Those who happen to be in Gozo this coming weekend have the opportunity to attend to an upcoming spectacular concert by the Leone Band of Victoria during which it is going to perform for the first time in Gozo the second Jazz Suite by Dimitri Shostakovich. Patrons attending Leone Band in concert shall be treated with an eighty-piece windband, augmented with an extensive array of percussion to meet the requirements of the different musical styles to be performed.

Jazz Suite No. 2

The Jazz Suite number 2, a highly virtuoso suite comprising of six taxing movements is this year’s celebrity piece which is planned to bring the concert to a grand conclusion. Colin Attard, conductor, and the Leone bandsmen are busily rehearsing during this last week, to regale the audience with a splendid 20th century musical masterpiece from Eastern Europe . This genre, indeed, is the latest of ‘firsts’ for the Leone Band, after it was also the first Gozitan band to include pop and contemporary numbers in its concerts. Together with opera and other classical music, the Leone Band started including several modern items in these last ten years, from the sixties, seventies eighties and nineties. Shostakovich’s second Jazz Suite, composed in 1938 is opening another attractive musical period which is yet to be discovered.

Leone Band in concert

The band concert, to be held this Saturday November 7th 2009 at the Teatru tal-Opra Aurora in lower Republic Street, Victoria, will kick off with three classical numbers – Brahms’ Hungarian Dance number 5, the Benedictus from Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man – a mass for peace, and a selection from Verdi’s Aida which includes parts of the prelude, a summary of Act 1 and the grand triumphal march. This opera selection continues the norm of performing a selection from the opera which the same Aurora theatre would have put up earlier in the season – thus this year being Aida.

Jackson, Clapton and Cocker!

On a more contemporary key, the concert shall then include medleys by Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker and Michael Jackson whose demise earlier this year rekindled a new heated interest in his music worldwide. Therefore, as This is it is filling up the cinemas around the globe, the Aurora Theatre, itself a former cinema, shall live the memory of this legend with I’ll be there, I want you back, Rock with you, Thriller and Man in the Mirror.

Entrance for the band concert is free. The general public is invited to attend and kindly requested to be seated ten minutes prior to the commencement of the concert which is scheduled at 8pm. Further information can be obtained from www.leone.org.mt, info@leone.org.mt or +356 21562974.

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