Another week, another D-FW classical music competition.
Tuesday night, just a week and a half after the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition named its winners in Fort Worth, the Dallas International Violin Competition presented its three finalists in concert at Moody Performance Hall, then announced their prizes.
The $2,500 first prize went to American violinist Laurel Gagnon, currently studying at the Yale University School of Music. The prize also includes a future solo engagement with the Dallas Chamber Symphony, which presented the competition.
The $1,500 second prize and $500 audience choice award went to Hong Kong native Hiu Sing Fan, who’s pursuing a doctor of musical arts degree at Northwestern University.
The $1,000 third prize was awarded to Alice Lee, a Canadian studying at New England Conservatory.
In the concert, each of the finalists played a violin concerto with the Chamber Symphony, led by guest conductor Peter Bay, music director of the Austin Symphony Orchestra. Gagnon performed the Brahms concerto, Fan and Lee the Sibelius.
The biennial competition is open to violinists 18 to 35. From applications and video recordings, 16 violinists were selected for the in-person competition. The first two rounds were held June 12 and 13 at the Murchison Performing Arts Center at the University of North Texas in Denton.
Each quarterfinalist performed a violin concerto with piano accompaniment, after which nine semifinalists performed recitals of unaccompanied solo violin works. A jury of three professional violinists/teachers picked contestants for each round.
It’s impressive that even a newer and lower-visibility competition could attract players of such technical authority and interpretive sophistication as the three heard Tuesday. Different listeners might have ranked them very differently.
All three occasionally overdid gruff bowings of fortissimo double-stops, at least for a 700-seat hall about one-third the size of most orchestra halls. This bothered me more in the Brahms, where it’s better to err on the side of reserve. And for me Gagnon’s choice of the over-the-top Fritz Kreisler cadenza overloaded the concerto.
But she’s an accomplished and expressive musician, and after Bay and the orchestra — principal oboist Elise Belk especially — eloquently introduced the slow movement, Gagnon tapped right into their timing and tapered phrases. The finale was a little more deliberate than I was expecting, but Brahms does qualify his “happy allegro” marking with “but not too lively.”
Both Fan and Lee delivered Sibelius’ scurries, double-stops and leaps into high pianissimos with impressive assurance, but differently. Not for Lee the Nordic cool often heard in the piece — hers was a passionate account, by turns earthy and ethereal, with considerable freedom in the built-in cadenza. Fan’s Sibelius was more conventionally cool, with a fine focus throughout.
With wind and brass sections as large as would be deployed in a 2,000-seat hall, although far fewer strings, Bay had his work cut out to keep the orchestra in balance. Apart from an occasional spot when flutes and clarinets or horns were a little too prominent, he and the players maintained impressive equilibrium. Always attuned to the soloists, Bay shaped the music securely and sensitively.
This would have been a good opportunity to ask the audience not to applaud after every movement, as it did Tuesday. And prolonged late seating during the slow movement of Lee’s Sibelius was unfortunate.
Artificial intelligence hasn’t yet triggered the broad job losses many feared — at least not for experienced workers.
That’s the takeaway from a new analysis by J. Scott Davis, an assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who examined employment and wage trends in industries most exposed to artificial intelligence.
Davis argues the data tell a more nuanced story — one that’s challenging the traditional career ladder, and helping older employees earn a bit more.
Since ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, overall US employment has risen about 2.5%, according to Davis’ analysis, which uses an AI exposure index developed by researchers and published in the Strategic Management Journal. At the same time, employment in the sectors most exposed to AI has slipped by roughly 1%.
Wages tell a different story. The average weekly pay nationwide has climbed 7.5% since fall 2022. And across the most AI-exposed industries, wages have grown faster, up 8.5%.
If AI were simply replacing workers, both employment and wages would likely be falling, Davis wrote.
Instead, Davis points to a divide between “codified” knowledge — the kind learned from textbooks and in university courses — and “tacit” knowledge gained from hands-on work experience.
“Returns on job experience are increasing in AI-exposed occupations,” Davis wrote. “Young workers with primarily codifiable knowledge and limited experience will likely face challenging job markets.”
Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, his analysis found that the occupations most exposed to AI tend to offer larger pay premiums for experienced workers.
In roles with less hands-on experience, AI exposure is associated with weaker wage growth, he wrote.
Workers under 25 in AI-exposed industries have also experienced employment declines, according to Davis’ analysis.
“There appears to be less cause for concern about widespread job displacement for older, experienced workers,” he wrote.
The findings offer a counterpoint to the more apocalyptic predictions about AI’s impact on the labor market.
Last week, Citrini Research published a memo, written from the hypothetical perspective in 2028, that theorized how AI could crush the US jobs market and trigger a broad-based market collapse.
“What if our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish?” the memo asked.
Top executives inside the AI companies are worried about jobs, too.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company that runs Claude, warned that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs. OpenAI’s head of product, Olivier Godement, said the life sciences, customer service, and computer engineering industries were all about to get automated. And Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, said that he doesn’t believe the job title “software engineer” will exist next year.
For now, at least, the Dallas Fed paints a different picture of today’s jobs market. It points to less mass displacement and market ruptures — and more power for employees who already have their foot in the door.
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Early the morning of Feb. 9, Ana, a 45-year-old mother of four, woke up in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center outside Abilene. Bluebonnet, it’s called, so named for the toxic state flower. She was hustled from bunk to bus for a ride to Del Rio. By noon, she was standing in the middle of the International Bridge that connects Del Rio with Ciudad Acuña across the Mexican border.
Ana was told only: You’re free to go – back to Monterrey, which she left in 2006 and where her parents still lived. She did not know how she was going to get there. Or when she would see her girls again.
