YOUTH ORCHESTRAS OF SAN ANTONIO | FALL CONCERTS opening melody, which may have been Beethoven’s homage to a similar tune from a Mozart piano sonata. Nearly 200 years later, Billy Joel reworked the melody into a minor pop hit, “This Night” from his 1983 album, An Innocent Man. Has there ever been a bigger hit than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, The Phantom of the Opera? It is not only the longest running Broadway show in history, with nearly 12,000 performances, but has also grossed more than $5 billion in ticket sales worldwide. It opened in London in 1986 and in New York in 1988, and both productions are still running. Paul Jennings’ arrangement of the title song evokes all the drama and passion of the show. Robert Russell Bennett is probably most famous for orchestrating many of the greatest musicals of Broadway’s golden age, from Show Boat (1927) to Camelot (1960). Bennett wrote his Suite of Old American Dances after attending a Carnegie Hall concert by the famous Goldman Band in 1948. The composer originally called the piece Electric Park and wrote: “Electric Park in Kansas City was a place of magic to us kids. The tricks with big electric signs, the illuminated fountains, the big band concerts, the scenic railway, and the big dance hall—all magic. In the dance hall all afternoon and evening you could hear the pieces the crowds danced to, and the five movements of my piece were samples of the dances of the day.” During his lifetime, Johann Sebastian Bach was probably better known as an organist than as a composer. In the century after his death, however, he became widely regarded as one of the greatest composers who ever lived. Bach was especially adept at counterpoint, composing a remarkable set of 48 pairs of preludes and fugues called The Well-Tempered Clavier. The Prelude and Fugue in B-flat major is one of several works by Bach that Iowa band director Roland L. Moehlmann arranged in the 1950s. Starting during his tenure as conductor of “The President’s Own” U.S. Marine Corps Band in the 1880s and ‘90s, John Philip Sousa wrote much of the music that established the concert band as a uniquely American institution. The Washington Post was one of his earliest successes, written in 1889 for The Washington Post newspaper’s essay contest awards ceremony. The march was a great hit; indeed, its popularity led to a reporter first dubbing Sousa “The March King.” Australian composer Percy Grainger spent part of his life in England and eventually became an American citizen. He composed and arranged a wide range of music based on English folksongs. Of his Themes from “Green Bushes,” Grainger wrote: “Among countryside folksongs in England, ‘Green Bushes’ was one of the best known… It seems to breathe that lovely passion for the dance that swept like a fire over Europe in the middle ages—brimful of all the youthful joy and tender romance that so naturally seek an outlet in dancing.”
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