Lee. Wharton Arts’ Youth Chorus, under the direction of Trish Joyce, had to bow out due to an intense season ahead that includes an invitation to sing at the American Choral Directors Association’s Eastern Region Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in early 2026.
KIMBERLY M. WANG
HELEN CHA-PYO
Cha-Pyo also had to come up with a strategy for the musicians to tackle the challenging work in sections because of limited rehearsal time together, which came down to three hours per week and only started in September. “For us to pull together a big symphonic piece with all the technical aspects, endurance and just the whole arch of doing a seven-movement piece takes some time, and I wanted them to marinate a little more, so I had them spread it out,” she says.
They have now polished off the Mars, Venus and Jupiter movements, and will delve into the remaining four (Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) over the coming months.
“I don’t know how much of it they would really own if I had rushed them to do the whole thing in, say, six weeks,” Cha-Pyo says. “So giving them a full two months to prepare worked out great.”
Every year, Cha-Pyo draws up an artistic theme to inspire programming and highlight an aspect of Wharton Arts’ organizational culture. For example, last year’s theme was joy, with the goal to spread joy through making music together. This year’s theme is ARISE, which stands for artistry, representation, inspiration, self-expression and empathy.
“With ARISE, I want to bring these ideas into our teaching, performing and practices to create a community that is centered around giving our students the space to self-express and be their authentic selves,” Cha-Pyo says. “Defining artistry goes beyond what they can do on their instruments and with their voices, but how they live and bring their best selves and that excellence into everything they do.”
In addition to challenging the students, the “five pillars” of ARISE are meant to guide the professional development of Wharton Arts’ 100-plus music educators. “It is so important that we teach more than music,” Cha-Pyo says. “Music educators are educators for life because we have this beautiful tool called music that can take our students to a different dimension, tap into their imagination and we can talk about being responsible through music.
“I think that’s an amazing place to be as a teacher. Every year we remind ourselves of the awesome task as we take in these young people who many not realize the power of music until we are able to create that space for them.”
For more on all Festival of the Moon events, visit rahwaymoonfest.com.
For more on Wharton Arts and The New Jersey Youth Symphony, visit whartonarts.org.
_____________________________
CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET
Since launching in September 2014, NJArts.net, a 501(c)(3) organization, has become one of the most important media outlets for the Garden State arts scene. And it has always offered its content without a subscription fee, or a paywall. Its continued existence depends on support from members of that scene, and the state’s arts lovers. Please consider making a contribution of any amount to NJArts.net via PayPal, or by sending a check made out to NJArts.net to 11 Skytop Terrace, Montclair, NJ 07043.
