I wish you could have been there. Last night was one of those nights with one mountaintop moment after another- and it was courtesy of the Kenosha Pops Concert Band. Most of the summer this fine group plays in the open air bandshell at Pennoyer Park- but last night, in a first-time experiment, they played a summertime concert in Carthage’s Siebert Chapel. (They’ve played a Christmas concert here for the last several years in mid-December, but never done so in the summer.)
It was quite a gamble. People obviously love the experience of coming to Pennoyer Park with their favorite lawn chair or blanket, spreading out with a soda and maybe even a good book, and relaxing under the sky with the lake right beside them. We were asking them last night to leave the lawn chair at home and come indoors on a lovely, cloudless night to listen to a program with a bit more substance to it- more Brahms than Beatles, as I like to say.
Well first of all, they came! We had an excellent crowd at Siebert- not quite equal to a typical night in the park but a very good turnout nonetheless. (“You found us!” I said at the very beginning of the concert.) And they absolutely loved the concert, rewarding the band with several partial standing ovations along the way and a resounding standing ovation at the end of the night. It was incredible.
And I for one found the program to be incredibly powerful and uplifting. It’s easy to say that band music is a homely cousin next to orchestral music, but I heard a lot of tremendous music last night . . . and a lot of it really got to me. One piece in particular, which I think was called “The Wings of Victory” was commissioned for Kenosha Unified’s 50th anniversary Band-O-Rama concert this past February. It took its name from a neat statue in Kenosha’s library park commemorating the thousands of Kenoshans who were killed during the Civil War- and by the end of it I had this huge lump in my throat and wondered if I would even be able to speak. . . let alone sing. (As luck would have it, I had to sing three Old American Songs of Copland right after that.) Another tremendously moving piece was Sousa’s Songs of Grace and Glory, which was a medley of famous religious pieces including Faure’s The Palms and also Nearer My God To Thee, as Sousa arranged it for the funeral of President Garfield. As the band soared to the climax of that hymn, I felt like raising my hands in the air as one might at a Revival Meeting. The band also played a neat medley of the hymns of each of the branches of the armed forces, beginning with “Eternal Father Strong to Save” (which was sung at my mom’s funeral) which was also quite moving and musically sublime. I also loved one of the very first pieces on the program- a band setting of the opening movement of the Brahms Requiem. That’s something that is certainly best heard in its original form, but when you don’t have a chorus and orchestra handy, this was certainly a worthy alternative.
Besides emceeing and singing the Copland songs, my big contribution to the night was playing the organ for the last big piece of the night, Mannin Veen by Sir Haydn Wood. It’s a piece based on four Gaelic folk melodies, and the last portion of the work is based on a Thanksgiving hymn. There was something truly awesome about the sound of that great wind ensemble joining forces with the mighty Cassavant pipe organ – and if there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about what a wonderful idea this concert was, they had to be erased by that monumental finale.
The stupendous success of last night got me thinking back to 15 years or so when the Racine Symphony decided to move their summertime concerts inside Festival Hall. (The first several seasons were outside under the stars.) To judge from the intensity of the outcry, you would have thought the RSO had proposed the killing of baby seals- People were truly outraged – and it took several seasons inside before those feelings calmed down. I think the problem there was that it was a permanent change they were making- while last night’s move indoor was a one – week thing. Another difference is that the RSO moved inside into a space which is acoustically better than the open air but not by a whole lot. Siebert is an amazing room for a band and I think for many people there it was absolutely revelatory to hear what a group like that sounds like in a beautifully reverberant hall. And that more than compensated for the loss of the sky above you or the comfort of your favorite lawn chair.
What was probably neatest of all for me was how this was a chance for people to be listening to the band far more attentively than is the case in Pennoyer Park, where the sound of the band is this relatively tinny sound that’s mostly in the background and to which you really have to force yourself to listen to with any true intensity. In Siebert, it was like being caught up in a stupendous storm and it was as though nothing else could possibly matter. And when it was all over, you knew that you had experienced something truly magnificent and rare.
pictured above: I love this shot of Craig Gall and Garrett Kornman, the director and assistant director of the band, in a last minute consultation right before the start of the concert- with band and audience visible in the background.