Michael Reckord, Contributor

(Left)Khaed Fagan. (Middle)Justin Yapp, as he plays at the Jamaica Music Teachers Association High Achievers concert and presentation of awards.Far right: Yanique Leiba in performance. - photos by Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer

Of the approximately 700 music candidates who sat formal examinations in the island this year, 67 gained distinctions. Most of them showed why when they performed at the annual High Achievers Concert, organised by the Jamaica Music Teachers Association (JMTA) and held in the School of Music auditorium, Edna Manley College, last Saturday.

Like many of the other beginning students, nine year-old Grade 1 piano student Keiana Byfield might have wondered where her skill on her instrument could eventually take her. Two fellow students could have suggested answers.

One, 16 year-old Justin Yapp, who has now passed the Grade 8 piano examination, the last of the Grade exams, plans to become a concert pianist. The other, Yanique Leiba, an adult who has already received her LRSM in piano and who took her Grade 8 exam this year in Singing, told The Sunday Gleaner that she was kept "very busy" playing the piano at various functions.

Keiana and Justin were two of five students who received special awards from the JMTA. There should have been only two awardees, the one who achieved the highest mark in the Trinity Guildhall exams and the other the best student in the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) exams. However, there was a four-way tie in the latter exams. The result was that in the Trinity Guildhall exams Dacia Harris got the top prize for Singing, Initial, and in the ABRSM exams, Khaed Fagan (Violin, Grade 3) and Devon Reynolds (Piano Grade 2) got special prizes along with Keiana and Justin.

Trinity Guildhall examinations representative in Jamaica, Winston Ewart, told The Sunday Gleaner that those exams had been suspended in Jamaica for some time and Saturday's function marked the first occasion on which both sets of distinction students were featured in one awards ceremony. As of next year, he said, the plan was to have only one set of awards.

Two-hour concert

Saturday's concert lasted two hours, including a brief intermission, with the 60-odd students performing, on the whole, very brief items. Most lasted about one minute.

Not surprisingly, the longer pieces elicited the loudest applause from the standing room only audience, comprising mostly friends and relatives of the performers. Khaed, playing from the first movement of Rieding's Concerto in B Minor, proved himself a budding master of the violin and earned prolonged applause.

So did Ms. Leiba's song Un Donna a Quindici Anni and, in the Singing 5 category, Kadian Northover's rendition of Panis Angelicus and Samara Reid's version of Fly Me to the Moon. Danielle Jarrett (Violin 5) played Michael Radanovics' poetically titled The Silver Tears of the Moon with appropriate beauty. Yapp, playing the final piece for the afternoon - the complex, fast-paced Toccata by Poulenc - was rewarded with both loud applause and cheers.

Accompanying the young musicians on the piano when necessary was EMC lecturer and music tutor at Immaculate Conception High School (ICHS), Allison Wallace.

Ewart told the audience that though the Intermediate Ensemble of the ICHS Symphony Orchestra also received award-winning marks in its exams, the ensemble was too large to have been comfortably accommodated in the auditorium and so had not been invited to the concert. He added that he hoped to have the group play at the EMC at another time.

The very capable chairperson and announcer at the function was Patricia Lyew who, in the midst of the joy on the occasion, unfortunately brought bad news. It was that music teacher and double bass player Maurice Gordon, who was to have received a certificate of appreciation for his contribution to the JMTA, had been attacked and stabbed in his home earlier that day and had been hospitalised.