THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 3, 1995 TAG: 9511010187
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: THUMBS UP
SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
AT THE AGE OF 19, Kempsville resident Norman Belleza is soft-spoken, self-effacing and well-mannered.
He is also something else.
Extremely impressive.
The son of Dan and Esther Belleza (he's a retired Navy man, now an X-ray technician; she's a nurse at Portsmouth Naval Hospital), Belleza is a sophomore at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Although the Shenandoah Valley Academy graduate had prep school grades good enough to net him scholarship offers from some of the top universities in the country, he had two very good reasons for choosing the small Maryland school.
The first was religion. Columbia Union is connected with the Adventist faith in which Belleza was raised. The second was that the college came looking for him.
Or, more specifically, Virginia-Gene Rittenhouse, director and conductor of the New England Youth Ensemble, which is headquartered at Columbia Union, sought him out because of his demonstrated musical ability.
Competition to become a member of the group, which is limited to 50 outstanding teenage musicians, is keen. Started in Boston 22 years ago, the ensemble has played worldwide and performs several times each season at Carnegie Hall.
Were Belleza an athlete instead of a musician, he'd be known as a triple threat. His first instrument is the clarinet, on which he soloed in his first Carnegie Hall appearance. His second is the soprano saxophone and his third - one on which he also solos regularly - is the piano.
Despite all his talent, he has no plans to major in music. Not now and not in grad school, which he hopes to complete at California's Loma Linda University.
Home for a rare weekend visit (the occasion was the wedding of his older brother, Bobby), Belleza talked about his educational and career goals. ``I'm majoring in physical therapy and that's what I want to go to graduate school for,'' he said.
``Music is something I enjoy. It's something I do when I really need an escape from stress,'' he explained. ``If it was my major, I wouldn't have that escape.''
While music may be an escape, it is also very hard work.
In a year and a half at Columbia Union, Belleza has played in New York's Carnegie Hall five times and in more other American cities than he can recall off-hand.
Last summer, the ensemble made a 21-day whirlwind air and bus tour that took members from Amsterdam and Salzburg though Venice, Prague and Krakow to Amman and Jerusalem, playing concerts as they went.
``We slept on the bus, we ate on the bus,'' he said of the tour, ``You get very close to the other people when you travel like that. It's almost like a family.''
During the tour, Belleza was tapped, on three-day notice, to play a ragtime piano solo at the Jerash International Festival in Jordan. The piece wasn't familiar and a piano was rarely available for practicing, but that didn't stop the dedicated musician. He studied the music constantly and tapped it out silently wherever and whenever he could.
Back at school, the heavy rehearsal and concert schedule continues. ``We don't have any weekends,'' he said with a shrug.
He doesn't have a whole lot of weekday time free, either. That's when he works at his paying job in the college's Allied Health Unit and volunteers at nearby Washington Adventist Hospital.
So how do the concert schedule, the job and the volunteer involvement impact on his grades?
Favorably, it would seem.
``I have a 4.0 average so far,'' he said in his quiet, unassuming way. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by JO-ANN CLEGG
``Music is something I enjoy. It's something I do when I really need
an escape from stress. If it was my major, I wouldn't have that
escape,'' says Norman Belleza, 19, who is majoring in physical
therapy.
by CNB