By Olivia Turner | Arts & Life Editor
A few new faces will be heading the orchestras at Waco Symphony this upcoming performance season.
Rebekah Lambert, a Baylor alumna, was appointed as music director and conductor of the Waco Symphony Youth Orchestra and co-assistant conductor of the Waco Symphony Orchestra. Waco freshman Lydia Gravagne, the new administrator of the youth orchestra, will work alongside her.
Lambert said she found out in mid-June that she was to be appointed to the director and co-assistant positions. The key to success? Networking, she said.
“I wasn’t told until right before I graduated that, on average, it takes seven years to get your first conducting job,” Lambert said. “And I had been applying for about three years. … The biggest move that I made was going to a Waco Symphony event, meeting Larry Loh, the director, and saying, ‘I want this job.’”
Lambert grew up in the Dallas area. She said she initially got involved with music because her father was a pianist and her mother was an opera singer. Though her brother and sister grew up practicing instruments alongside Lambert, out of the three, she is now the only sibling still in the music business.
“When I was 13, I just kind of had this realization that it was actually therapeutic — that even if I hated practicing — when I was done practicing, I always felt better,” Lambert said. “And I came to the realization, ‘I think I’m supposed to be a musician.’”
While her main instruments are piano and accordion, she’s tried her hand at quite a few different instruments.
“I took a semester of cello,” Lambert said. “I have borrowed my mom’s violin several times. I have a clarinet. I’ve got a couple of guitars at home and I’ll play around on them every once in a while. But really, piano and accordion are the ones that I can sit down and shred on.”
With this realization, she joined the youth orchestra at 14 years old. After graduating from high school, she attended Baylor for her undergraduate degree in piano performance and graduate degrees in collaborative piano and, eventually, orchestral conducting.
Lambert said she was drawn to Baylor because her sister and parents attended, and because of the wonderful professors.
In Gravagne’s case, she has spent her entire life on Baylor campus. With her father as a professor, she grew up as a child of a faculty member in residence in North Village, she said.
Gravagne now attends Baylor and is a political science major on the pre-law track with a secondary major in instrumental performance. Cello is her main instrument, which she started playing when she was three years old. Her early involvement is much thanks to her father, who plays the viola and piano, and her mother, who is a singer.
“They decided to put me in music lessons at the local Central Texas String Academy,” Gravagne said. “So I had my tiny, little eighth-size cello.”
Gravagne, like Lambert, said she had a similar, pivotal epiphany that kept her pursuing her instrument, the cello.
“There does come a time when you start anything at a really young age, when you have to decide, do you keep doing it for yourself — out of love for music and the instrument in this case — or do you stop because it’s something that you were forced to do and you don’t actually want to do it anymore?” Gravagne said.
She came to this realization during a sabbatical in New Mexico with her family at ten years old that she wanted to pursue cello seriously, thanks to the help of her teacher, Lisa Collins.
Since sixth grade, Gravagne has been a member of the Waco Symphony Youth Orchestra. Her biggest takeaway from her time as a member of the youth orchestra was the power of collaboration in music, rather than the nature of competition that can come with playing an instrument.
“People can be cutthroat,” Gravagne said. “It can be really antithetical to the spirit of music, which, like I said, is its unity.”
Knowing the former administrators of the youth orchestra was one of the main factors that led to her application for the position. One of them was her sister, Gina, who was also in the youth orchestra with Gravagne when they were growing up.
“It just so happened that I graduated out of the youth orchestra program and she was leaving at the same time, so it was pretty much perfect timing,” Gravagne said. “I had seen her do the job. I had, by osmosis, acquired a feel for that role.”
Gravagne said she sees the position as an opportunity for service, to give new students the positive experience she had received during her seven years as a member of the youth orchestra.
The youth orchestra typically accepts students from eighth to twelfth grade, but can accept as young as sixth grade. With Gravagne being close in age to many of the current youth orchestra members, she is most anticipating getting to better know some of the younger members, she said.
Likewise, Lambert said she is looking forward to both the challenge and joy of working with kids, a first time for her.
“I find that their energy is just — they’re not tired yet,” Lambert said. “They still have that passion and that childlike pep in their step that most of us lose by the time we hit adulthood.”
Lambert said she will also be working closely with Gravagne concerning the youth orchestra. Impeccable organizational skills and behind-the-scenes planning are just a few of the qualities that make Gravagne an excellent person to work with, Lambert said.
“It’s really just the two of us,” Lambert said. “She’s done a really good job at handling how the auditions happen, when they happen [and] where we are going to do our concerts.”
For the youth orchestra, Lambert’s next order of business will be listening to and analyzing auditions, which will then allow her to begin programming for their first concert. On the other hand, her current responsibilities for the assistant conductor position entail buying, renting and distributing music to orchestra members. The other half of her duty is easier said than done.
“Really, you have to know the music,” she said. “You have to be constantly expanding your repertoire, like know[ing] more music than you did yesterday.”
Gravagne said the youth orchestra is making the switch back to rehearsing in Jones Hall this season. They previously held their weekly practices at Midway High School during the pandemic, as Baylor COVID-19 policies prevented the orchestra from practicing as normally as possible, she said.
The Waco Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the season, “Made in America,” will be Oct. 2 at Waco Hall, Lambert said. The theme of the show will revolve around the 250th anniversary of America’s birth as a country, starting with the national anthem. The Waco Symphony Youth Orchestra will have its next concert on Oct. 26, titled “First Impressions.” This show will be held at Jones Hall in the Glennis McCrary Music Building.
Lambert and Gravagne both said they encourage students to attend concerts for the youth orchestra and the Waco Symphony Orchestra.
“Music is not for the musicians,” Gravagne said. “It’s really mostly for our audience, touching the people that come to watch.”
