The Honors Recital

June 11, 2024

As part of a comprehensive plan to develop poised, confident, and knowledgeable performers, we offer our students a wide range of frequent performance opportunities. This includes everything from open mics to studio recitals, department recitals, school-wide recitals, masterclasses, juries, faculty concerts, and everything in between. This year, we announced a new, annual tradition: The Honors Recital.

The Honors Recital is on the formal end of PCM’s student recital continuum – it’s highly selective, and includes a competitive audition process. The goal of The Honors Recital is to curate an intermediate-to-advanced level PCM sampler showcasing all performance-based departments.

The audition process includes a preliminary round where each department identifies a number (proportional to enrollment) of semi-finalists who are invited to audition (based on their annual jury performance and results). In the final round, department chairs collectively serve as the adjudicating team. Students perform and are selected by consensus. Adjudicators select one to two performers or ensembles from each participating department to perform at the Honors Recital.

When asked about her experience participating in the Honors Recital, violin student Maria Kuznetsova shared that she’s “…so grateful that I got the opportunity to perform! The audition process was exciting. The day of the recital also went really well – I met a lot of new people. Performing was truly a wonderful experience. I hope that I will get to perform in more events like these in the future!”

String Department Chair, Aimée Kreston added: “I couldn’t be more proud of the students, the teachers, and the staff at PCM after our inaugural Honors Recital. The performances were stellar, and it was a thrill to be able to see the amazing work that our teachers and students are doing. The concert had tremendous variety, not only from all of the different departments, but also in terms of repertoire and the students’ ages! I look forward to this being an annual tradition at PCM!”

Additionally, Vocal Arts Department Chair, Mariné Ter-Kazaryan, said that “The honors recital was an eclectic collection of different musical genres and instruments. There was, however, one common theme: excellence. What I really loved about this is that we recognized and celebrated students of all ages. It was an honor to be listening to all of these students. They wowed us all!”