NEWS PHOTO MO CRANKER Brothers Laec and Soren Lorentzen stand Saturday with the Rose Bowl after winning the award for the 65th annual Rotary Music Festival.
mcranker@medicinehatnews.com@MHNmocranker
For the third year in a row, the Lorentzen family celebrated a Rose Bowl victory at the Rotary Music Festival.
In 2018, older brother Soren won the trophy for his viola performance. In 2019, Laec won it for his work with his cello. This year the brothers combined their musical superpowers to create Duo Fratelli. They performed Duo for Viola and Cello Friday evening and captured the win.
“It feels pretty good to win again,” said Soren. “I think we were both a little surprised this year to win.”
Laec says he didn’t know what to expect when the names were being called.
“There was a lot of good people – it was close,” he said.
In last year’s festival the brothers performed in a trio with guitarist Rhys Parks. The year before they played as a duo.
Soren has been playing the viola for 11 years and Laec has been a cellist for eight years.
Soren, 17, says he is in the process of auditioning to different schools across North America to continue his education in music. Laec, 14, said pursuing musical education is something he will consider as well.
Due to COVID-19 concerns, the Rose Bowl was closed off to a limited audience of just family or friends, which made for a different atmosphere than usual, the brothers said.
“Sometimes it’s helpful to have an audience so you can feed off their energy and vice-versa,” said Soren. “Last night, it sounded different in there with the audience being so small.”
The runner-up to this year’s Rose Bowl was violinist Denis Kim. Other performers were the Medicine Hat College Girls Choir, Tyson Hill, Bree Clark, Robert Lee, Lucas Semrau, Debasri Jena and Gabrielle Campbell.
