By Nancy Plum

The Westminster Conservatory “Showcase” at Richardson Auditorium demonstrated that Westminster Choir College has a “town and gown” impact at all ages and in all genres, with performances of the Westminster Community Orchestra, Children’s Choir, Choir College Opera Workshop, and several winners of the Choir College’s Concerto Competition. Sunday’s concert showed the range of Choir College vocal students, a sampling of the next generation of performers, and community residents who just love to make music.

Led by Music Director Ruth Ochs, the Westminster Community Orchestra has offered performing opportunities to community musicians for the past 30 years. The ensemble’s programming is serious and high-quality, with the orchestra’s musicians always up to the challenge. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, which opened the orchestra’s portion of the concert, musically summarized Goethe’s play of the same name and is full of Beethoven’s trademark jubilant orchestrations. The strings of the Community Orchestra started the overture dramatically, as Ochs drew out graceful dynamic contrasts. The orchestra found an effective 19th-century ebb and flow within the music, and Ochs left plenty of room for the orchestra sound to grow dramatically, with musical details effectively in place.

The orchestra returned on its own at the end of the concert to present a symphonic poem by Czech composer Bedrˇich Smetana, playing the one-movement Vyšehrad cleanly. The piece was especially elegantly introduced by sweet harp passages from Gerry Porcaro and Katherine Highet.

For the Concerto winners’ portion of the program, two instrumentalists played short works with the orchestra, with one singer performing two 18th-century operatic selections. Flutist Clarissa Cheung looked to the more underperformed repertory for 19th-century Polish composer Franz Doppler’s Fantaisie Pastorale Hongroise. Poised and in full command of the music, Princeton High School senior Cheung floated through the improvisational first section with clarity. This soloist was clearly unafraid of fast-moving passages, and took her time presenting them. Cheung was also crystal clear in chipper ornaments, with strings delicately accompanying her. Cheung effectively led the players through the dance-like closing section of the piece, displaying flute fireworks of her own.

A high school senior from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, soprano Hope Lacson is already a well-experienced solo classical and musical theater singer. She chose as her concerto-winning performance two Baroque arias, which she sang with pure intonation and a touch of innocence to the vocal sound. G.F. Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” from his 1711 opera Rinaldo was delicately accompanied by harp and a well-balanced string ensemble, as Lacson sang expressively. She followed this aria up well with “Hark the echoing air” from Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, finding a great deal of musical character in an aria with only two lines of text.

Lawrenceville senior and clarinetist Alex Liu, the third Concerto winner, demonstrated a refined feel for Claude Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie, dreamily opening the impressionistic work and subtly fitting into the orchestral texture. His high register passages were very clear, but he was also able to cleanly handle sections of crisp detachment and extended trills. Throughout this complex multi-faceted piece, soloist and orchestra were equal partners.

The Westminster Conservatory Children’s Chorus heard in this concert was comprised of close to 75 young singers divided among three ensembles. Accompanied by a handful of strings, the Schola, Concino, and Cantus choirs sang a work by G.F. Telemann with a light and clean vocal sound and clear German diction. The sound was pure in the initial unison verse, and just as well-tuned when the music divided into three parts.

Westminster Choir College Opera Workshop is an auditioned class preparing upper-level undergraduates and graduate students for careers in opera. The class contribution to Sunday’s program was an opera scene from both Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. In performances of operatic excerpts, there is often a stand-out artist, in this case graduate student soprano Courtney Pendleton, singing the role of the courtesan Magda from La Rondine. Pendleton’s voice soared over the orchestra, and when the scene was repeated as an encore at the end of the concert, she was just as powerful. She was joined in the opera’s restaurant scene by very capable singers in tenor John Burke, soprano Elizabeth Robbins, and tenor George Cole. The opera class also closed Sunday’s concert with the final scene from Hansel and Gretel, featuring especially solid singing from soprano Yasmine Swanson and mezzo-soprano Christina Santa Maria, and as the Children’s Chorus happily portrayed gingerbread children, the Richardson audience could appreciate a concert of combined ensembles not often heard together.