USU Symphonic Band and Chamber Ensembles will perform Wednesday
The USU Music Department will present its annual fall Symphonic and Chamber Ensembles Performance at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Kent Concert Hall. The concert will be free and is open to all students and Cache community members who want to attend.
Dr. Joseph Falvey, the conductor of both groups, is a new addition to the department, but students studying under him are confident in his leadership.
“I am really looking forward to the concert, especially since this in the first concert with the new symphonic band director, Dr. Falvey,” said Brittany Little, a freshman flautist majoring in music education.
There will be lots of variety in this concert, Falvey said, including a trombone choir, a french horn quartet and a clarinet choir performing pieces before the 92-member symphonic band.
Pieces played by the symphonic band will include “Amazing Grace,” composed by Frank Ticheli, and “Japanese Rhapsody,” composed by Clare Grundman, Falvey said, as well as “March of the Scaffold,” the fourth movement of composer Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.”
“We prepare by rehearsing and learning about the different styles and story behind each piece,” Little said.
Berlioz’s composition was written around the story of a man who falls in love with a woman after he sees her for the first time, Falvey said. Later, the man has a dream where he kills his love and is taken to trial; there, he is sentenced to death by the guillotine. He then attends his own funeral as a ghost and sees Halloween like creatures like witches and sorcerers at his funeral.
Falvey said the fourth movement in the concert is about the dream itself. Rehearsals for this event have been very limited and very stretched, Falvey said. The symphonic band only meets a few times before the concert and each rehearsal lasts for five hours.
Falvey said he is looking forward to this event because it has a “different repertoire” than other concerts he has conducted. Every piece, he said, will have a different style that will appeal to a broad audience.
