March Recap: Orchestra Invitational, Festival

With March behind us, Music in the Schools Month comes to a close. It was a busy month for our program, sending three orchestras to three festivals, and hosting a zone concert in which 200+ elementary school students performed alongside our high school students.

On Thursday February 29th, both Sinfonia and Chamber Orchestra earned 'Superior' ratings at Eastshore Orchestra 1 Festival - the highest rating possible for a large group ensemble. Our adjudicators were Maria Sampen (violin) from University of Puget Sound, and Marcus Tsutakawa, retired music educator and former orchestra director of Garfield High School as well as Seattle Youth Symphony.

The following week we hosted the West Bellevue Orchestra Invitational (zone concert). The event featured neighborhood elementary school orchestras, CMS Philharmonia, BHS Sinfonia and Chamber Orchestras. The evening ended with a grand finale of Ode to Joy from Beethoven's 9th Symphony featuring all of our orchestra students in grades 5 - 12 performing together. Two weekends after the zone concert, we sent Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra to WWU Orchestra Festival. Both groups earned 'Gold Performance' ratings for their performances (check out the program at the bottom of this post!).

Finally, our Concert Orchestra performed at Eastshore Orchestra 2 Festival, where they too earned 'Superior' ratings from the festival adjudicators, which included Anna Edwards (Seattle Collaborating Orchestra and former Bellevue High Orchestra Director) and Leslie Johnson (former PNB Principal Viola). Thank you to Skyline High School for hosting!

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Thank you to all our parent volunteers who supported the zone concert and chaperoned on our field trips. Congratulations to all students on beautiful performances.

Concert Orchestra: Orchid (Yukiko Nishimura), Elementa (Soon Hee Newbold)

Sinfonia: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 (J.S. Bach), Eighteenth Variation (Rachmaninoff), The Odyssey (Soon Hee Newbold)

Chamber Orchestra: Concerto in A Minor (J.S. Bach), Lyric for Strings (George Walker), Bartok Rumanian Folk Dances

Symphony Orchestra: Finlandia (Sibelius), Song Without Words (Holst), Sleeping Beauty Waltz (Tchaikovsky)