Meet the 2025 Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition Winner: Aiden Moon

By Eric Dundon

Aiden Moon remembers listening to his older sister practice the violin when he was no more than age five or six. His mother took videos of his reaction to the music. One shows him “air bowing”—the classical music version of the air guitar. Another captured him dancing to the music.

Those early memories inspired Aiden to also pick up the violin.

Fast forward more than a decade, and Aiden will be the featured soloist of the May 11 season finale concert of the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra (YO). The winner of the YO’s annual Concerto Competition, Aiden will perform the rarely heard Fifth Violin Concerto by Belgian composer Henri Vieuxtemps—a work Aiden himself selected for his competition-winning performance.

Growing up in a musical household (his mother also dabbled in piano in her younger years), Aiden started his music journey on piano. In second grade, he added the violin, drawn to the instrument’s singing and sweet qualities. Although he took structured lessons from a young age, he recalls that it wasn’t until sixth grade that his passion for symphonic music developed.

By then, the violin had become his primary instrument, but it was a piece that featured piano that captured his imagination. His mother introduced him to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, one of the most romantic pieces in the symphonic repertoire.

“I started listening to it so much in sixth grade, but it still remains such an important piece to me,” he said. “It’s what really brought me into the world of classical music.”

By then, his sister April had won a position in the YO.

“She’d always come back from concerts looking like she was having so much fun,” he remembered.

As a middle school student, he auditioned and won a spot in the second violin section. Now a junior at Parkway Central High School, Aiden held a spot in the first violin section in his second and third seasons in the YO and currently serves as the Co-Principal Second Violinist.

With four years in the YO under his belt, Aiden has experienced as much fun as his sister, as well as learned many lessons along the way.

“My time in the YO is unique because I’ve had the chance to play with so many conductors,” he said.

Learning from conductors including Stephanie Childress (former SLSO Assistant Conductor), Leonard Slatkin (SLSO Conductor Laureate and founder of the YO), and now Samuel Hollister (current YO Music Director and SLSO Assistant Conductor) allowed him to view music from many perspectives. He also recalls meeting superstar violinist Hilary Hahn with his peers and side-by-side concerts with SLSO musicians as stand-out memories of his time in the YO. The greatest lesson, he said, involves playing in an ensemble of 90-plus musicians.

“Orchestral music, it’s more precise, I would say, because you have to match with what dozens of other musicians are doing, and that’s not an easy task,” he said.

A laureate of several competitions with other organizations, Aiden selected a relatively unknown concerto for the YO’s annual competition—Henri Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 5. Vieuxtemps was a violinist himself, and, according to Aiden, brought that sensibility to writing the concerto.

“He’s really able to showcase the many interesting aspects of the violin, but at the same time, it’s such a technical demon,” he said. “It all culminates to be such a masterwork of both technique and violin characteristics.”

Against a background of serious musical intent, the solo part of the concerto throughout is full of multiple stopping (playing two or more notes simultaneously) and brilliant scale passages. The selection of this concerto for Aiden also pays homage to his first inspiration, his sister April: it was the first concerto that she performed with an orchestra.

The May 11 concert, led by Hollister, also features Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza, Lili Boulanger’s Of a Spring Morning, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite No. 2. The concert will be held at the University of Missouri–St. Louis’ Touhill Performing Arts Center at 3:00pm, Sunday, May 11, 2025.

What does the future hold for Aiden? While he is leaning towards a career in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field, he predicts a lifelong interest in and engagement with music.

“I just want to be able to balance music in my life because it’s just been such a present part of my life for so long,” he said.

Eric Dundon is the SLSO’s Public Relations Director.