Only five weeks earlier, Ana had a job at an ice cream shop at Lombardy Lane and Brockbank Drive in northwest Dallas, where she’d worked for six years. A single mother, she alone cared for her daughters, two of whom are in elementary school – fifth and sixth grades – and struggle with dyslexia. Her 12-year-old, diagnosed with severe depression, had twice tried to harm herself just last year. Her eldest, a 17-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, is set to begin college in the fall.
Ana crossed the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft near Laredo 20 years ago for a life she couldn’t find in Mexico. She met a man in Lewisville with whom she had four children. He abused her, she said, so she left again, to start over in northwest Dallas.
Immigration officials gave her a preliminary court hearing: Aug. 24, 2027. Ana, who has no criminal record, went to the ICE offices on Stemmons Freeway around New Year’s Eve for her annual check-in.
A plethora of messages were created on handmade signs for attendees to hold during an ICE vigil held outside the Dallas ICE field office, located at 8101 N. Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, on July 27, 2025.
Steve Hamm / Special Contributor
And every time she returned home to her girls. Until Dec. 30, 2025, when she was detained by officers, then shuffled around the state – Dallas to Alvarado to Abilene – before being sent back to Mexico, leaving behind daughters, all born in Dallas, to whom she did not get to say goodbye.
“I was so scared,” said Ana, who, with her eldest, agreed to talk to me if I did not use her full name or her children’s names.
“And I was in shock,” she said. “The whole morning I was just praying thinking about what to do next. I thought I would see my lawyer or talk to someone about what was going on, but the way they took us, no one explained anything to us. I know I did something wrong when I came over without my paperwork, as I should have. But I wasn’t stealing or hurting someone; I was working for my family, providing.”
Ana spoke by phone from Monterrey, where, last week, she buried her father, whose heart failed him days after she was left on that bridge. She began to cry.
“The fact that they just took apart my family, it’s breaking my heart,” Ana said, trying to catch her breath. “There are a lot of people who are doing bad things. We’re just trying to provide for our kids. Why us?”
But she knows why. Everyone does. Because there have been so many stories like this in recent months it’s impossible to keep track.
Ana was transferred to and deported from the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson on Feb. 9. 2026.
Eli Hartman / AP
Just last week, María de Jesus Estrada Juarez of California, who came to the U.S. when she was 15 and was a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, was arrested during her regular check-in and sent back to Mexico. In Alaska, a mother and her three children were sent to Tijuana within 36 hours of being detained by ICE. NBC News also recounted the story of an 11-year-old girl, a U.S. citizen, whose brain-tumor treatment was interrupted when her parents were deported to Mexico.
The Texas Civil Rights Project has been trying to reunite the parents with their 11-year-old girl so she can get the care she needs. I asked the Austin-based organization if they kept track of the number of parents without criminal records deported to Mexico while their children are left behind. A spokesperson said they do not maintain a database tracking such cases, but that “it happens very often under this administration.”
Which is more or less what other immigration advocacy and legal nonprofits told me: We don’t track that data. But it’s, you know, a lot. ICE didn’t respond to emails asking for that information, either.
But just because we’re inundated with these stories doesn’t mean we should turn a deaf ear to them, especially when they involve our neighbors. This feels especially personal, as Ana’s eldest will graduate from my alma mater – if she can survive the next few months of waking her sisters each morning, getting them to school, working late hours at her fast-food job, dealing with grown-up responsibilities suddenly thrust upon her and trying, somehow, to fit in homework.
“It wasn’t really a choice for me,” the 17-year-old told me. “If I don’t do it, who will? The hardest part is getting up every morning, because there’s no break for the rest of the day – it’s the same thing every day, the same loop. And if there is, I have to do laundry or get these girls to their Girl Scouts things.”
Lynn Wilbur has been a Girl Scouts troop leader since 1983. For the last decade, she’s been part of an outreach group within the Scouts that helps girls who otherwise couldn’t afford to be part of the organization.
Courtesy Lynn Wilbur
I never would have known of Ana’s story, and that of the children left behind, had I not been forwarded a newsletter from Now>Forward, the nonprofit once known as North Dallas Shared Ministries. In the newsletter was a brief telling of the tale, along with a plea for assistance, as the girls need food, rent, uniforms.
I was told to call Lynn Wilbur, a Girl Scout troop leader since 1983, when her own daughter turned 5, and, for the last decade, leader of an outreach program that provides financial assistance for girls who want to be Girl Scouts but can’t afford dues, uniforms, supplies, field trips. “Anything that has to be paid for,” Wilbur said.
There are some 60 girls in the program, most spread across Dallas ISD elementary schools, including Ana’s three youngest daughters. Where once the program was funded by a foundation, though, the troop is having to depend on private donations – begging and scrounging, Wilbur said.
“Now, we’re just trying to help the girls pick up the pieces, along with their lives,” the 80-year-old said. When I called, she was with Ana’s daughters.
Most of the girls in Wilbur’s troop are from Spanish-speaking homes. This is the first time one of their parents has been deported. But, she fears, it will not be the last. One mother recently asked Wilbur if she would take her daughter if she, too, is deported.
“The amount of fear is unbelievable,” Wilbur said. “My house is one place they let them come because they know they’d have to kill me before I let them in the door. This has got to stop. Unless good people step up and let their voices be heard nothing is going to change. That’s why I am talking to you. We can’t let this keep happening, especially to children.”
Wilbur taught Ana’s eldest how to pay bills, how to buy a car when her mother’s recently broke down, how to deal with insurance, how to be a grown-up at 17. The TJ student was never a Girl Scout. But Wilbur, the living embodiment of a slogan that demands a Girl Scout do a good deed daily, has surely taught her how to be prepared.
“Miss Lynn has always made us feel like we’re important, that we’re loved,” Ana said. Another small sob. “That we’re human.”
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