Music students from the Perry Middle School and St. Patrick’s Middle School staged the 2016 Perry Middle School Band and Choir Winter Concert Monday night at the Perry Performing Arts Center.
With the community audience filling nearly all the seats in the hall, the 106 middle school bands students, directed by Lisa Christensen, and 120 choir students, directed by Jenn Nelson, entertained for almost two hours and performed 15 numbers.
The sixth, seventh and eighth grade bands each played three songs, and the sixth, seventh and eighth grade choirs sang two songs a piece.
A flute solo by seventh grader Sharitzy Romero was especially notable, as was the sixth grade band’s rendition of the “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”) melody from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
The stage was set with dinosaur props for the eighth grade band’s performance of “When the Dinosaurs Ruled the World” by Carmine Pastore.
The sixth grade choir pulled off some complex harmonies on Ken Berg’s arrangement of “This Little Light of Mine,” and the eighth grade singers were even more intricate in their version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the Johnny Marks song arranged by Lee Kjelson and Margaret Shelley Vance.
The seventh grade choir was directed in one song by Iowa State University practicum student Christopher Culer, with practicum student Kylie Erickson leading the singers in their second number and featuring Adrianna Eastman on bells.
The two ISU practicum students have spent the last 11 weeks at the Perry schools, working with seventh and eighth grade choirs and the PHS Select Choir. At the conclusion of the eighth grade choir’s performance, middle school choir director Nelson presented the aspiring music teachers with farewell tokens of gratitude from the students and staff of the Perry school system.
Nelson also recognized eighth grade choir member Miguel Orduna for his recent selection for admission to the Opus Honor Choir, the highest honor a middle school singer can achieve.
