Sturgeon Composite band to beat

March and April are music competition months and every school with a concert band worth its salt is gearing up for a chance to bring home the shiny hardware.

This year, the school to beat is Sturgeon Composite high, winners of the 2011 Rotary provincial high school choir award.

Responsible for their high calibre performances is music director Darwin Krips, who this year has entered his students in three competitions – Alberta Choral Festival, Alberta International Band Festival and St. Albert Rotary Music Festival.

This year the Rotary festival is recording performances at the local level and they are sent to a committee that selects a provincial winner. And from the provincial winners, a national crown holder is chosen.

“So the recording has to be national calibre and potentially it could go all the way,” says Krips.

But the 98 students are more than prepared to battle their way through a plethora of technically challenging world music with a Festival Concert on March 6 and 7 at the Arden Theatre.

This two-hour program is a showcase of the music they’re practiced and polished for all the upcoming festivals and it is the public’s first peek at the finished product.

The 48-member brass, woodwind and percussion concert band starts with El Relicario, a Spanish pasae doble, music that was popular in the 1920s.

“A good pasae doble has good energy in the beginning, a lyrical middle and a fiery end. Historically it’s one of the most popular in the literature.”

They are also playing The Spring Sketches, a new two-minute work of Satoshi Yagisawa, a beautiful slow work that is really quite challenging. Their third piece is Sky Dance, a multi-metered ode to the beauty of the heavens.

The 62-member concert choir shifts gears and transports listeners to 15th century Italy with Si ‘Chio Vorrei Morire, a madrigal about the passion of loving and missing someone.

They swing to French in Dirait-on, a piece inspired by poet Rainer Maria Rilke about the beauty of a rose. Their finale is Son de la Loma, a Cuban folk song everyone learns before they are knee-high to a grasshopper.

“We sing nothing in English. It’s a stretch for the kids. But when we get to the festival, the adjudicators really appreciate that you look outside the box.”

The 12-member vocal jazz group sings Senior Blues, a funk piece about a tough guy in Mexico who gets all the women to love him. But by the time they do, he’s vamoosed.

And they reprise Roberta Flack’s 1972 platinum hit Killing Me Softly With His Song.

“It was originally a ballad. This arrangement is slightly more bossa nova.”

And finally the 21-member jazz band strikes out with Four Brothers, an old jazz standard that features the sax section and Aim High, a hip hop shuffle.

The band’s highlight is Afro Blue, a work where the spotlight shines on the hourglass shaped batá drums the school brought back from their Cuban trip.

“This is definitely an eclectic program. It’s a really diverse sound from all around the world in all kinds of styles and that’s really fun.”