Alex Amato fell in love with music the first time he heard rock pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano.
“I was absolutely inspired by the way that his hands were moving all around the keyboard. And I was like, ‘Man, that’s so cool. Like, I want to do that,’” Amato said. “My grandparents had a piano at their house, and they live really close by, about 10 minutes down the road, and I just started to play around on it.”
Since then, music has been a major part of the 17-year-old’s life. He has played piano for 12 years and sung with the Young Naperville Singers for the past 10. Now a senior at Naperville North High School, he has found himself organizing his own concerts.
Amato held his first youth-led concert at Naperville Covenant Church, an event last month that drew about 70 people and brought together high school-aged musicians from Naperville, Aurora, Wheaton, Rolling Meadows and Chicago.
The concert, “Amid the Winter’s Snow,” was so successful that Amato is organizing a second concert for April called “Amid the Harbor Lights.”
“I don’t really hear a lot of concerts that are entirely kind of conceived by youth so I thought that was a really unique idea to bring to the vibrant kind of arts community in DuPage County,” Amato said.
He involved students he knew through his connections to the local music scene. He started with a few friends at Naperville North and then reached out to Young Naperville Singers and other musical organizations in the Chicago area.
He also picked out all of the music the students would present.
“We had about 28 songs that were performed in the concert with an intermission, and those songs featured many, many different instruments. The repertoire actually spanned over three centuries of festive works,” Amato said.
Among them was a mix of solo piano and group performances by percussionists, vocalists, brass instruments, string players and even electric instruments.
“(It) was all about collaboration,” Amato said. “Many of the selections featured four-handed piano, so piano duets, many of them that were very technically challenging and very, very rich in their texture, and we had so many different such a variety of different combinations of instruments.”
While he loved all of the pieces that were performed, his favorite was the group rendition of “See Amid the Winter’s Snow,” which Amato described as the piece that inspired the concert’s name.
The Christmas hymn was originally intended for a choir with a string quartet, percussion and piano, but Amato picked out a solo piano version of the piece written by musician Dan Forrest.
“’See Amid the Winter’s Snow’ has a cinematic style to it that Dan Forrest writes with and he invites the listeners into this emotional journey that beautifully charts the arc of the nativity story,” Amato said. “I reached out to Mr. Forrest and I asked him if the string quartet and percussion parts were aligned with the solo piano version. And he returned my message and he said yes.”
That was when Amato knew the piece would be the centerpiece of the concert. It’s a composition, he said, he has played many times, but adding the string and percussion instruments brought a whole new level of depth to the piece.
“When you add the string quartet and the percussion to it, it just swells with emotion. And it was breathtaking. It never gets old,” Amato said. “I just remember being in the concert and just feeling chills as I played the piece because it was just so, so gorgeous.”
But planning the concert was much more than just picking out the music and performers, he said.
“It took months of hard work to pull off and to coordinate,” Amato said. “I think a lot of people would really be surprised to hear just how much logistical thought and creative direction that goes into this type of a major event because, although I did choose all the music and coordinate the music part of it, there was so much more beyond that that I had to do.”
Among the tasks were coordinating with a four-person stage crew to ensure all of the stage transitions went smoothly and, perhaps the biggest challenge of all, designing a “technical comprehensive plot” for the performance, which included stage set design, audio and visual elements, and a custom, automated lighting map for more than 20 live transitions.
While Amato had some prior experience with stage design and lighting for smaller, more intimate events, he had never done anything on this scale.
“I definitely found it overwhelming at times,” he said. “I think it got more overwhelming as we got closer to the day of the concert, especially that week before the Sunday performance. That was a really busy week. And also it was at the peak season of the end of the semester for school as well.”
But it was well worth it in the end.
“It was even commented on by multiple audience members, just the sheer impressiveness that they felt with our variety and how we kept the audience engaged in the program through the entire concert, which I thought was wonderful,” Amato said.
Following the success of the first concert, Amato will host a second youth-led concert at the Naperville Covenant Church at 4 p.m. April 12. “Amid the Harbor Lights” will focus on yacht rock, a genre of softer rock music that includes artists like Toto and Christopher Cross.
Amato is still compiling the roster of performers, but at least five musicians from the winter concert have expressed interest in returning.
“With this yacht rock concert, ‘Amid the Harbor Lights,’ I again want to create this sense of uniting the community together to share the gift of music,” he said.
cstein@chicagotribune.com
