Last Night's Concert

Jamie's strings concert last night was great. Not only was his group performing, but ALL the strings students from 43 schools were performing! This consisted of about half of his school district. So imagine a gymnasium filled with more than 1,300 orchestra students, and that's what I heard last night. Performing were 5th grade string students from 20-some elementary schools, 12 middle school orchestras, and 5 high school orchestras. The high schoolers started us off with "The Star Spangled Banner." Then the 5th graders got to perform "Do Re Mi" from The Sound of Music and "All That Jazz" from Chicago. The evening's theme was "Broadway;" every school performed at least one song from a Broadway musical. In addition to the aforementioned musicals, we heard selections from The Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof, Grease, and Phantom of the Opera. Phantom was the finale performed together by all five high schools (one of which was the districts performing arts magnet school). It was a medley of the more popular songs. What was neat about it was that about halfway through, the middle school bands joined in on "Music of the Night," then the last 25 bars, the 5th graders joined in, as well. There's something pretty powerful about hearing 1,300+ musicians play together that'll give you goosebumps everytime.

Unfortunately, a transportation snafu meant that, at the last minute, I had to get Jamie from the house and go pick up another student and rush them over to the concert. I didn't have time to find my digital camera to record the concert. However, I was able to catch some of the 5th graders' performance on my cell phone camera. As luck would have it, I chose exactly the perfect spot to sit, as I was almost directly across the aisle from where Jamie wound up sitting, so at least you can see him. The bad thing, though, is that for some reason my camera recorded the video sideways and I can't figure out how to rotate it, the sound quality stinks and seems to be a bit faster than the video, and the memory ran out before I could get any of the rest of the concert. Naturally, after I got home from the concert I found the good camera right away (figures). I plan on recording Jamie playing solo sometime this weekend and posting it for you.

For now, here's the less-than-stellar video from last night.