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Dana Concert Band to perform at Carnegie Hall
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
YOUNGSTOWN
Carnegie Hall is the top classical music venue in North America, and playing there is an honor usually reserved for the world’s top artists.
But a group of students from the Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University will get to experience what it’s like to play one of the world’s great stages.
The 55-piece Dana Concert Band will play Carnegie on Nov. 27 as part of a National Festival Chorus performance.
Faculty and student musicians at the school have been abuzz since last week, when they got word.
Professor Stephen Gage, director of bands and orchestra at the Dana, said the invitation came after the ensemble caught the ear of Manhattan Concert Productions – the company staging the performance – at a state music conference in February.
Manhattan productions contacted Gage in May to inquire if the band would be interested. Gage said yes and set about to secure approval and financial backing for the trip.
The concert will center around the National Festival Chorus, an honors choir of singers from throughout the country. Two orchestras will take part in the event: the Dana and one from Florida Gulf Coast University.
The Dana contingent will leave by bus in the early hours of Nov. 25. It will spend Thanksgiving Day in New York and then attend a dress rehearsal on the morning of Nov. 27. The concert is at 8 that night.
Gage said his band will have 30 minutes on stage, and will play a set written by contemporary New York composers – “A Short Ride On a Fast Machine” by John Adams, “Radiant Joy” by Steven Bryant and “The Frozen Cathedral” by John Mackey.
Funding is coming from YSU, private donations and local foundations.
Gage led a Dana ensemble to Carnegie in 2005 and said it was memorable. “It was the first time that any group associated with the Dana played at Carnegie Hall,” he said.
The upcoming trip has stirred excitement among the students and university officials.
“The students were thrilled when I told them,” said Gage, who has been at the Dana for 23 years. “For a musician, Carnegie Hall is one of those iconic concert venues. Its rich history is chronicled even in nonclassical music circles. Every great artist has given small and large group recitals there.”
In terms of acoustics, the room itself is also in a class of its own.
“It has the finest acoustic and aesthetics of any concert hall on this continent,” he said of Carnegie. “It is an incredible experience acoustically just to stand on its stage. If there is such a thing as human perfection, this is it.”
The Dana Concert Band has played at Stambaugh Auditorium and Powers Auditorium in Youngstown, and Gage said those buildings stack up well against major concert halls in other cities.
But Carnegie Hall, he said, is on another level.
“There is something really amazing about Carnegie Hall,” said Gage. “Groups from all over the world all come here. When you play at Carnegie, you know you’ve made it. I can’t wait to see the look in our students’ eyes when they step out there on stage. The experience we had in 2005 was priceless, and I’m grateful that this generation has the same opportunity.”
The Dana Concert Band is known on an international level thanks largely to the seven recordings it has released in the past 22 years. “I get notes from Asia, Europe, the United Kingdom, mainly from public radio stations who play our music,” said Gage. “It’s helped us in a significant way to do some special things.”
At a news conference Tuesday, Michael Barkett, a junior from Canfield and a trumpet player with the Dana Concert Band, said the students are ecstatic to have this opportunity. “Every music major dreams of paying in Carnegie Hall, and all of us get to make that come true and to represent YSU and the Youngstown community,” he said.
Michael Crist, interim dean of the College of Creative Arts and Communication, started the news conference with the old vaudeville joke that begins, “Hey, do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?” The punch-line answer is “practice, practice, practice.”
YSU President Jim Tressel said the Dana band will be putting the school on the world stage.
“We often say there are not enough people who know how great we are,” he said. “You are letting people know that.”
The Dana Concert Band includes woodwinds and brass, percussion, a harp, string bass and synthesizer. It’s a type of ensemble that has a firm place in the classical field.
“The most famous group like this is the U.S. Marine Band,” said Gage. “But universities all have these groups.”
The Dana band performed a song at Tuesday’s conference that had a unique Youngstown touch. In “Rocky Point Holiday,” there is a part for an instrument called an anvil. The Dana band uses a 2-foot segment of a massive steel H-beam, struck with a 9-inch bolt, for the loud metallic sound.
Tickets for the Nov. 27 performance at Carnegie Hall are $20 to $110. Call 212-247-7800 or go to carnegiehall.org. Friends and family of YSU students can get a 25 percent discount until Oct. 27 (use the code SPL22466 when ordering).