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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Did We Enjoy It? You Bet Your Brass!


The final concert in the Dickinson Area Concerts Association's series for this year was last night: a high-energy, high-volume, funny, impressive performance by the brass quintet Synergy. They used no chairs the entire time; they stood and danced while they played and even walked around the auditorium amongst audience members while playing. They used no sheet music, either, remembering their entire repertoire of complicated arrangements of works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Bach, Mozart, Rossini, Copland, and Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, and George Gershwin.

The girls had a great time, owing in some part to the fact that the musicians spotted them in the audience and made it a point to target them whenever Synergy was roaming the house! Hillary was seated on my lap, and for one song, the members of the quintet took turns sitting beside her/me, continuing to play but conducting a fun conversation with her through their eye expressions before being replaced by another member of the group.

We knew this would not be your average "clah-ssical" chamber music performance when it began with a burst of fog through which the performers ran onstage. Also, one of the performers had long afro-like hair that stuck out in a bouncy bush about eight inches out from his head on all sides. He's a white man with reddish-blond hair that looks like a Toni Home Perm gone very, very wrong and left untended for about a year (check it out!). Perhaps needless to say, his coiffure drew the immediate attention of our children . . . and just about everybody else in the audience.

Hair, jokes, and theatrics aside, there was no denying their musicality. It was a super night of entertainment.

(Past events in this series: Church Basement Ladies, Presidio Saxophone Quartet, Cadence, and The Golden Strings)

2 comments:

  1. Hillary's favorite instrument was the trombone -- mostly because the person playing it was the first to interact with her. She thought it was amusing that he'd dance with his instrument :-)

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  2. I wish I could have witnessed such entertainment! Also the past concerts. I remember seeing such concerts in Tioga as a young adult. Loved every one of them! The girls will remember them for a long time! ;)

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