Heights Student to perform with Philharmonia
By Bobbi Mlynar (Contact)
Originally published 01:11 p.m., March 17, 2008
Updated 01:11 p.m., March 17, 2008
Robyn Meahl practices in Northern Heights High School’s music room on Friday. The Heights junior will perform with The Philharmonia in Kansas City at the end of the month.
The adage says “Practice makes perfect,” and pianist Robyn Meahl, 17, has kept herself busy, practicing and proving the old saying is true.
She practices playing two to three hours a day — often before school, beginning about 6 a.m.
“It kind of varies, depending upon what’s going on at school,” Robyn said. “Lately, it hasn’t been that much.”
It has been enough, however, for her to amass an impressive list of wins in piano competitions.
The list is too long to publish, but in recent months her successes have been numerous for the piano student of Jane Wheat of Allen.
In November last year, Robyn was state runner-up for the Music Teachers National Association Yamaha High School Piano Competition; she won the upper grades division (Grades 11 and 12) at the Missouri Western State University Young Artists Piano Competition and was a prizewinner in February in the Missouri Southern State University Honors Audition, where she was invited to perform in master class during the International Competition in April.
In January of this year, she was the concerto competition winner for the Kansas City Music Teachers Association, and has been invited to perform with the Philharmonia of Greater Kansas City on March 30.
She also has won scholarships to the International Institute of Young Musicians in Lawrence and to the Fort Hays State University Summer Piano Camp.
“I’ve had a good year,” Robyn conceded, reluctant to boast though she has every reason to.
To Robyn, practicing for hours on end is not a chore, it’s a passion.
“It’s what I love to do,” Robyn said. “It’s just kind of my thing. I just always wanted to play. When I finally did, I just kind of took off, I guess.”
She will be busy in Kansas and Missouri through April, and also will go to Tulsa and Omaha for more competitions. The contests are a little “nerve-wracking,” she said, but it’s an excitement she wants to bring into her life permanently.
Robyn, the daughter of Jeff and Beth Meahl of Admire, is a straight-A junior student at Northern Heights High School and class president. A member of the school band, she also accompanies the choir and soloists. She plans to make performance music her career. It makes life a little more magical, plunging herself into pieces by Franz Liszt and Ludwig van Beethoven, her favorite composers, and others as well.
Last week she completed a CD of several pieces and sent it to Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., as part of a scholarship competition conducted annually by the school. The top three winners get full tuition scholarships, and enrollment also is limited.
“They only take 24 people, so we’ll just have to see. That’s really what I’d like to do because performing is really what I live for,” Robyn said. “You walk out and you’re just kind of on the line for the first couple of phrases, but after that, there’s such a rush. If it goes really well, you walk off and that’s almost more nerve-wracking than going on. It’s really exciting.”
Occasionally, the competitions carry a monetary award.
“Then you always get a critique, which is in many ways the most valuable,” she said.
Between practicing and competitions, Robyn also performs in concerts.
In January, she donated her talent for a fundraising concert for Shiloh Home of Hope, a home for single mothers who temporarily need help to live and to learn to take care of their children.
Robyn had heard about the project through her church and said she felt compelled to help in some way, such as volunteering time to work at Shiloh. Later, after talking with another student at the Lawrence music camp, she connected her desire to perform in concert with her desire to volunteer at Shiloh.
“I guess you could say it was my debut,” Robyn said. “It was so much fun. I’d never done anything so rewarding because it was for something, a good cause.”
She’s on Shiloh’s schedule of upcoming events for another concert on Jan. 9, 2009.
That and upcoming competitions will require more and more practice, which Robyn anticipates. It’s an opportunity to get in a little extra time doing what she loves to do best.
Excelling in music and academics and taking part in school and church activities fill her schedule to the brim. It’s not a matter of taking time, it’s a matter of making time. And if she has any to spare?
“I like to sleep when I can,” she said.
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