CONCERT BY LOS ANGELES YOUTH ORCHESTRA

The Los Angeles Youth Orchestra (LAYO) is 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a noble ambition to cultivate a lifelong passion for music among young musicians by providing opportunities for studying and performing classical and contemporary music. Through their dedication, LAYO contributes significantly to both local communities and the broader cultural landscape. Annually, LAYO supports more than 110 music students, aged 8 to 18, representing 60 different public and private schools. The orchestra rehearses on Sunday afternoons at the Encino Community Centre and performs regularly at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica and the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. LAYO has also performed at Carnegie Hall and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The orchestra toured internationally to Vienna and Prague in 2015 and to Italy in 2017. Many of the orchestra’s graduates went on to attend acclaimed universities such as the Juilliard School, Cornell, the Berklee College of Music, UCLA, USC, Harvard and the New England Conservatoire.

Russell Steinberg is a Los Angeles-based composer, conductor, pianist and educator. Fanfare magazine described Trio Accento’s recording of his American contemporary piano trio PALEFACE on Albany Records as “from galloping cowboys to folk songs and hymns, film noir and pulp fiction… it all fits together beautifully; and it’s fun, too.” The Los Angeles Youth Orchestra recently premièred his new dramatic overture, Diminished Resistance.
Three commissioning orchestras – the New West Symphony in Los Angeles, the Bay Atlantic Symphony in New Jersey and the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore – premièred Steinberg’s symphonic poem Cosmic Dust, a musical work featured in Science News Magazine on the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. His work “Stories From My Favourite Planet”, commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation and based on Pearl’s Wall Street Journal articles, has been performed several times, and the Bay Atlantic Symphony in New Jersey performs Steinberg’s Hanukkah fantasy “Lights On!” every year. Steinberg is the founder and artistic director of the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra, an ensemble that attracts students from over 70 schools in the LA area and performed the Sibelius Symphony No. 2 at Carnegie Hall in June 2022.
Steinberg is passionate about music education. He is a popular pre-concert speaker for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and also gives virtual lectures on Zoom. In response to the pandemic, he founded Russell’s Classical Consortium in 2022, a unique Patreon fan community of classical music lovers who learn together and participate in online concerts, lectures and Monday Classical Listening Hangouts.

Steinberg holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leon Kirchner, an M.M. from the New England Conservatory with Arthur Berger, and a B.A. summa cum laude from UCLA with Elaine Barkin, Roy Travis and Paul Reale. His early instrumental and composition teachers were Dorothy Compinsky (piano, classical guitar, violin), Kenneth Klauss (composition), Earle C. Voorhies (piano), Salome Arkatov (piano) and Ron Purcell (classical guitar).