At their final concert of the year Saturday, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Minnesingers captivated their audience from the moment they strolled on stage for the first number, Singin’ in the Rain.
Filled with colorful ponchos and twirling, transparent umbrellas, Ken Romero’s choreography for the classic movie love song was lifted from the delightful to the sublime by the sheer joy in the young performers’ faces.
These were the smiles of teenagers doing something they love, and doing it beautifully, before a wildly enthusiastic audience.
And so it went throughout the show, with 25 Minnesingers filling the stage — and a runway extending through the orchestra section — with lively, costumed performances of movie and musical songs that showed their full range of talents.
Senior Jack Crawford and sophomore Aiden Weiland even had a tap-dancing duet, showcasing the skills they learned for their shared role in the school musical, Cabaret, over the winter.
The concert’s choral interludes, conducted by Minnesingers director Abigail Chandler, showed why this group earned the silver medal at a recent all-state choral competition.
In their black concert attire, the chorus sang their medal-winning set of works by Clara Schumann, Kinley Lange and Healy Willan, followed by a moving arrangement of I See the Light — another movie song, from Tangled — in which the Minnesingers accompanied their vocals with American Sign Language lyrics.
The group also performed some humorous songs, including Eletelephony — composer Ben Parry’s setting of a 1930 nonsense poem by Laura Elizabeth Richards — and brought the house down with Nathan Howe’s pitch-perfect arrangement of the Spice Girls megahit Wannabe as an Elizabethan madrigal.
Other standouts included a female quintet arrangement of Mama Who Bore Me, from Spring Awakening, and Adam Todd’s choral arrangement of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’.
The show also featured two Billy Joel songs by the a cappella group Martha’s Vineyard Soundwave, which junior Eli Friedman has reformed after a fallow period.
Mr. Friedman, who also plays saxophones in school bands and performed on bass during the concert’s Hildegard Von Bingen song, was one of 11 young men in the chorus — most of them underclassmen, which bodes well for next year’s Minnesingers.
The alto and soprano sections, on the other hand, will see five of their 14 members graduate next month.
The spring concerts are a fundraiser for the Minnesingers’ concert tour of Europe, penciled in for Austria, Bavaria and London next April.
