PORT ANGELES — The Sequim City Band and Port Angeles High School Wind Ensemble will combine nearly 110 members for a concert, “A Royal Celebration,” at 3 p.m. Sunday.
The free concert will be at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.
“This concert has been six months in the making,” said Tyler Benedict, director of the Sequim City Band.
The two bands have rehearsed separately, playing together for the first time this past Wednesday.
Combining talent
The concert will mark the first time in the Sequim City Band’s 23 seasons that it will perform within Port Angeles, or with the Wind Ensemble, Port Angeles High’s top band.
“We’re the only community band in Clallam County. We want to show that there is music after high school, a way to continue to play your instrument,” Benedict said.
Next year, Benedict said, he hopes the city band will have a chance to play with Sequim High School’s band.
Benedict is a native of Port Angeles who is in his second season conducting the city band.
He is a former student of Doug Gailey, director of the Port Angeles High bands, and received a degree in music from the University of Washington.
The two ensembles will perform music that honors royalty of various sorts, Benedict said.
Wind Ensemble
Sunday will be the 103rd anniversary of the death of composer Gustav Mahler on May 18, 1911.
The Wind Ensemble — a brass, woodwind and percussion ensemble, with select string instruments — will perform excerpts from Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 finale in the composer’s honor.
In 1883, Mahler was hired as the royal musical and choral director in Kassel, Germany, and was appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897.
He conducted both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
His work, seldom performed in the years immediately after his death, has seen a steady revival in recent decades.
The 54-member Wind Ensemble also will play selected pieces from its repertoire, which may include “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” by John Williams, which invokes the majesty of the Olympic Games; the “Sabre Dance” from the ballet “Gayne” by Aram Khachaturian; and the “Washington Post March,” a tribute to John Philip Sousa.
Sequim City Band
The Sequim City Band, which has 55 members ranging in age from 16-88, will perform Gustav Holst’s First Suite in E flat, considered a great work among all classical music genres.
Holst, one of the most famous classical composers, was one of the first to write specifically for concert band, Benedict said.
Royalty continues with “Highlights from ‘The King and I’” with music by Richard Rodgers and “Elegy For a Young American,” written in 1964 by Ronald Lo Presti to commemorate President John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot” White House.
The two ensembles will combine for an arrangement of music from “The Wizard of Oz” by Harold Arlen and “Semper Fidelis” by Sousa.
George Rodes, the director of the Mount Angeles unit of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula, will serve as the announcer and provide program notes throughout the concert.
Rodes, a clarinet player, performs with the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
