Ewing residents Jonathan Pollinson, left, and Nicco Grillo, during their two-week trip to South Korea to perform in the Daejeon International Choral Festival in September.
Ewing residents embark on two-week trip to South Korea with American Boychoir School
By Bill Sanservino
For young Ewing residents Nicco Grillo and Jonathan Pollison, members of the prestigious American Boychoir School concert choir, performing for Korean audiences gave them a taste of what it’s like to be a celebrity.
Grillo, a 14-year-old eighth grader at ABS, and Pollison, a 10-year-old fifth grader, travelled to Daejeon, South Korea, in September with the 31 other members of the choir to perform in the city’s International Choral Festival. Both boys are the only Ewing residents in the school.
After their performances, they found out just how famous they are.
“We seemed to be more popular in Korea than here,” Pollison said. “I don’t know why. It seems like the further away we get (from home), the more popular we are.”
“They did seem to like us more,” Grillo agreed. “After concerts here in America, people come up to us and are like, ‘Nice job. Good concert.’ In Korea they were like (makes a squeal of excitement).”
“They were like rock stars there,” said K.P Weseloh, director of admissions, who served as tour tutor on the trip. “Everybody was waiting for them to come out and they wanted their pictures taken with them.”
ABS is a world-renowned school and one of only two boychoir boarding schools in the United States. This year is the 75th anniversary for the school, which moved to its new location in the historic St. Joseph’s Seminary building in Plainsboro at the beginning of the year.
The Boychoir performs regularly with world-class ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony. It has also performed with artists such as Wynton Marsalis, Beyoncé and Paul McCartney.
The trip to Korea served as the fall tour for the Boychoir, which tours about four times a year — mostly throughout the United States.
According to Kerry Heimann, assistant director of music and concert choir accompanist on the trip, this was the choir’s first trip outside the U.S. in about five years. The most recent international trip before Korea was a performance in an international choir festival in Prague in the Czech Republic.
Heimann said that the Boychoir was invited to Daejeon as part of an effort to start a similar group there.
“The city of Daejeon has a city organization that has a college-age choir and a high school-age choir,” Heimann said. “They weren’t getting enough participation in their high school-age choir by men, so they decided they wanted to start a boychoir. They also had a children’s choir going, but it wasn’t attracting enough boys.”
While planning for their boychoir, the people from Daejeon visited ABS in the summer of 2012.
“They loved what they saw so much, they said, ‘We’re going to start a choir, we want you to come to our festival to sort of inaugurate our efforts to start a boychoir.’”
For Grillo and Pollison, the 10-day trip gave them an opportunity to travel abroad and experience a different culture for the first time.
“Staying in a hotel is interesting there,” said Pollison. “You have to put your room’s card key in a slot to turn off the light so you can leave the room.”
This is to save energy by forcing people to turn off the lights before they exit, Heimann explained.
Grillo said one of the best moments of the trip for him was on the last day when they visited the Korean War Memorial and Museum in Seoul. “It was very interesting; it had lots of interesting facts and things to look at.”
Another memorable experience for Grillo was a visit to the Secret Garden at Changdeok Palace in Seoul.
“It was really, really beautiful” Grillo said. “There were a lot of water [features], ponds and streams. It had some pretty cool architecture too.”
The trip to Korea came just in time for Grillo’s final year at ABS, which is for students between fourth and eighth grades. Although he hasn’t decided where he is going to attend high school, he is applying to the George School, the Pennington School and Notre Dame.
Going to ABS was a natural choice for Grillo, who has been singing since he was very young. His father, Joe, is a professional musician, and his mother, Lynn was a performer and dancer before she got involved with computers. She works at Adobe Systems as a senior manager.
Grillo said he likes the school because of the advanced musical training he receives there.
“Plus, I can actually converse with my dad about musical stuff,” he said
Pollison said checked out ABS based on a recommendation from the director of his previous choir — the children’s choir at Westminster Conservatory.
He and his parents, Robert, the director of accounting at Signature Information Solutions and, Kathy, who works at as an instructional aide for the Ewing School District, checked out the school and thought it was the perfect place for him.
“We were looking for different options for him because he was so interested in music,” said Kathy. “In the public schools, unfortunately the music programs aren’t always that great, depending on the district you’re in.”
And while Grillo lives at home with his parents, Pollison boards at the school to give him a more holistic experience. According to Weseloh, about half of the kids at ABS live at the school.
Pollison, now in his second year at ABS, said he adjusted right away and enjoys the experience of living away from home. It’s kind of like an extended summer camp, he said.
Ironically, neither of the boys wants to pursue a career in the field.
Grillo said he wants to go into one of the sciences — perhaps chemistry or physics, and Pollison wants to be an architectural engineer. They both said that music is something they enjoy and they might lose some of that if they had to do it as a job.
“I don’t think it would work for me as a profession,” Grillo said.
Despite the fact they don’t want to be involved with music as a job, both boys’ parents are happy that their children are at ABS.
“I think it is the absolute most incredible experience at this stage of their life that they can have,” said Lynn Grillo. “You can’t believe the level of musical training these kids are getting here. Most people I know that major in music in college don’t get some that these guys are getting here in middle school.”
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