Synergy Brass Quintet

Last night I went to see the Synergy Brass Quintet at MYA. It was a fun experience. Before the performance, I saw three of my friends there. I was expecting to see Nathan. Nathan is a horn player in my MYA orchestra. He's a pretty cool guy. He's a lot like me, I think. He's really good at playing his horn, he practices a lot, and he likes the same kind of music I like: classical. I was surprised and happy to see Micah there. He plays on my soccer team, and he doesn't play at MYA so I wasn't expecting him there. I was also surprised to see Matthew, a trumpet player from my school band. Matthew and Micah don't play at MYA, but they were there for similar reasons. Micah's brother and Matthew's nephew wanted to see the quintet, and so Micah and Matthew came along with their family.

Here's a youtube video of Synergy Brass Quintet.

The quintet was really good. They played mostly classical pieces for the first half, and for the second half, they played mostly contemporary music. The first half of the performance was my favorite part by far. The quintet played some fun classical pieces. They played In the Hall of the Mountain King by Grieg, a Norwegian composer. I like Grieg because I'm part Norwegian. They played a Mozart horn concerto, which was really good. The tuba player played an extremely hard violin concerto, which was really funny, because the violin concerto moves very fast, and it is much harder to play fast on tuba than it is on a violin. It was amazing that the tuba player could do it. The trombone player played Flight of the Bumblebee, which was funny, because you don't usually think about the trombone playing it.

I loved the first half of the performance, but I didn't like the second half as much. The pieces they played were more contemporary, and I don't like contemporary pieces as much. They also had movies playing during some of the pieces in the second half, but I found that kind of distracting, because I really wanted to just listen to the music. Still, even though I didn't like that type of music as much, they still played really well. For the last song they asked whether the audience wanted a jazz or a classical piece to end their performance. Nathan, my sister, and I were shouting that we wanted a classical piece, but they played a jazz piece instead, because that's what most everyone else wanted. The jazz piece was so loud that it kind of hurt my hears. I'm not much of a jazz fan. But other than that it was a fantastic performance.

In between songs, and during the intermission, Nathan and I talked about the music, how it was played, how we liked it, and about our own music. Watching a performance with a friend was so much more fun and enjoyable than watching it with my mom or by myself, because discussing the performance was as much fun as watching it.

After the quintet finished, we stayed for a bit. First my sister Eowyn went to get all of the players autographs. She especially wanted the Horn player's autograph because she plays the French Horn. They whole band was really nice about autographs and talking about their music, and they even let me take a picture of my sister and the horn player. I also met Nathan's dad and his sister who plays the flute.

All and all it was a great performance and I had a great time.