The Concord Band continues its 55th season with Flights of Fancy, featuring trumpet soloist Lewis Buckley, at the Performing Arts Center, 51 Walden Street, Concord, at 8:00 PM on Saturday, March 8, 2014.
The program opens with the dramatic Beyond the Horizon by Rosanno Galante. This majestic and sweeping work is based on two themes that represent the magnificence of the earth’s horizon.
John Philip Sousa is widely known for his marches, but he also wrote many other works, including a number of suites. People Who Live In Glass Houses is a unique and lively four-movement suite composed one year before the world tour of the Sousa Band in 1910. Each movement is a musical representation of the country or region where a particular type of drink originated: “The Champaignes”, “The Rhine Wines”, “The Whiskeys”, and “The Convention of the Cordials”.
John Pennington’s Apollo (1968) is one of the first aleatoric (chance music) works written for band. It consists of a series of “sound events” that are solely determined by the musicians. The conductor’s role is to mold and form the events and to assist in the transitions.
Dusk by Steven Bryant is a slow work in chorale style that captures the calm and awesome beauty of that time of sunset where the rich colors and contrasts fill the early evening sky.
The Concord Band has frequently performed and commissioned works by Rhode Island composer Roger Cichy. His phenomenal Quartets, presented by the Band in October, was extremely well received. Roger’s newly released Wings Across America is inspired by the Women Airforce
Service Pilots (WASP’s) of World War II. Cichy writes that the piece “unfolds as a dramatic musical narrative of the WASP’s and episodes [in the] various stages that these inspiring woman went through to serve their country”.
Aerial Fantasy by the significant 21st-century composer Michael Mogensen depicts the exciting and inspiring concept of flight, employing ascending music motives, soaring melodies, powerful volumes and fast tempi. Aerial Fantasy, which was nominated for a 2007 Pulitzer Prize, was commissioned by the United States Air Force Band of Washington DC.
Lew Buckley, Music Director of the Metropolitan Wind Symphony, will be featured on trumpet in this concert, first performing his composition Tribute to Doc (which, under its original title, Bell-Flight,
was the inspiration for the theme of this concert) and then his arrangement Variations on the Yellow Rose of Texas. Both works showcase musical and technical virtuosity, ranging from the high note “lead trumpet” sound characteristic of Doc Severinsen, longtime leader of NBC’s Tonight Show, to the fast and flying fingers found in the musical form of theme and variations.
In the view of Music Director James O’Dell, this concert promises to be an exciting continuation of the Concord Band’s 55th Season and his own fifth as Music Director.
