Audible to human ears
Wind ensemble offers program on canine motifs
For music directors of orchestras and ensembles, deciding what pieces to play on a concert is the fun part that comes before the budgeting, the purchase or rental of the music and the slog of rehearsals. As principal conductor of the Capital Region Wind Ensemble, Brett L. Wery has become a master at the fine art of programming.
The ensemble’s concert on Sunday, May 20, is titled “Release the Hounds” and each piece relates in one way or another to man’s best friend. The program opens with “Orion’s Sword” by Alan Lee Silva. Students of astronomy know that the sword of Orion, the great hunter in the winter sky, points directly at the “dog star,” also known as Sirius. Sure enough, the next piece on the program is Joel Puckett’s “The Shadow of Sirius,” a f lute concerto featuring soloist Jacqueline Wright, the ensemble’s principal flutist.
After the concerto comes Wery’s own Dance Suite. He explains that the piece is akin to a Baroque dance suite, a once-popular form in which composers like Bach and Handel took popular dances like the courante, saraband, and gigue and transformed them into concert music. Wery does the same with the tango, waltz, polka, and fox trot. Each movement has a title and that’s where we find the next dog connection. One of the movements is titled “Dog Day Tango” but it’s a lazy tango that evokes the hottest days of summer. “It’s indolent and slow and sags back into its lawn chair at the end,” says Wery.
Next up, “Aesop’s Fables” by Scott Watson will feature as narrator Dean William Bennett, a professor of history at Schenectady County Commu-