Bay Concert Band Schedules Season's Final Concert

Program Will Be "ALL MARCHES", Including "Entry Of The Gladiators"

May 2, 2018
By: Stephen Kent

The Bay Concert Band, under the direction of Music and Artistic Director Peter Makar Jr IV, will present its final concert of the season Tuesday, May 8, at 7:30 pm in the auditorium at Bay City Central HS. The program, titled "MARCH ON" and will feature a variety marches, both familiar and surprising!

The program opens with Berlioz's "March to the Scaffold" from the "Symphonie Fantastique". Subtitled "The Fantastical Symphonie - An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts", the fourth movement "March to the Scaffold" takes on a nightmarish character. Having taken opium, the young artist dreams that he has killed his true love and is about to be executed for his crime. This movement thus depicts the artist's forced march to the scaffold.

No march program is complete without a Sousa march, so the band will play "The Thunderer", one of the most famous and simplest of the marches from Sousa's large catalog of compositions.

Edward Elgar wrote and published five marches titled "Pomp and Circumstance" and left sketches for a sixth that was eventually elaborated upon by Anthony Payne and premiered in 2006. The most famous of the marches is Pomp and Circumstance No. 1. The trio section of this march is the British "Land of Hope and Glory", which is often used in America as the ceremonial processional piece at school graduation ceremonies.

Also on the program is the "Wedding March" from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" composed by Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthody, which is the music between acts IV and V of the Shakespeare comedy. This march is one of the most recognizable melodies used at weddings today.

The concert concludes with "Pines of the Appian Way" from the "Pines of Rome" by Ottorino Respighi. Sometimes lauded as the best march ever written it depicts an honored Roman Legion returning to the city via the famous Appian Way.

Doors at Bay City Central High School Auditorium open at 7 pm and the program starts at 7:30. Admission is $5. Students in grades six and under admitted free.