A Moment to Remember: TRYPO Takes the Stage at Heinz Hall
On May 23, more than 350 musicians from the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestras (TRYPO) took the stage at Pittsburgh’s historic Heinz Hall for what became the largest-attended concert in the organization’s history.
There’s a lot of weight in that sentence, but it still doesn’t quite capture the gravity of what it felt like to be there.
Heinz Hall is not just another performance space in Pittsburgh. For musicians, especially young orchestral musicians, it is the room. The big one. The place where the GRAMMY-winning Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra plays. The place where the chandeliers, the stone, the gold leaf décor, the history, the culture, and the sheer scale of the room make everything feel more vivid and real. As someone who had similar opportunities as a young musician, I can say this with some authority: stepping onto a stage like that feels electric, like the hall itself is saying, “You did it!”
I had the pleasure of photographing TRYPO’s dress rehearsals and concert that day, covering the full arc from rehearsal to performance. This particular TRYPO concert featured Tutti Strings, Symphonette, Wind Symphony, and the Young Peoples Orchestra. I arrived knowing this was an important event. What stayed with me was how clearly the day showed the kind of opportunities TRYPO creates for its students.
The dress rehearsals were focused. Not frantic or chaotic, even though there were time constraints. Each of those ensembles had to take their turn throughout the afternoon rehearsing on the stage to learn the acoustics of the hall. That’s a more nuanced thing that most people don’t realize. Different halls require different approaches to playing, so, even though they had rehearsed their pieces for quite a while before concert day, they still had some final adjustments to make to optimize their sound for that specific room.
That’s one of the things I love about photographing performances. The concert is the part everyone sees, but the story starts much earlier. It starts at home, practicing their parts. It continues in rehearsals, learning how their parts fit together. It sharpens at the dress rehearsal where they fine tune the sound of the ensemble. And then there are those little moments where the kids recognize how all that work is really coming together and making the piece come alive.
Pierce Cook led Symphonette and Tutti Strings, Robert Traugh conducted Wind Symphony, and Brian Worsdale conducted the Young Peoples Orchestra. The program included music by George Walker, Kirt Mosier, Frank Ticheli, Gala Flagello, Camille Saint-Saëns, Arturo Márquez, Gioachino Rossini, Édouard Lalo, and Dmitri Shostakovich. That is a serious evening of music by any standard, and it’s a pretty spectacular thing for young musicians to experience from the stage.
The Young Peoples Orchestra’s portion of the concert was especially full of those “this is a real moment” layers. Composer Gala Flagello was in attendance for YPO’s rehearsal and performance of her work, Everything Beautiful. Dennis O’Boyle, Assistant Principal Second Violin of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and a longtime TRYPO coach, joined the orchestra as violin soloist for Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Carter Smeal, a graduating senior from Baldwin High School, six-year TRYPO member, and the 2025–2026 TRYPO Concerto Competition winner, was featured on the first movement of Lalo’s Cello Concerto in D Minor. Several TRYPO alumni also joined the orchestra for the final movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.
For anyone unfamiliar with that repertoire, this is not “nice experience for kids” territory. This is real repertoire, the kind that professional ensembles perform regularly around the world. Add in the real artists, real expectations, and real opportunities created for these young students, and you start to get a clearer picture of just how meaningful this kind of experience is.
One of the bigger messages of the night was that TRYPO gives young musicians access to experiences that can change the size of the world they imagine for themselves. Performing at Heinz Hall is already a major milestone. Sharing the stage with a Pittsburgh Symphony musician, working with and performing for a composer Gala Flagello, sharing the stage with alumni, being recognized as a concerto winner, and learning that the Young Peoples Orchestra will be touring to China pushes that even further. It tells students in a way no brochure ever could that this world is open to them.
For me, there was also a personal layer to the evening. The longer I build my work around Pittsburgh’s arts, education, and civic communities, the more I notice how often the circles overlap. WQED-FM’s longtime host Jim Cunningham has been part of several events I have photographed over the years. I have taken headshots for TRYPO’s Executive Director Lindsey Nova and YPO’s conductor Brian Worsdale. I have photographed Robert Traugh in both headshot and family sessions, and I’ve also photographed Pierce Cook’s middle school concerts. In addition, Paul Doerksen, who was honored by TRYPO during the concert, had also just retired from Duquesne University, where I recently helped feature him and his fellow retirees.
Those intersections matter to me because they are a reminder that creative work like this is built on trust. Not “I know a guy” trust. Real trust. The kind that only comes from showing up and proving that you understand the job from the inside out. The kind that is built from repeatedly doing the work carefully, respecting the people in the room, and understanding that these aren’t just pretty pictures of kids playing instruments. They are photos that tell a story rooted in creating memories, continuity, and joy.
For a business like mine, that matters just as much as the photos themselves. I do not want to simply photograph events as isolated assignments. I want to help organizations preserve the moments that explain who they are and why their work matters. TRYPO’s Heinz Hall concert was exactly that kind of moment.
From a distance, it would be easy to label this event as “just another concert,” but when you zoom out and look at it with a wide-angle lens, you start to see something much larger: a gathering point for students, families, educators, alumni, professional musicians, composers, arts leaders, and a community that clearly believes young musicians deserve serious opportunities. That’s the real story. My job was to help make that visible, and man, did I enjoy helping them do just that.
There are plenty of beautiful things to photograph in a place like Heinz Hall. The stage, the lights, the architecture, the sheer scale of the room. But the real story was the students filling that space with everything they had carried there. And I’m not just talking about instruments, backpacks, and sheet music. I’m also talking about all the preparation, focus, pride, and possibility they carried inside and turned into a memorable performance for the largest audience TRYPO has ever had.
That is what I hope these images preserve. Not just that a concert happened, but that thismoment happened.
And for hundreds of young musicians, it was one worth remembering.
