What We're Up To: Season Finale Concert

By: Maddie Mechem, Concert Choir

Maddie has been in BCC for 4 years. She is 15 years old.

   On May 22nd, BCC performed its last concert of the season. This is the concert where everyone shows off what they learned during the year, and says goodbye to the departing seniors, which is like saying goodbye to family. In Concert Choir, we had to say goodbye to Vanessa Zamy, who will attend Stanford, and Amanda Yee, who is going to UMASS Lowell.

Members of CU

   There is always a lot to do before the final concert, since we have to look and sound our best. In years past, we have based the concert on a theme, like musicals (2008-09) or movies (2009-10), but this year, we had no theme, just a lot of great music.

   Concert Choir and Choral Union started off the concert with The Storm is Passing Over, a gospel piece that was really fun to sing despite the difficulties of clapping and singing at the same time. CU then performed Windy Nights and Ojos Azules, the latter of which was extremely pretty, and done a capella.

 We followed up with We Will, Rise Up My Love (which is a text from the Song of Solomon, and was also done a capella), and This is the Day, in which Olayeni and Oladunni Oladipo did a fantastic solo. After this, CC went up to the balcony to watch the rest of the show.

Training choirs with Ms. I

    The Training Choirs followed us. They sang Siyahamba, O Desayo, and Ching a Ring Chaw (and Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’), and they did a great job on all three. Then came the Intermediate Choirs, who sang Ma Navu (Hebrew text), How Can I Keep From Singing? (American folk hymn), and Everlasting Melody, all of which were performed very well, especially Ma Navu, which was intense, but pretty at the same time.
 
    After Everlasting Melody, all the choirs sang together for A Place In This World, a very pretty piece written by BCC’s Composer-in-Residence, Bill Banfield. I love this song, because it has a really sweet message, that “everyone has a place in the world.”

Ella plays cuatro during
La Paloma

After this piece, YME took the stage for Despertar (“to wake up”), a fantastic song about someone who sees the sun rise, and is amazed by everything around him. Then PC came on and performed La Paloma (“the dove”), which is a pretty and attention-grabbing piece, with Ella Williams on the cuatro, which looks like a ukulele, but sounds more like a guitar. Both pieces had originally been performed at the April 9th concert with Maria Guinand. After La Paloma, PC and YME sang Alleluia, which was another pretty song, and Mr. T-K acknowledged the graduating seniors and their families. PC began to sing If I had a Dream, which was performed at the MLK concert with Kyle and Christopher Massey. They sang it for about 30 seconds, then stopped to laughter and applause, and everyone was smiling. PC and YME then sang another piece from the April 9th concert, Salseo, which seems like a fun piece to sing, and sounds great.

    As the finale, CC, who had been waiting patiently for about half an hour, came up on stage. PC and YME were behind us on the risers, and everyone else was in front of us. CC was going to be the call for Sahayta, a multi-lingual call-and-response song, which we had been performing for around two months. For this concert we had several people, me included, who volunteered to go up to a microphone, and give the definition of one of the words from the song. The words varied in difficulty from “Peace and Joy” (spoken by Nancy Chomitz) to “!Uba !Uoba” (Alexander Lee-Papastavros). The reason this last word was the most difficult is because the “!” is a tongue click. My word was “Shalom,” meaning “peace.” This song contained words in Swahili (washirika), Amharic (ngoyila), Arabic (salaam, selam), Filipino (bayanihan, aawitankita, halo halo), Damara (!uba!uoba), Hebrew (shalom), English (peace and joy), Hindi (ektaa), Sanskrit (sahayta), and Spanish (unidad), as well as a two-part clapping pattern. This piece was fun to do, and we must have carried it off pretty well, since we got a standing ovation for it.

Final Song of the Season!

This was a great concert, and although I wish it was not the last, it was fun to have been a part of it!