ST. GEORGE, Utah — Violinist Jenny Oaks Baker, who spent seven years as first chair for the National Symphony Orchestra, is now also a musical entrepreneur of sorts.
Ms. Baker has launched a 10-city “Joy to the World” tour that comes to Capital One Hall in Tysons Corner on Dec. 19, with her four children accompanying her on different instruments. Irish singer Alex Sharpe, who was a member of the Celtic Woman quartet, provides vocals, and novelist Jason F. Wright, bestselling author of “Christmas Jars,” serves as narrator.
“The Christmas show has been this incredible teaching moment on how to become a production company and who I need and how to afford it,” Ms. Baker said in a postconcert interview from her home in Salt Lake City.
Finding venues for each city and arranging travel for her troupe were just the start of her entrepreneurial effort, she said, noting that she also has had to find local choirs and dancers to fill roles related to the concert. For the Capital One Hall concert, members of the Gin Dance Company and the Boyle School of Irish Dance are expected to perform.
Ms. Baker, 47, said she has had to learn “how to find sponsors, how to order playbills and design them, and how [to work with] a graphic designer. It is mind-blowing how many things are involved in this. It really should take a crew of 10 people, and I’ve been doing it all myself.”
“Joy to the World,” a two-hour event, includes 18 Christmas songs, almost all of them classics. The 1992 contemporary Christian song “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song)” is the most recent number.
Although Ms. Baker is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — her father, Dallin H. Oaks, is the first counselor to church President Russell M. Nelson and is in line to succeed him — she said the concert is designed to appeal to Christians of all stripes.
“It’s entirely from the Bible, entirely about Jesus Christ and being individual witnesses of him in this world,” she said. “I want people to just come and worship the savior together with other faithful people.”
Ms. Sharpe, who jetted in from Dublin for the tour, told a reporter the shows are “a real gift to me” because the recent pandemic restricted her performing opportunities.
“I feel like I’ve been gifted a great opportunity, and it’s just wonderful,” Ms. Sharpe said, adding that the concert “actually makes me feel closer to God.”
Mr. Wright said writing the narration “would have been honor enough,” and he is excited about touring with the production, which opened Dec. 1 at a Utah Tech University auditorium.
Quit NSO to raise a family
A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and New York City’s famed Juilliard School, Ms. Baker left the National Symphony Orchestra in 2007 around the age of 32. She says she enjoyed her time at the NSO, adding that it’s unusual for members to leave so early in their careers.
“I got into the National Symphony, and I loved it,” she said. “I loved everything about it, except leaving my children.”
The NSO, it turns out, appreciated her as well.
“Jenny was one of the bright stars at the NSO,” Leonard Slatkin, the orchestra’s musical director from 1996 to 2008, said via email. “Extremely gifted, she brought the highest possible level of enthusiasm to work every day.”
But Mr. Slatkin acknowledged “her family very much came first, and that it would not be possible for her to continue to balance that priority with the amount of work required to play in the orchestra while maintaining her strong musical values.”
Ms. Baker said she “ugly cried” after her last NSO performance, but a voice told her this was “only the beginning,” and she immediately received offers to be a guest soloist with various orchestras.
“All of a sudden, I had a solo career that I didn’t have until I left the symphony, quietly,” she said.
Ms. Baker said following that spiritual impression to leave the NSO revealed a lesson.
“That’s a really tender chapter in my life that further taught me that we need to trust the Lord,” she said. “What I’m doing now I could never do without His direction, ever in a million years.”
In 2012, Ms. Baker was nominated for a Grammy Award for best pop instrumental album for her work on “Wish Upon a Star: A Tribute to the Music of Walt Disney.” She has released 19 albums, and has her own YouTube channel, where a video of a hymn has garnered 4.6 million views. The album “Joy to the World” by Jenny Oaks Baker & Family Four was released in 2020.
’Never considered’ kids performing with her
Ms. Baker said she helped her children find their musical instruments but never imagined the Family Four quartet that accompanies her on tour.
“Never once did I consider them playing with me, not once,” she said. “[The] thought never crossed my mind that someday they could perform with me. And it should have, because it makes a lot of sense.”
She gave a violin to eldest daughter Laura, who is married and a student at Brigham Young University, “just because I thought it would be good for her.”
The next Baker child, Hannah, took up piano studies “just because piano goes well with the violin and I didn’t want them on the same instrument to compete with each other.”
Sarah, the next daughter, “seemed like a cellist. And I thought, someday they can play little piano trios together,” Ms. Baker said.
Ms. Baker said she wanted her son, Matthew, to take up the viola, but he rebelled against that and ended up with a guitar, in which he is classically trained.
She first got the idea to have her children accompany her when she performed at a Christmas concert at the Washington D.C. Temple Visitors Center in Kensington, Maryland.
She thought “it’d be really cute” to have them play at the event, and she asked keyboardist/composer Kurt Bestor to write an arrangement, which became “Christmas Concerto.” More numbers followed until the Family Four was born, which Ms. Baker said was an answer to prayer, the desire to play music and be closely involved as her children mature.
“She’s probably the equivalent of Josh Groban meets Andrea Bocelli,” Mr. Bestor said of Ms. Baker in a telephone interview. “She was raised with classical music … she doesn’t get that far out of that zone. What you hear [from] her is definitely something that is classical and classical crossover.”
Ms. Baker said she’s glad her classical vibe “comes through” in the Christmas concert. But she believes there’s a higher purpose to these concerts.
“I really hope that people feel the love of God … I hope that I’m a vessel for that, for God’s love to just come through me and go out through His Spirit to the audience. I just feel like that’s my mission,” she said. ” That’s what I’m supposed to do is to help people feel close to God while they hear my music.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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