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Arts & Entertainment

Foxborough Music Department Presents: A Spring Concert

The FHS Concert Band, Concert Choir, and Symphony Orchestra play their spring show!

I've never been to a high school music concert which opens with a video display before. The quality of the short film which was put together to promote the work of the Foxboro Music Association is a fairly strong statement of how much value students, parents and faculty in Foxboro place on music. The FMA sounds like an organization worthy of support.

The Concert Choir, the first group to perform, begins with the famous pop song “True Colors,” featuring several soloists, one of whom beatboxes. If anyone found it a bit unconventional, they are certainly consoled by the next piece. “Tatkovina,” a Macedonian folk song, is beautiful and tasteful, featuring a single violinist.

Jazz pianist Thelonius Monk wrote the song “'Round Midnight,” in the 1940's. Amazingly, it sounds new and fresh seventy-odd years later. This arrangement, which incorporates part of Debussy's “Claire de Lune,” doesn't sound like something one would expect from a concert choir. The ending is sufficiently eerie to simulate the feeling of being lost in the dark.

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Continuing their theme of alternating classic fare with bolder choices, the group sings “Piu Jesu,” from the Requiem Mass, before closing with a shanty; a wild and chorale-style version of “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?”

The Symphony Orchestra will play selections from three great composers tonight. The first is from Johann Strauss. The balance between the different sections of the orchestra is impeccable throughout the “Radetzky March.”

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Stravinsky's “Firebird Suite” is one of the most exciting pieces of classical music ever written. The crazed, conflicting melodies are unlike any music written before. It isn't an easy score; District Orchestras often perform it. But I swear, this is the best playing of the “Danse Infernale,” movement I've ever witnessed.

The program notes that Brahms' 1st Symphony has been called “Beethoven's Tenth,” for its similarity to the works of the greatest composer of the Romantic movement. Anyone in the audience who has ever listened to Beethoven could clearly hear his influence in the melodies, especially those played by the first violins.

Sailors and dancing seem to be common themes tonight. The FHS Concert Band plays Leonard Bernstein's “Danzon, Sailor's Dance,” with a growing feeling of anticipation and celebration.

I would have recognized Beethoven's “Sonata Pathetique,” without a program. While Brahms' work in his style is splendid, this is the real thing. No one can write Beethoven like Beethoven, and the band creates a huge wall of sound out of this moving number.

If Beethoven has an equivalent in the field of brass music, it is John Philip Sousa. Though I've never heard “The Black Horse Troop March,” before, Sousa's jaunty, brash style is instantly recognizable. Marches are apparently a particular strong point of the Concert Band. Throughout the song, various sections stand up while their parts are featured.

The last band piece is “Kaddish,” named after the Jewish prayer for the dead. The minimalist opening chills the listener before startling them by a blast of horns and timpani. As the composer, W. Francis McBeth wrote, the work, “end[s] as an. . . affirmation of life.”

The band and choir join forces with a few orchestra members for the evening's final piece, the Angel's Chorus, “Hallelujah,” from Beethoven's Christ on the Mount of Olives. The effect of a couple hundred voices in combination with a full band is difficult to describe. All I can say is that it is easy to see why the people who appeared in the opening videos sounded so passionate about Foxboro's music program. It is glorious to hear.

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