Coronado Concert Band Plays Well in "From Hollywood to Broadway" Concert at "Twilight in the Park" August 27

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

Last night (Tuesday, August 27) I went to the second-from-last series of “Twilight in the Park” concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, featuring a quite good ensemble called the Coronado Concert Band. A “concert band” is actually a quite large group consisting of all the major instruments of a symphony orchestra except strings – though one of the key numbers on their concert last night included a guest violinist. The program was advertised as “From Hollywood to Broadway,” and I was grateful that for once at one of these concerts there was a printed program, so I didn’t have to scribble down frantic notes on what they were playing. As you’d guess from the title, the concert was given over to songs and instrumental pieces from Broadway musicals and film scores – and sometimes, notably the two songs from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story, Broadway musicals that were later adapted into films. The Coronado Concert Band occasionally suffered from the usual problems of intonation and blend that afflict semi-professional musical groups, but for the most part they blended quite well and acquitted themselves marvelously on some pretty exposed and elaborate arrangements. The program opened with George Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band” in an arrangement by Warren Barker that artfully combined the song’s rarely heard verse with the main chorus and refrain and required some elaborate counterpoint from the brass players.

After that they did bits of two big film scores by John Williams: “Harry’s Wondrous World” from the first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (actually the story was originally called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in author Joanne Rowling’s native Britain, but the title was changed in the U.S. because the people running Warner Bros. and Scholastic Publications didn’t think Americans would know what the term “the philosopher’s stone” – the magical element alchemists searched for in vain that would turn lead into gold – meant) and the familiar march from the 1978 Superman. Then they did a “symphonic suite” from the classic stage musical and film Fiddler on the Roof, composed by Jerry Bock and arranged by Ira Hearshen. To create this piece, Hearshen mostly drew on the opening number, “Tradition,” along with “If I Were a Rich Man” and several horas heard during the show as instrumental dance numbers. The two leading clarinetists did quite good klezmer impressions and made the music sound, if anything, even more “Jewish” than it does in context. I’m only sorry that the arrangement didn’t include a part for the solo violinist who played the title character (and who in the 1971 film version was played by Isaac Stern), because their guest violinist, Jusun Eo (a Korean-American woman who’s the assistant concertmaster of the Coronado Philharmonia Orchestra), could have played it marvelously.

Eo actually appeared in the next item after the Fiddler on the Roof medley, the famous violin theme from John Williams’s score for Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. This was originally played by Itzhak Perlman, who’s since complained that in every concert he gives – even ones supposedly devoted exclusively to classical music – he’s expected to play the Schindler’s List theme. Eo was hardly in Perlman’s league, but then I hadn’t expected her to be and she was quite good in her own right. After Eo’s stint (which drew a lot of people from the audience approaching the stage and video-recording her performance on their phones) the band played two songs from West Side Story, the relatively little-known “Cool” (to which they gave a lilting big-band swing) and the all too familiar “Somewhere.” The songs had different band arrangers – Paul Murtha for “Cool” and Jay Bocook for “Somewhere” – and they were both nicely played. After that the band played a medley of themes from Alan Menken’s score for the 1991 Walt Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast and the 2017 live-action remake (there was an intervening stage musical version as well), which began with a narration by the show’s MC giving the background of the story. I’m a bit ashamed that the only songs in the medley I recognized were “Be Our Guest” and “Beauty and the Beast” – there were at least three others – but the piece was nice enough even though part of me wished they had done a medley from the Disney film Frozen instead.

The final work on the program was another film medley, this time from the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro, directed by Martin Campbell with music by James Horner and starring Antonio Banderas as Zorro and Anthony Hopkins as his nemesis, Don Diego de la Vega. I remember being disappointed in this movie when Charles and I first watched it together on a VHS tape – it didn’t have anywhere near the insouciant charm of the best-known previous versions (Douglas Fairbanks’ 1920 silent and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1939 remake with Tyrone Power) – and Horner’s music was O.K. but nothing special. Fortunately the Coronado Concert Band had built an encore into their program, and it was a fun one: “76 Trombones” from Meredith Willson’s score for The Music Man (his last name was misspelled “Wilson” on the program, a common mistake), which like “Strike Up the Band” had an unexpectedly complex arrangement. The chart incorporated the opening strain of John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” – the one best known today as the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus – which makes this an unusual band concert in that there wasn’t a complete work by Sousa on the program. Though the Coronado Concert Band’s program was hardly as adventurous as the Kearny Mesa Concert Band’s in a much earlier (June 25) “Twilight in the Park” concert this year, it departed enough from the usual hackneyed concert-band repertoire to be interesting – and the band itself played surprisingly well and met the challenges of some pretty tough arrangements with aplomb.