Serious Fun with Saint Ann's School and Hungry March Band--Live at the Archway!

On Thursday, May 14, between 6 and 8 PM, Live at the Archway, underneath the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge, presented first the Brass Choir and Percussion Ensemble of Saint Ann’s School and then the musicians and dancers of the Hungry March Band.

If duets are for lovers, or enemies who can’t get enough of each other, these two were like opposites who attract. They also played in counterpoint to the intermittent subway trains rumbling across the bridge overhead.

The resulting happy coincidence of music and noise is what makes Live at the Archway, sponsored by the DUMBO Business Improvement District and Superfine restaurant, a unique new venue which represents so well DUMBO’s blend of culture and technology.

In their casual school dress, the students of Saint Ann’s could not have been more unassuming. Yet, they met the challenge of a historically and stylistically varied repertoire.

Directed by Stephen Pickering, the two dozen high schoolers of the Brass Choir turned “Fanfare” from the 1912 ballet, La Peri, by Paul Dukas, into a rhapsody, slowly built Richard Wagner’s lush tones towards a crescendo, for “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral,” from Lohengrin, and properly embellished one of Giovanni Gabrielli’s Baroque-sounding canzonas.

Even with conductor Sam Lazzara hovering over them like a crane spearing fish, the Percussion Ensemble’s sixth-graders retained their poise with a discipline to match the minimalist “Five,” (duet for snare drums), by John Beck, and “Duet for Snare Drum and Timpani” by Thomas Siwe, both late-20^th-century composers.

The Brass Choir’s performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Procession of Nobles,” from the opera-ballet Mlada, expressed the ambition of a cinematic overture. By ending with the traditional Shaker song “Simple Gifts” and the third movement “March” of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Folk Songs from Somerset, the students let down their audience as sweetly as the breeze in the trees.

In contrast, “raucous” best describes the 12-member Hungry March Band (HMB), which traces its origin to the Mermaid Parade of 1997. Their original tunes, based on a melange of Balkan, Reggae, Central African and New Orleans styles, resounded in the Archway as if Tin Pan Alley, with its synthesis of jazz, ragtime, and ballads had been reborn. 

In fact, HMB’s three dancers, dressed as drum majorette, pirate, and jail-breaker, could have been characters from the Three Penny Opera (for beggars), who enticed the Archway’s urchins to step, however wobbly, beyond the reach of their parents.

The moral of the story: Some young people take their fun quite seriously while some grown-ups let the good times roll wherever they lead. Thank goodness you can find both groups mixing it up in the Archway, down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.