The students in the 2025 NASH chorus concert sang their hearts out on Thursday, November 20th. 

The annual winter concert that takes place at the senior high school has successfully come and gone. Directors David Schmiech and Bryan Sable, did their best when it comes to rehearsals, organization, and song choice for each and every performance.

For each winter and spring concert, a theme is chosen by both teachers. The songs are matched carefully with the theme and showcase every voice in the massive ensemble. This winter’s theme is “Dreams.”

“We pick a theme for every semester just to give unity to the program and to give us direction when we’re picking repertoires,” said Schmiech, the NASH choir director and teacher. “I had a few pieces in mind that I was interested in doing with my students and they all had “dreams” in common… It all started to spiral from there.”

The concert started off with a bang. There are five different choir groups at both NASH and NAI. In total, this consists of about 350 chorus students. To begin the show, every student in the NA choir was brought on stage to sing the opener, “The Dream Keeper.”

There were many arrangements of songs throughout the concert that were renditions of famous poems. The opener and two other pieces were from poems written by American poet and social activist Langston Hughes. Other features included works by William Shakespeare and Christina Rossetti. 

Interludes were also a large part of the concert, redirecting the attention of the audience during choir transitions.

One interlude of note was an original piece of work performed by Denisse Matos-Perez, Billy Freiberg, Elliot Davis, and Gael Martinez, more commonly known by their band name, The 45’s. The performance was a hit.

Matos-Perez was gratified by the audience’s reaction.

“I started a band because songwriting is a crucial part of who I am and I wanted to collaborate with others,” she said. “It is an original song of ours that we really enjoy and wanted to share with the world.”

In a later interlude, a girl band took the stage. NASH students Ruby Rosenberg, Lydia Martorella, and Avery Zook entered the stage as their band Jane Doe and performed “Beaches,” a popular tune by the artist beabadoobee.

Another standout interlude was a solo performance by NASH junior Juliet Forrest, who sang a number from Cabaret.

“I chose ‘Maybe This Time’ because Cabaret is one of my favorite musicals. It’s beautiful and moving, it’s really iconic, and it has a lot of jazz elements,” she said.

The 9th grade choir followed the opener and sang three songs, one of which was the Shakespeare feature “All Days Are Nights.” The Treble choirs, combining female students from NAI and NASH, followed this act.

NAI’s choir took on a challenging Eric Whitacre piece titled “The Seal Lullaby,” while NASH’s choir sang a song in Korean called “Evocation.” But in between these two impressive performances, both choirs sang a suite of three songs, all composed by Bryan Sable, the Choir Director at NAI.

The Honors Chamber choir was given some of the most challenging pieces to learn, yet they overcame the difficulty and performed three pieces beautifully. The Concert choir, which includes grades 10-12, sang an additional three pieces. Special elements were included as part of the song “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which included a solo by Matthew Collins and Aiden Combs, with percussion provided by Stephen Rihmland.

The concert concluded with each choir student taking a final bow with “California Dreamin.'” Sable arranged this song especially for the concert’s finale, taking the original and inserting a segment from each choir’s selected piece. It made the song more unique and distinctive, creating an unforgettable finale that everyone who was in attendance at the NASH auditorium that night will remember.