On Tuesday, Mar. 12, the concert band and wind ensemble performed in their pre-festival concert. This concert takes place to prepare the members of these ensembles for their upcoming festival, the San Juan Hills Ratings Festival, on Wednesday, March 20.
The festival that this concert supports is a slightly more important event as it is one of the main festivals that the concert band and wind ensemble will be performing at.
Concert band and wind ensemble are some of the band program’s groups that primarily operates during the school day as they are classes during second and first period, respectively. The upcoming festival will also take place during the school day similar to jazz band’s performances during school hours.
Call time for the performance was 5:30 while the actual show began at 6:30 p.m. Since the ensembles were only playing two pieces, the performance itself lasted only about 20 minutes. An unorthodox aspect of the performance was that following the performance, two guest instructors helped the students on improvements to polish the pieces before their important festival. Helping both soloists and the ensemble as a whole, the band aims to perform its best for that festival at San Juan Hills High School in over a week.
The festival itself is one of the most important performance opportunities for the concert groups in the band program. Unlike marching band, drumline and color guard, the concert band and wind ensemble, as well as the jazz band, perform only concerts and festivals instead of competitions, enjoying a more pure performance experience that often produces less stress.
Most of the audience present at this performance was parents and family of the performers or friends within the program.
Kayla Borlasa (12), a member of one of the other band programs who attended the concert, comments, “I really enjoyed the performance, because although I don’t know too much about band, I was still able to appreciate the musicality of their pieces. I also enjoyed watching their pre-festival clinic, as it provided insight as to how their technique can be changed to match what each piece requires.”
The two pieces played during this concert were a Cajun folk song and Irish tunes. The concert band and wind ensemble will perform the same pieces at the festival that this concert prepared them for.
The concert ensemble performances are also much more infrequent compared to many of the other arts groups on campus. However, the past month of March has been unusually busy in terms of concert season with occurrences such as orchestra concerts, the area concert, and this band concert that leads to another band performance at said festival in the district.
Mr. Ma, Aliso Niguel’s band director, runs and teaches the concert ensembles himself, while other groups in the band program have external instructors.
He states about this concert, “The kids sounded great, and it was a great opportunity for me to bring in two clinicians to work with the students for about 30 to 45 minutes and get them to think about what to work on as well as reinforce what I’ve said in class. It really helped them improve as an ensemble and get ready for the Ratings Festival at San Juan Hills, with the performance at 6 p.m.”
