Band and Orchestra and Choir, Oh my!

The end of the school year means that we get to enjoy concerts galore from our musically talented kids.  I’ll start with band.  Emily plays the clarinet and she does a pretty good job of it.  She was going to skip to advanced band, but a combination of a personality conflict with one of the other clarinets in that band and her schedule made her decide to do intermediate band this year.  They had a concert last week and then on Saturday combined with the advanced band at a competition in Ogden and then they went to Lagoon for the rest of the day.  She had a blast.  She will probably be mad that I put this picture on here.  It’s hard not to look a little funny when you are playing a wind instrument. 

Jason is in Orchestra and they had their concert last night.  At the end of April, they traveled to Colorado to participate in a competition there.  They did FABULOUS and sounded great.  I had the privilege of going down with them on the bus as a chaperone.  Boy, did that bring back memories. 

It was odd to have him on this side of the stage playing.  He’s usually on the other side.  They played really well and got straight superior ratings once they finally got to play.  There was some sort of miscommunication about the location of the competition and we ended up at the wrong place and missed our assigned time so we had to wait until they had an opening where they could squeeze us in.  Thankfully that wasn’t too late, but it was still three hours later than we had planned.  It made for a long day, but those kids are a ton of fun.    After the competition before we left for the 4 hour bus ride home.  The boys tossing around a rugby ball to get out some energy. 

The orchestra on stage last night. 

It is virtually impossible to get a picture of Jason during an orchestra concert because of all the people and stands between him and the audience.  He did a great job playing and the orchestra sounded great. 

It just so happened that Jason’s choir concert was also last night.  I thought after the Christmas concerts were on the same day that the directors would think to check with one another, but they didn’t and so we were running like crazy to get Jason from his choir concert to his orchestra concert in time.  Thankfully both directors were very understanding. 

Jason sang wonderfully and he even had a solo last night that he did REALLY well on.  He has learned a lot and is becoming a great singer.  This is during the vocal premier part of the concert. 

This is for the part where the concert choir combines with vocal premier (so they actually have some boys in the choir)

His solo—I wish I had recorded it!

Whew!  Now we can be done for a few months until next year.  It’s nice to have kids in music, but it sure makes for a lot of concerts to attend.  Way to go Em and Jason!