The Valley orchestra and choir performed in their annual fall concert on Oct. 9. This was the first joint fall concert between the two classes.

“A lot of people were really pleased that we added the new element of doing both concerts combined, because usually it’s an orchestra fall concert and a choir one,” Kelly Holowecki, director of both choir and orchestra said. “We combined this year for ease of bringing up the middle schoolers for one concert, versus two separate days. It allowed us to do some really cool things with playing together and making music across ensembles instead of within our traditional ensembles.”

The choir performed “Friend Like Me” from Aladdin with a small amount of choreography, then the orchestra performed “Haunted Carousel.” Together they ended with a joint performance of “Shut Up and Dance.” Additionally, the Chamber Choir performed a reflective piece called “Time” as their feature piece. 

“The piece is about how we view time from childhood into school age, like teenage age, where you start to have more commitments happening. Then going out and finding a job, and the things that traditionally we’re told are a priority in life,” Holowecki said. “So you make all this time for all these other things, and by doing that we start to let some other things slide, like family time and the amount of times you tell somebody I love you, or you connect with friends, and things like that. And so then you hit a stage in life where you realize how much time you’ve lost because you’ve been so hyper focused on making it in the world professionally, then seeing that and reevaluating life and reprioritizing things so that you do make time to make memories with the people around you.”

Overall, the performance garnered positive reviews from the audience, setting a promising trend for the rest of the school year.