Following Arts Chai Lights, the Spring Concert marked the end of the school year and featured live entertainment from the Middle and High School bands and choirs.

On Wednesday, June 8, the first in-person Spring Concert since the COVID-19 pandemic was held. The concert was organized by the Chair of the Arts Department David Solomon, Upper School Instrumental Music Teacher Gary Prince and Upper School Vocal Music Teacher Sherry Benedek.

For Benedek, it was her first spring concert, and she directed the Middle School choir, Harmoniah choir and Shir Madness a cappella choir. She was particularly excited about a joint song between Harmoniah and Shir Madness called “Amen” where alumni in the audience were even invited to join the performers on stage and sing along.

“[The joint song] was kind of buoyed by this visit from Ramaz, which is a group or a school rather in New York, and they visited us and kind of passed on this song,” Benedek said.

The Middle School ensembles and the High School band were directed under Prince. Prince said that when he started arranging music for the concert, he wanted to start teaching it to his ensemble classes earlier so they would have time to perfect the music.

“As we have gotten closer to the concert, we focused more and more on just the material that we are playing for those concerts and we focused on really polishing them up, getting everything really ready,” Prince said.

Benedek said the process of picking the music for the choirs was based on the types of vocals of the students in the choir groups.

“I know I have x amount of sopranos or something. You might have a different song than if I have more bases than sopranos and stuff like that,” Benedek said. “So it kind of depends on what you have in a given year.”

Freshman Evan Klepper said he liked having Arts Highlights and the Spring Concert separately. He performed in the High School ensemble and liked how there was more of an intimate crowd during the Spring Concert, which made performing less stressful.

Although Klepper said sometimes performing with a large crowd can be intimidating, Prince said it is important for the ensembles to practice performing throughout the year.

“I also really like doing things like the Kabshab performances as a way to like get these songs tested and get you that on stage experience with them,” Prince said. “So with a song feeling good, because we did that at Kabshab, it’s now going to be even better when we do it at the Spring Concert because we will have gotten some of those initial performance jitters out.”

Prince said the Spring Concert is a great way to show off the hard work of the ensembles and to show the community what the bands have been working on over the course of the year. He also explained that the goal of the Spring Concert is to give the students a chance to perform and put on a show.

“I think that is the thing that makes the music students the best, is having that pressure to have to perform is the thing that really takes them up to the next level,” Prince said. “It’s my favorite part of the job. I really missed it when we were in COVID. Of course we had fun doing video performances, but it’s not the same.”