Show band to present ‘An Evening at the Pops’

The Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band will present “An Evening at the Pops,” a concert of music from the concert hall and world of popular music, 7:30 p.m. Monday, at the Merton E. Hill Auditorium on the campus of Chaffey High School, 1245 N. Euclid Ave., Ontario.

Admission is free, and before the concert, the Woodwind Celebration Ensemble will perform at 7 p.m. in the lobby, where coffee and cookies will be available.

Featured soloists from the band will be Gary Simpson, Trisha Molina, Francisco Mowatt, Natasha Le and John Holguin.

Gary Simpson, a trumpeter in the band, has made an arrangement of the first movement of Franz Joseph Haydn’s 1796 Concerto per il Clarino (Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major), and he will solo in the band’s performance of that piece, according to a news release.

Flutist Trisha Molina will be featured in her original composition “Libertango,” a piece for flute and alto flute that breaks away from the traditional tango.

Francisco Mowatt will play an alto saxophone solo in “Never Let Me Go,” a ballad from the 1950s popularized by Nancy Wilson and Nat King Cole, and will be the violinist in a quartet performing the first movement of Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.”

Other members of that quartet are Neil Vargas, clarinet; Kenya Nelson, viola; and George Osorio, bassoon.

Band member and vocalist Natasha Le will perform “Maybe This Time” from “Cabaret,” and John Holguin will play the role of Herb Alpert in the 1968 song “This Guy’s in Love With You.”

The concert also features the band’s percussion section in a piece for percussion ensemble.

Also on the program are “The Best of All Possible Worlds” from the “Candide Suite” by Leonard Bernstein; “A Day in Branch Brook Park” by Gabe Petrocelli, director of the Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band; and “April in Paris.”

Narrators will be Gary Ovitt and Susan Petrocelli.

The concert will be broadcast on local Ontario cable Channel 3.

The Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band, founded in 1985 by R. Jack Mercer, is directed by Gabe Petrocelli and assistant directors David Schaafsma and Pat Arnold. Members represent communities throughout Southern California.

The band rehearses 7 p.m. Mondays at Chaffey High School and presents monthly concerts on the Chaffey High campus. Adult musicians and students are invited to participate.

For information and to donate to the Friends of the Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band, go to showband.net.