Kearny Mesa Concert Band Plays an Unusually Advanced Program at Free Concert in Balboa Park June 25

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Tuesday, June 25) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featuring the Kearny Mesa Concert Band. Though they’re a pretty typical concert band – what makes a “band” different from an “orchestra” in this context is that a concert band has only brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, no strings – I give them and their music director, Richard Almanza, credit for picking a surprisingly unhackneyed program. Most concert bands play pretty much the same stuff – marches by John Philip Sousa (who spent most of his career, once he was discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps, leading a concert band of his own, and a quite famous one at that!) and others in a similarly stentorian style, pop songs from the “Great American Songbook” and medleys of soundtrack music from a famous film. The Kearny Mesa Concert Band began their Balboa Park concert with a piece whose title and its composer name got hopelessly garbled. It sounded like “En Paredo Roca” and the composer’s name came off as “Jaime Texaner,” though whatever it was called and whoever wrote it, it was an uptempo march in the Spanish paso doble style and provided a fine kickoff to the program. After that the band played an arrangement by David Holtzinger of the spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead” (for some reason the announcer, a woman who was also a flute player in the band, insisted on pronouncing “Gilead” as “Jileed”) that was quite artfully done.

Then came the obligatory march by John Philip Sousa – though in this case it wasn’t one of the mind-numbingly familiar ones but an obscure march, “The Glory of the Yankee Navy,” which Sousa actually wrote as an insert piece for a Broadway show in 1909 called The Yankee Girl starring Blanche Ring. It even had lyrics by Kenneth Clark (not the African-American NAACP sociologist who testified in Brown v. Board of Education or the British historian who narrated the 1970’s PBS series Civilization), though the Kearny Mesa Concert Band performed it as an instrumental. (In fact, they didn’t use any guest singers at all.) For “The Glory of the Yankee Navy” they brought in a guest conductor, Jonathan Ring (probably no relation to the woman who introduced the song in 1909), a Navy officer. Then the band played the one familiar piece on the program, Luigi Denza’s “Funiculì, Funiculà,” composed by Luigi Denza to a poem by Peppino Turco in 1880 to celebrate the opening of the world’s first funicular railway (one in which the cars move up and down on cables and one car is always on the opposite side from the other so they remain in balance) up the side of Mount Vesuvius. After that the band performed a quite lovely piece, Eric Whittaker’s “Light, Warm and Heavy,” a Christian-themed composition written mostly in pedal tones. Next up on their program was a piece called “Instant Concert” by Harold Walters, which incorporated bits of 30 classical, semi-classical, folk and pop selections including the “Blue Danube,” the Lone Ranger theme from Rossini’s William Tell Overture and a number of other favorites. Part of the fun of a piece like this is seeing how many of the borrowed themes you can recognize, and part is admiring Walters’s skill in weaving bits of incredibly familiar music into a smoothly flowing whole.

The next three pieces were American Folk Rhapsody No. 1 (1948) by band composer Clare Grundman (a man, and according to Wikipedia he was Gay and his partner lived 16 more years after Grundman’s death in 1996), which also drew on American folk songs – On Top of Old Smokey, Shantyman's Life; Sourwood Mountain and Sweet Betsy from Pike – though not as blatantly or obviously as “Instant Concert”; a clever arrangement by Frank Kelly of the American folk song “Shenandoah”; and a score medley from a film. I had got worried that they’d trot out some incredibly banal music by John Williams or one of his contemporaries, but no-o-o-o-o: they picked Bruce Broughton’s score for an obscure 1985 Western called Silverado, directed and co-written by Lawrence Kasdan (his writing partner was his brother Mark) and with an all-star cast: Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese (from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers), Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum and Linda Hunt. It turned out to be a perfectly serviceable generic “Western” score, though it made me want to see the film to hear just how the music was used (and how the Kasdans managed to squeeze in all those formidable acting talents into this one film!). They played the virtually obligatory encore from these events, yet another turn-of-the-last-century march, “Glorious Victory” by British composer Walter M. Kendall, which sent the audience out on a truly glorious, upbeat note. The Kearny Mesa Concert Band suffered a bit from the ensemble glitches endemic to amateur bands, though they got better as they warmed up, and overall I give them credit for a performance far above the “community concert” norm and especially for their unusually advanced and progressive selections in terms of their material! For more information on the Kearny Mesa Concert Band, visit their Web site at https://www.kearnymesaconcertband.com.