Photograph courtesy of Kevin Lowder
Their concept was super simple: two guys, two cellos, and one medley. Oh, and one unforgettable name: Two Mellow Cello Fellows. “Our name was actually kind of a joke,” says Christopher Halen, one of the aforementioned mellow fellows. “We weren’t really sure what to call ourselves, and when we heard that, we liked it and thought it was kind of funny. So we went with it.” Halen’s a junior at Whitfield School; Grant Riew, a junior at John Burroughs School. The pair attended elementary school together, and their mothers know each other. They also both play in the cello section of the Young People’s Concert Orchestra at Webster University’s Community Music School. It was during rehearsal breaks there that the pair hatched their plan. Riew and Halen decided to try out for the St. Louis Teen Talent Competition (now in its fourth year), produced by the Fox Performing Arts Charitable Foundation. “It was partly for fun,” Halen remembers. “We wanted to win, but we really weren’t sure if we would be able to.” There were more than 100 acts from 80-plus schools competing to win, but only 12 acts would make it to the finals. First step: Arrange a musical crowd-pleaser—something that, say, an auditorium of teenagers would like. The duo met over winter break and started arranging music together.
“A lot of popular music, they use the same four chords,” Riew explains. “And ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’ uses the first four chords of the progression that a lot of pop songs use. So we started off our medley with ‘Pachelbel’s Canon,’ which is classical music that a lot of people recognize. Then we decided to branch off into all these different pop songs.”
The pair dubbed their medley “Pachelbel Pop” and made it even poppier with some inventive choreography. They started with a sweet, minimalist interpretation of the Baroque music (after slipping on sunglasses), and then about 1 minute, 20 seconds in, Halen swung his cello into his lap and plucked it like an acoustic guitar as they transitioned into Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” followed by Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” (cue screams from teen girls in the audience). For the finale, Riew stood up to play Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” and Europe’s “The Final Countdown.” (Cue more screams from the audience, now directed more toward the duo than the evocation of Bieber or Harry Styles.)
For a performance like this, they knew they couldn’t stick with stuffy traditional tuxedos, but they still needed to reference their classical roots. So they started with tux jackets, then accessorized with the shades, polka-dot bow ties, and acid-green and fluorescent-yellow pants. “I think that was the most difficult thing about it,” Halen says, “because we’re both classically trained musicians. Wearing all that colorful stuff, and really kind of the way that we moved, all of these little bits that we had were very different from what we were used to.”
“Normally, you try to sit with your back straight and up at the tip of the chair,” Riew agrees. “I decided to stand up and play at the same time, which is really not what you want to do in classical music. But I guess in popular music, you can do whatever you want. There’s a band called Apocalyptica, made out of four cellists who stand up and play all the time, and it’s pretty cool. I think that’s where that idea came from.”
Both Halen and Riew started playing music at age 4, and both started on violin. “The youngest memories I have involve music somehow,” Halen says. He transitioned to cello in fourth grade, when he entered his school’s Suzuki program. “I just liked the deep sounds and the tone a lot more than the violin,” he says. Riew says his older cousins, whom he looked up to, all played stringed instruments; he always knew he wanted to play cello, though his family couldn’t find a teacher for him until he turned 5. “You start out with a baby cello, so they have, like, an eighth-size cello, a quarter-size cello, and as you grow up, you switch out cellos and you get bigger ones,” Riew says.
Although he plays mostly classical music, Halen has omnivorous taste, and he goes to a lot of live shows. “I also love playing music with my friends, whether it’s pop or rock or anything,” he says. “In terms of my playing, I stick with my cello, but I do like to get away from classical music; I like to play pop music and any music that I can make work on the cello.”
Riew also listens to lots of different kinds of music. “I listen to jazz in the car sometimes,” he says. “I don’t actually like a lot of the new popular music… I do like a lot of classical music, I listen to a lot of romantic composers, and also I like movie soundtracks: Pirates of the Caribbean, the soundtrack to that, or Batman, the same guy did that, Hans Zimmer. I think soundtracks are really exciting; you can get a lot out of them.”
Both musicians express how profound it felt to perform for the Teen Talent Competition, even during the preliminaries. During the finals, the performers are on the Fox Theatre stage, the same place where professional touring musicians and Broadway artists perform. The judges are working musicians, dancers, and actors; thousands of dollars of scholarship money is at stake, and so far, the Fox has filled up for every performance from 2011 on—and that doesn’t even include the 120,000 pairs of eyeballs that watch the competition when it broadcasts on KETC-TV.
The stakes are high, to say the least. In the 2013 finals, Halen and Riew competed against 11 other incredibly talented (and incredibly polished) acts, including an opera singer; ballet dancers; pianists; break dancers; and a duo who wore white suits and straw hats, dubbed themselves The Great Rapsby, and deadpanned, “West Egg is so hot / you could call it hard-boiled!” (They came in second.)
“It was very intense,” Halen says. “We were at the rehearsal a couple of days before, and the first time stepping out onto the stage, it was really mind-boggling. I wasn’t sure how we were going to do this. And I did feel nervous. But after intermission, during the actual performance, you could hear the audience after every performance cheering, and when we got out onstage, they lifted the curtains, and well, I realized that it wasn’t that bad. It made it a lot easier with the audience cheering after each song. I think the audience is what made it really fun for us.”
“It was pretty intense, but it was also a lot of fun,” Riew says. “One of the greatest things was that we got to meet all the people who were participating in the program, too. Especially in the final round, everyone really bonded together. There were people from all over St. Louis, from all different backgrounds, and we all really connected. And everyone backstage was congratulating each other, wishing each other good luck. It wasn’t a competition; it was a performance, and we were all working together. I’m still in contact with a lot of the performers.”
Like other Teen Talent Competition finalists, the pair has been given opportunities to perform at other venues. (Past contestants have gone on to appear at The Muny, Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, Sheldon Concert Hall, and Dancing in the Street.) Halen has performed at a Chesterfield Arts gala, accompanying a children’s choir and playing solo cello. Both guys say they aren’t sure whether they want to choose music as a career. Halen says he’s going to pursue a science degree at the college level, probably in chemistry—but he’s never going to stop playing the cello. Riew says he’s still exploring various fields and deciding what direction he’d like to take.
“It’s a possibility,” he says of a career in music. “I’m not quite sure what I want to do with the cello.” All he knows for sure: “I definitely want to play for the rest of my life.”
The finals for the 2014 St. Louis Teen Talent Competition take place April 4 at Fox Theatre (527 N. Grand). For more information, call 314-367-1573 or visit foxpacf.org.
