By: Annabelle Pan

Graphics Editor

The Los Gatos High School orchestras were hard at work from January to March, preparing for their third concert cycle of the year. The cycle commenced with the start of the spring semester as students received the new music and began learning.

Their first performance of the spring semester was on Jan. 21 for the Los Gatos Music Festival, where LGHS invited eighth graders in Fisher’s orchestras to rehearse with the high schoolers. All three LGHS orchestras — Chamber, Philharmonic, and String — participated in the event, meeting and talking to the eighth graders and telling them about their high school experience.

Roughly halfway through the cycle, the three LGHS orchestras performed during the Homestead Orchestra Festival on Feb. 8 at Homestead High School. At the festival, the LGHS orchestras sat in the audience and watched three other ensembles perform before warming up and going on stage. As the students played, three experienced adjudicators gave feedback and scored the ensembles. An adjudicator then took the conductor’s podium and went through a short workshop with the students, teaching them how to improve upon and play more stylistically with their repertoire. Sophomore Dylan Dadgar commented, “The Homestead festival was really useful for identifying areas to work on our pieces, and the clinician who worked with us was very good. It was also just very fun, especially watching the other orchestras play.”

One month later on Mar. 6, the ensembles prepared to take the stage for their spring concert at the McAfee Center at Saratoga High School. The LGHS orchestras combined with the four Fisher Orchestras — Chamber, Advanced, Intermediate, and Trojan — for a two-hour concert. To start off the concert, a few members of the LGHS Chamber played with the Fisher’s Trojan Orchestra, followed by Fisher’s other three orchestras, and ending with a performance from the Fisher Chamber ensemble, followed by the three LGHS orchestras. To culminate the evening, LGHS Director Armeen Ghafourpour and Fisher Director Aryn Krijnen called all seven ensembles to the stage to perform two pieces together as a grand finale. With the LGHS Chamber and Philharmonic violins playing among the audience, the cellos sitting in arcs on stage, and everyone else on the stands, the students played Spartacus and Waltz No. 2.

Finally, to conclude their spring concert cycle, the LGHS orchestras attended the California Music Educators Association (CMEA) Band and Orchestra Festival. Similar to the Homestead Festival, CMEA gives ensembles the opportunity to perform and receive feedback from talented members of the music community. Fernanda Cantu Valadez, a sophomore violinist in Chamber, remarked, “What’s great about going to both the Homestead Festival and then CMEA is that you get the chance to have critical feedback at two different points in time, which really lets us see how much we improved. We can compare and contrast really easily between our first and second performance.” All three ensembles finished the long and busy cycle with their amazing performances at CMEA and will soon receive new music for their final concert cycle.