BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Union High School Music Department will present an Early Spring Bands Concert on Tuesday, March 24, at 7 p.m, in the BUHS auditorium.
No admission will be charged and the public is invited to attend.
The concert will open with the concert band, performing their most rigorous program of the year.
Director Stephen Rice has created a hybrid suite of sorts with the program. The band will open with the first movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams' “English Folk Song Suite.” This movement sets three folk songs into a march style with a unique ABCCBA form.
The band's second selection is the second movement of Vincent Persichetti's Symphony No. 6, Opus 69, composed for band in 1958. This slow movement is a setting of a hymn Persichetti composed prior to the symphony.
The finale of the band's suite is Frank Ticheli's fiery “Vesuvius,” composed in 1999. Ticheli uses Phrygian, Dorian and altered Aeolian modes to help evoke ancient times when, in A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius buried the city of Pompeii and thousands of its inhabitants. Ticheli described this piece as a “furious dance...from the final days of the doomed city."
The second ensemble to perform will be the jazz workshop, directed by Christopher Rymes. It will perform jazz standards in a combo setting. Selections will include “Milestones” by Miles Davis, “Soul Sister” by Dexter Gordon, “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise” by Oscar Hammerstein II and Sigmund Romberg, “Imagination” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, and “Song For My Father” by Horace Silver.
The final group to take the stage will be the jazz ensemble, fresh off of a very successful performance at the University of Massachusetts High School Jazz Festival on Feb. 28.
The ensemble will perform Wycliffe Gordon's “The Woogie,” featuring Gwen Harris on piano, Ian Epstein on the trombone, John Sawyer Shaw and Kyra Johnston on the trumpet, Claire Thomas on the tenor saxophone and Isaac Freitas-Eagan on the baritone saxophone.
Next up is a movement from Benny Carter's Kansas City Suite titled “Katy-Do,” featuring Jonah Goldenbird on the trumpet. This will be followed by the well-known George and Ira Gershwin song, “They Can't Take That Away from Me,” with Gabrielle Walton on vocals.
The concert closes with Dizzy Gillespie's Latin jazz classic, “Manteca,” featuring Brain McCarthy on alto saxophone and Jacob Gartenstein on the drums.
For more information, call 802-451-3511.