Michele Kenyon, 17, left, and Sarah Hepfl, 18, both from Butler recently played violin on a European tour with the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra in Pittsburgh. They have been encouraging other student musicians to audition for the orchestra.

Two young Butler violinists took the first airplane flights of their lives recently: a straight seven-hour shot from New Jersey to Frankfurt, Germany.

Michelle Kenyon, a 17-year-old senior at Butler High School, and Sarah Hepfl, an 18-year-old recent Butler High graduate soon heading to Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, recently returned from a tour of Europe playing in the string section of the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra.

Both are hopeful they'll start a trend of Butler students participating in the Pittsburgh program.

Both students started playing violin in fourth grade. Hepfl auditioned and joined the orchestra in the ninth grade, then convinced Michelle to join her.

“If I hadn't been in Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra, I don't think I would've known that I want to pursue music as a career,” Hepfl said.

The two students said they're the only musicians in the Butler school's orchestra program who participated in the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra.

They said their teacher, Katherine Vercek, had improved the school's orchestra program in recent years, and that they planned to speak to underclassmen about taking their talents to Pittsburgh.

The Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra represents a step further for students such as Michelle and Hepfl. The pair drove to Pittsburgh every weekend for practices at Duquesne University. Saturday practices routinely lasted three hours, and extra programs sometimes consumed Sundays as well.

In the lead-up to the international trip, the 83-person orchestra handled two, two-hour rehearsals on both Saturdays and Sundays for a total of nearly eight hours of playing each weekend.

“I don't know how I didn't die,” Michele joked.

After landing in Frankfurt, the orchestra flew on to Prague in the Czech Republic, where it played the first of four shows. The orchestra also played in Vienna and Budapest.

For the shows, the group learned about two hours of music or about eight total pieces, the pair estimated. They learned the original scores of pieces by musicians such as Antonin Dvorak and George Enescu.

Their favorite songs? Hepfl liked “Romanian Rhapsody” by Enescu, while Michelle who one day wants to play for musicals, liked “Mambo” by Leonard Bernstein from “West Side Story.”