The Butler School of Music’s internationally recognized UT Wind Ensemble traveled to Dallas for an outreach concert at the Meyerson Symphony Center on March 10, 2009. The concert was part of the School’s comprehensive outreach program, which sends our premiere ensembles throughout the state with an eye towards recruiting Texas’s best and brightest students.
The University of Texas Wind Ensemble has firmly established itself as one of America’s truly elite university wind bands under the baton of Jerry Junkin. It should come as no surprise that he is also the conductor of the Dallas Wind Symphony, one of the world’s premiere professional wind ensembles.
On Tuesday evening, March 10, the UT Wind Ensemble performed at the Meyerson Center, sharing the cherished traditions of the Dallas Wind Symphony, which performs its regular concert season on Tuesday evenings in the same hall. The concert was attended by hundreds of local public school students who were invited to hear the concert free of charge. Much of the Dallas Wind Symphony’s regular patronage was also in attendance and the diverse crowd responded enthusiastically to the stellar performance of these talented students.
Each Dallas Wind Symphony concert begins with an originally composed fanfare commissioned specifically for that concert and performed in the Meyerson lobby as a prelude to the main program. The UT Wind Ensemble embraced this tradition, premiering the fanfare Resound!, composed by Cormac Canon, currently a Butler School of Music graduate student. Resound! was a winner of the Dallas Wind Symphony’s 2007 Call for Fanfares, their annual competition for the season’s opening works.
The UT Wind Ensemble is known for its commitment to the performance of recently composed compositions. One such work was the colorful Kingfishers Catch Fire by Austin resident composer John Mackey. Mackey is a widely published composer of works for wind band and was somewhat of a celebrity for the several hundred Dallas middle and high school students in attendance. Another such work was Steven Bryant’s Ecstatic Waters, originally commissioned and premiered by UT. The piece features the challenging synchronization of pre-recorded electronic sounds with the live ensemble and the exciting result brought the crowd to its feet.
Arguably considered the highlight of the evening, a virtuosic performance of William Bolcom’s Concert Suite for Alto Saxophone and Band was impeccably performed by Butler School of Music graduate student Sunil Gadgil. The work contains some of the most difficult passages in the saxophone repertoire, but Sunil’s performance seemed effortless.
No Dallas Wind Symphony concert concludes without a John Phillips Sousa march and this evening was no exception. The UT Wind Ensemble honored this tradition as well, performing a Sousa march as a surprise addition to the program. But UT had the last word when the group added a long-standing tradition of their own. The final notes echoing throughout the famous hall were the refrains of The Eyes of Texas! Hook ‘em!