The Centenary Wind Ensemble is presenting its spring concert on Earth Day, Wednesday April 22nd in Anderson Auditorium on the campus of Centenary College at the Hurley School of Music. The program highlights various locales and mileus around the earth, from Weimar Republic Germany, to Sicily, Hawaii and the jungles of pre-Columbian Mexico.

The world premiere of graduating senior Haylee Roberts’ “Aztec Dance” is one of the featured works on the program and “follows the journey of a lone traveler who discovers an abandoned Aztec temple deep within the mist-shrouded jungle. Exploration turns to unease, and an otherworldly force begins to consume the traveler, becoming gripped—almost possessed—by the rhythms echoing from within the temple walls, each step an internal struggle as they try to resist the music’s relentless pull and to escape with their life.”

Kurt Weill’s “Litle Three Penny Music” is a landmark from 1920’s Germany and the doomed Weimar Republic that emerged after World War I. The music is a parody of operatic traditions, about a madcap gang of London beggars taking place in Victorian England has a deus ex machina ending when the anti-hero Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) is saved from execution by a sudden pardon from the queen. The music is a brilliant mix of 1920s American jazz and German cabaret styles and one critic called it “the weightiest possible lowbrow opera for highbrows and the most full-blooded highbrow musical for lowbrows”. Kurt Weill had an early career as a “serious” composer but with the “Three Penny Opera” perfectly blended the high and low arts and after emigrating to the U. S., became a successful composer of musicals on the Broadway stage and influential in the development of the American musical. The suite from the opera includes the song “Mack the Knife” which has been listed as one of the 100 best songs of the 20th century and covered by many artists including Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerad and Louis Armstrong. The Three Penny Opera music adds to the band an evocative combo of accordion, performed by chemistry professor Tom Ticich, guitar (Andrew Powers), banjo (Henry Edwards) and piano (Dr. Gay Grosz).

Also on the program is John Williams’ “March from 1941”, Verdi’s “Sicilian Vespers Overture”, Claude Smith’s “Emperata Overture”, Frank Ticheli’s “Loch Lomond” finishes with Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant and raucous vaudeville influenced “Slava!”.

The concert is free and open to the public.