PREVIEW: Prize time and Brovtsyn for West Sussex Youth Orchestra

Alistair Gibson, 14, and Francesca Barsby, 15, will receive their prizes this Sunday (February 1) when star young Russian violinist Boris Brovtsyn joins their band for the eighth Youth Prom at the Assembly Hall, starting at 2.45pm.

The Best Young Musician awards are sponsored for a second successive year by Worthing Symphony Society, for the WSYO, an orchestra of real commitment and playing standard, who have toured Europe and played before the Queen.

Both winners are from Midhurst and the prizes come courtesy of two Worthing Symphony Society patrons.

Sue Holland has provided the boys' prize and Moss Murray is again donating the girls' award.

Michael Sullivan, Head of Awards and Performance for West Sussex Music Services, who selected the winners, acknowledged that it was through the "outstanding contributions from the Symphony Society that the awards had been possible".

Alistair, who has already participated in performances at the BBC Proms and the Barbican under the baton of Sir Colin Davis, has achieved a place at the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He has been playing for nine years and is already at A Level.

Harpist, Francesca Barsby, a year older than Alistair, had a Grade A with distinction at A Level and hopes to continue her studies also in London. As well as having appeared in the Royal Albert Hall, she has performed across Europe most recently in Austria as a member of the Sussex Youth Orchestra

Brovtsyn studied at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory and has been identified as an "high octane performer" by the Los Angeles Times.

He has become the currently most popular and acclaimed of guest soloists in Worthing, will this time play the virtuosic Vieuxtemps Violin Concerto No 4 in D minor.

The West Sussex Youth Orchestra will be conducted by John Gibbons, the conductor and director of the fully professional Worthing Symphony Orchestra, and a former Lancing College boy.

The other pieces will be Brahms' stirring Academic Festival Overture and Cesar Franck's celebratedly unified Symphony.

While Vieuxtemps was French, Franck was a brilliantly improvising Belgian organist teaching much earlier at the Paris Conservatory but whose sonorous and often poetic music is more German than the French which surrounded him in his adopted land.

The Symphony includes the extra colour of a cor anglais, bass clarinet, harp, and two cornets.

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