When Meridith Southard steps onto the stage at Pasadena High School on Saturday evening, she will carry a viola she first picked up eight years ago — and a piece of music written nearly a century before she was born.
Southard, a graduating senior at La Salle College Preparatory, will perform William Walton’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra as the featured soloist in the Pasadena Youth Symphony Orchestras’ annual Spring Concert — a free, daylong event at Pasadena High School on May 2 that the Pasadena Symphony Association says will showcase all 11 of its youth ensembles. More than 700 student musicians in grades four through 12 from 29 cities across Los Angeles County and the San Gabriel Valley, according to the association, will take the stage in three sessions spanning morning to evening, performing repertoire that stretches from the Beatles to Shostakovich.
The concert opens at 10 a.m. with the program’s beginner ensembles — Prelude Strings, led by conductor Kyle Smith; String Orchestra; and the All City Orchestra, conducted by Heather Lockie, a tuition-free group drawn entirely from the Pasadena Unified School District. Their program ranges from American and Chinese folk music to Mozart, Vivaldi, and the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
At 2:30 p.m., the Overture Strings and Wind Ensemble, conducted by Gay Yearick, take the stage with selections from “La La Land,” “Wicked,” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. For select pieces, the Wind Ensemble and String Orchestra will combine to perform as a full symphony, according to the association’s press release.
The evening program, beginning at 7:30 p.m., features PYSO’s most advanced ensembles — the Symphony, Sinfonia, and Philharmonic — performing works by Dvořák, Mahler, and Shostakovich, along with themes from “How to Train Your Dragon.” It is the Philharmonic’s program that will open with Southard’s performance of the Walton concerto, a work first performed in London in 1929 that helped establish the composer as a leading voice in British music.
Southard, who won PYSO’s Concerto Competition to earn the solo slot, began studying violin in 2015 with Suzuki teacher Liz Arbus and switched to viola three years later. She joined PYSO’s String Orchestra in 2018 and advanced to the Philharmonic in 2023. Over the past four summers, she has participated in the Pasadena Conservatory of Music’s summer chamber intensive, where she played in masterclasses with Jonah Sirota and Michael Coughman, and has received guidance from violists Gina Coletti and Karen Dreyfus, according to a press release.
At La Salle, she is concertmaster of the Strings Ensemble and plays in the school’s Jazz Band, Pep Band, and Music of the Masses program, performing regularly at venues across Pasadena including the Rose Bowl, the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and the Langham hotel. She has also performed at Zipper Hall and at California Adventure’s Hollywood Backlot Stage. In 2024, she received a Certificate of Excellence at the Southern California Viola Society’s Violafest, which awarded her a scholarship to the Summer Instrumental Artist’s Intensive at Idyllwild Arts, where she served as Principal Violist. That same year, she won second place on violin in the Dan Stover Memorial Instrumental Music Competition at the Sierra Madre Rotary Club. This fall, she will join the studio of Professor Karen Dreyfus at USC’s Thornton School of Music as a viola performance major.
The Philharmonic is conducted by Chris Kim, who also serves as the Choi Family Director of Instrumental Music and conductor of the Occidental Symphony Orchestra. Kim has premiered more than 250 new works for orchestra and received the League of American Orchestras/ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award six times between 2008 and 2014, according to Occidental College. The Symphony is led by Jack Taylor, now in his 13th year as PYSO conductor, and the Sinfonia by Pin Chen, who is also Orchestra Director at Arcadia High School and president and founder of Crescendo Young Musicians Guild, a nonprofit for music education in the Los Angeles area.
PYSO, the cornerstone of the Pasadena Symphony Association’s education programs, has trained young musicians in the San Gabriel Valley for more than 50 years, according to the association. The association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, was formed in 1928. The program offers weekly after-school rehearsals and supplemental instruction within PUSD. The All City Orchestra, launched in 2012, provides tuition-free ensemble instruction to district students in grades three through six.
The association lists The Helen and Will Webster Foundation, Cathay Bank, the City of Pasadena, the Dwight Stewart Youth Fund, the Green Foundation, the Ann Peppers Foundation, the Rose Hills Foundation, and the Pasadena Community Foundation among the program’s supporters, according to a press release.
All concerts are free, un-ticketed, and open to the public. Pasadena High School is at 2925 E. Sierra Madre Blvd. Free parking is available on campus. Information is available at pasadenasymphony-pops.org.
For Southard, Saturday’s performance is both a culmination and a beginning — the last time she will play under the PYSO banner, and the first step toward whatever stages come next.
