Played this in high school as Alto 1. We took it to competition, and in one of the pauses, all we heard from the audience was, "Oh. My. God." My band director also got lost in the middle of it, but we knew the piece so well, we carried on. This was an inner-city school with a ~350 piece band. We got 1s across the board. It was, by far, the best piece we played and we had fun while doing it!
We played this in middle school, and it is honestly the coolest-fucking song I played in all 7 years of band. It was like playing a damn Hollywood adventure movie. We actually begged our high school band director to let us try to adapt it to do a marching field performance of it, and he wouldn't let us.
