The Honeoye Falls Community Concert Band performs during its Fall 2025 concert. Photo provided by Tom Exter
By Tom Exter
Your Honeoye Falls Community Concert Band is back at it! Our Spring Concert – mark your calendars (!) – is Saturday, April 11 at 7:00PM in the HFL District Auditorium in the Middle School on Quaker Meeting House Road.
The band is big, not a “big band,” but a large concert band. Lindsey Borden, our director, always challenges us with extraordinary pieces for our Spring Concert session, proceeds of which contribute to a music scholarship given to an outstanding HFL student who plans a music major in college.
The program includes Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, written in three days, commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra in 1954, and first played with the ink not quite dry. The piece celebrates the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution and Russians’ hopes for dignity, fairness, and a better life. Events overwhelmed, but we won’t go there. Just let the music inspire.
The band lightens it up with Lincolnshire Posy, Percy Grainger’s musical bouquet of English folk songs, a collection of real-life portraits celebrating voices and more hopes blossoming into Spring! Grainger said he just tried to “capture the quirks, the courage, and the unpolished honesty of real people.” Sound like your neighbors?
On a more solemn note, the band will play Eternal Father, Strong to Save, also known as the Navy Hymn. This piece equates the vastness of the ocean with the courage of the sailors who face it. We also know that, in these times, there are real men and women out there facing challenges of a lifetime.
Leonard Bernstein wrote a piece – Slava! – exclamation point intentional – to celebrate his friend Mstislav ‘Slava’ Rostropovich (1927-2007), the renowned cellist. You can listen to his Dvorak Cello Concerto on your own time, but we will appreciate his spirit with a wink and a grin.
And grin you will if you honor your community concert band with your presence on April 11.
(Tom Exter plays clarinet in the band).
