Music has a way of inspiring people, infecting some with a musical bug that spreads until an entire life is dedicated to the proliferation and continuation of an art form. Thankfully, one of these musically afflicted people lives right here in Palm Beach Gardens and not only has founded a 45-piece band consisting of wind and percussion instruments, but also has organized a 48-piece symphony orchestra for our listening enjoyment. For the past fifteen years, Owen E. Seward, Jr. has led both the New Gardens Band and the Indian River Pops Orchestra through an amazing array of concerts every November through May.
This season the Indian River Pops Orchestra will play five separate concert series, beginning with three concerts featuring local celebrity piano sensation Copeland Davis. Davis’s jazz- and pop-infused music melds seamlessly with the IR Pops Orchestra.
“We had him for the first time with us last year and it was like old friends getting together,” Conductor Owen Seward explained. “We came together on one rehearsal. He laid that stuff down the first time, one time through in rehearsal last year, and we all kind of just got done and went ‘hey!’ and cheered each other…. It was a melding of two art forms and interlocked very easily.” This can’t-miss show has its PBG debut November 14 at the Eissey Campus Theatre of Palm Beach State College and has dates in Port St. Lucie and Stuart as well.
Next up for the program is their annual New Year’s Eve Gala at the Eissey Theatre. “I like the participation aspect of it. When the orchestra plays on New Year’s Eve, it’s the standard Viennese waltzes and Broadway singers, but everyone in the audience will have a kazoo and we’ll be playing along to ‘Bridge over River Kwai’ [‘Colonel Bogey March’], ‘On The Mall’, those kind of things, and the audience will be humming along on the kazoo. It makes for a great evening out and they’re tickled to death with it.”
