At Southeastern Wind Symphony’s concert titled “The Magical Music of Disney and Friends,” there were appearances from Disney characters such as Elsa, Belle and Maleficent. Elsa conducted the symphony for music from “Frozen” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Belle played a flute solo for Princess Leia’s theme from “Star Wars.”
Annie Goodman/The Lion's Roar
Disney characters performed at the Southeastern Wind Symphony concert.
On Saturday, Nov. 5, Southeastern’s Wind Symphony performed their concert “The Magical Music of Disney and Friends.” For this performance, members dressed up as famous Disney characters such as Tinker Bell, Pinocchio, Belle and more. Elsa, Tara Hymel, and Mr. Incredible, Matthew Soukup, conducted the wind symphony for some of the songs.
The wind symphony decided to extend their Disney concert to include “Friends” to broaden their music choices to reach more audience members.
“Disney and Friends gives us an opportunity to perform more music and more popular music,” said Jesse White, a graduate music performance major. “Things like ‘The Incredibles’ or like ‘Toy Story’ that kids know. There’s only a certain amount of standard, core Disney songs that most kids know and we want to try to expand that palate.”
The Disney theme was chosen because it is something everyone can connect to.
“Disney is something I think everybody can relate to on some level,” said White. “Whether you’re old or whether you’re really, really young, there’s something in Disney for everybody, and I think that’s what we were trying to capture with this concert.”
The songs were chosen based on popularity.
“‘The Lion King,’ the Pixar stuff and ‘The Incredibles’ are all things that are pretty well known,” said White. “‘Frozen’ is obviously gonna be a big standard because, I mean, it’s the newest one. Then the Disneyland stuff is all like classic Disneyland stuff, so ‘A Pirates Life For Me,’ ‘A Small World,’ things like that.”
The wind symphony’s “The Magical Music of Disney and Friends” concert brought in an audience including people not affiliated with the university such as Rebecca Patterson and Daniel Patterson.
“He’s taking a music appreciation class at Delgado as duel enrollment because he’s a senior in high school and he needed to attend,” said Rebecca Patterson. “His instructor preferred him to attend a live orchestra and this one was available. She recommended Southeastern actually. Any of the concerts at Southeastern, so we found this one and was like, ‘We love Disney.’”
For their last selection, the wind symphony played music from “The Lion King” and held up a stuffed Simba doll which the audience enjoyed.
“I love classic Disney movies so it was nice to see that and then see all the characters performing in it as well,” said Daniel Patterson. “That was pretty cool and then at the end with Simba, that was just so cute.”
The symphony had less than a month to prepare for this concert since their last performance was on Oct. 20.
“It was pretty whirlwind,” said White. “We got about two weeks to put this together from the very first piece to the end. We did not really have a lot of chance to work on stuff since two or three weeks ago on this past Thursday, we put on another concert of completely different music, so we had about eight-ish rehearsals or so to work on all this music.”
White enjoyed performing as children sang along.
“An absolute blast,” said White. “I mean, this is why we do this kind of stuff. To hear kids singing as we’re playing the music, that’s about as good as it gets.”
