Metropolitan Wind Symphony Band Concert: Dances

The Metropolitan Wind Symphony will continue their 43rd
season with their Spring Concert, "Dances," on Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 3:00 pm, at Cary Hall, 1605
Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington, MA.
MWS Music director Lewis J. Buckley will conduct the program. Featured on this
program which celebrates the world of dance will be Rolling Thunder by Henry
Fillmore, Postcard by Frank Ticheli, and Carmina Burana by Carl Orff/arr. John
Krance. Talented student musicians will join the MWS musicians for these
selections: Dances of Innocence by Jan Van der Roost, Turkey
in the Straw arranged by Lewis Buckley, Solitary Dancer by Warren Benson, and
English Folk Song Suite by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Mr. Buckley will deliver a
pre-concert lecture at 2:30 pm.

Tickets are $18 for adults, $14 for seniors, $6 for
students, and are free for children under 5. They are available at the door or
can be reserved by telephone. Call the MWS Concert Line at (617) 983-1370 to
reserve or purchase tickets. Visit the MWS web page at
http://www.mws-boston.org for information and directions. Email
mws@mws-boston.org with any questions.

“Dances”, our Spring Concert this year (so named for the
number of dance-related selections on the program) is lively, interesting, and
varied.

We will again open with a march, but this time it’s not
Sousa; it’s the famous Henry Fillmore’s circus march, Rolling Thunder.
Fillmore, a trombonist himself, wrote a number of trombone features including,
most famously, Lassus Trombone. Not surprisingly, this march also features the
trombones.

We next proceed to the music of one of our favorite
composers, Frank Ticheli, in this case his compact and difficult Postcard.
Famed wind conductor H. Robert Reynolds commissioned Ticheli to write Postcard
in honor of his mother, following her passing. The title is based on the fact
that Reynolds always sent postcards to his mom from wherever in the world his
many guest-conducting engagements took him.

Reynolds asked not for “…an elegy commemorating her death
but a short, energetic piece celebrating her life.” Ticheli certainly
delivered; this piece is bursting with energy. He also used a highly unusual
compositional technique; the opening 42-note theme is a palindrome. A theme
consisting of the same pitches both frontward and backward, it is based on the
Reynolds family tradition of giving their children palindromes as first names,
including “Harrah”, Reynolds’ own first name.

We close the first half of our program with a wind band
transcription of Carl Orff’s massive Carmina Burana. As major choral texts go,
these Latin texts are fascinating in that, although found in a monastery, they
are highly secular poems dating back to the traveling troubadours of the 11th
to the 13th centuries. This is powerful music that translates beautifully from
chorus to wind band. Widely used as background music in television and motion
pictures, the opening and arguably the most famous theme, O Fortuna, is one of
those rare, instantly familiar motifs that have become part of our culture.

Both private and public school students of the many music
teachers in MWS will join us for the second half of the concert. Middle school
students will join us first in Jan Van der Roost’s Dances of Innocence.
Although this piece, like Postcard, is a commemoration of someone deceased, in
this case a 14-year-old girl, Dances, like Postcard, celebrates the beauty,
cheerfulness, and innocence of the young girl it commemorates rather than the
sadness of her death.

Next we will take music director Lew Buckley’s arrangement
of Turkey in
the Straw. This light-hearted set of variations on the famous fiddle tune
features as soloists the clarinet, flute, and the [in this case] comical sounds
of the rumbling contrabass clarinet.

The high school students will next join us on stage for
prolific composer Warren Benson’s Solitary Dancer. This piece is imbued with
excitement, but in a fascinating twist, it is subdued excitement struggling to
break free. The expression of these tightly wound emotions takes place through
subdued dynamics, the use of hand clapping, singing using the syllable din, and
unusual percussion combinations.

We will close the concert with one of the concert band
masterworks of the early twentieth century, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ famed
English Folk Song Suite. In an era when most band music was transcribed from
orchestral compositions, an original wind work by a composer of Vaughan
Williams’ stature immediately became a staple in the relatively small wind
repertoire. The two outside movements are cheerful and light, and the middle
movement is hauntingly beautiful.