Hen Hud Students Wow Parents At Spring Concert

Student performers spilled out into the audience of Sleepy Hollow High School’s Donald Kusel Auditorium Thursday night during their last song, creating a surround-sound effect that had parents reeling with delight.

Once finished, the students from both the Hendrick Hudson High School and the Blue Mountain Middle School got a standing ovation for their efforts.

“I thought they all blended very well,” John Tanzillo said. “All the songs were very well thought out and performed beautifully.”

Tanzillo and his wife Michelle’s daughter Gabriella Abbate peformed in the High School Chorus. It was the last song that had the most impact on Tanzillo.

“Just the way they had the alternate choruses coming in from the sides … it was just gorgeous,” he said.

The concert was a collaboration between the two schools and the Copland House, the former house of Aaron Copland that now works to nurture American composers. It was “An Evening with American Composers” and student performers in sixth grade and up celebrated the works of such composers as Copland and Leonard Bernstein.

The concert included the world premiere of Lisa DeSpain’s “Cien Sonetos de Amor,” which was composed with input from the high school students. DeSpain is a composer at the Copland House.

“Cien” combined music and vocals with one high school student’s reading of three poems by Pablo Neruda. DeSpain told the audience she had originally brought in the poems last spring to teach the students about lyricism.

“You could hear the musicality of the language, and what I noted was how immediately both the instrumental students and the vocal students—they popped,” she said. “I could see the excitement, their understanding of lyricism. So I came back with that, because they connected to it.”

DeSpain told the audience she was overcome by the beauty of the piece when she heard it performed by the band and chorus together for the first time.

“I was so overcome by the beauty of what we were able to do with the music,” she said. “You live for that as a composer, because your art is silent unless somebody performs it. It’s so breathtakingly beautiful, it stopped me, and I don’t stop often.”

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