Southland Wind Ensemble 25-26 Season Finale

ONTARIO, Calif. - June 10, 2026 - PRLog -- Please join the Southland Wind Ensemble for the final concert of our 2025-2026 season, featuring music by Ethyl Smyth, Vincent Persichetti, Julie Giroux, among others! Throughout the season, we have explored music that was inspired by literary sources, that focused on specific musical forms, such as fugues, passacaglias and preludes, those taking root from folk music and the countrysides, as well as dance music. We've also been fortunate to look at celebratory and holiday-inspired music to round off the holiday season.

Our final concert begins with Ethyl Smyth's The Wrecker's Overture, which tells the tale of a village luring ships to the rocks and plundering their cargo. In addition to her compositional career, she took part in the Women's Suffrage Movement and when her hearing failed, she turned into an author.

The second work is by composer Karl Kohn, a professor of music at Pomona College, whose Wind Chamber for Concert band explores the various combinations of sonorities in the ensemble with chord changes against minimal moving tones. This piece challenges the listener to change their way of listening to band music and focus not on melodic lines, but on the atmosphere the ensemble is creating. Pageant is one of Vincent Persichetti's early works for band that established his signature sound for that medium and entered the repertoire almost instantaneously after its premiere.

Ending the first half of the program is Norman Dello Joio's Scenes from the Louvre, written in five movements that takes music and styles inspired by Renaissance composers. Each movement paints a musical picture and he quotes his Variants on a Medieval Tune in one of the movements.

Starting the second half of the program is Julie Giroux's One Life Beautiful, which paints a musical portrait of a life well-lived. One Life Beautiful is Dedicated to Heather Cramer Reu for her 'one life beautiful' that brought so much love and joy to our lives. Commissioned by Ray and Molly Cramer, husband Phillip Reu and children; brother Jeremy, his wife Michell and children. John Philip Sousa's The Loyal Legion, although rarely performed, does appear in one of his operettas, The Queen of Hearts. The program closes with Ron Nelson's Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H), a work that slowly builds and introduces a passacaglia theme in the low brass voices before layering other instruments on top of it.

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