Little String Stars Twinkle
The All Island Winter String Concert for students in grades one through 12 is set for Tuesday, Jan. 15th from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. Admission is free.
One of the high points of this concert will be the combined elementary, junior high and high school orchestras performing Kings of Stone, a piece for mixed level ensemble inspired by Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. The high school and junior high groups also will perform independently.
When jazz crooner Jerri Wells is finally coaxed up to the front of Oak Bluffs’ Offshore Ale by Eddie (Pepé Caron) Larkosh for a rendition of Do You Know What It Is to Miss New Orleans? she does not stick to the script for long. She delivers a few bars of the prescribed number then, like some sort of thief sidling past a security guard, hums her own improvised segue and ducks into the second verse of A ll Of Me, the Billie Holiday version, leaving the band to scramble after her.
Island musicians were the dominant revelers at the Vineyard Haven observance at the close of 2007.
The event could have begun at any time for members in the audience at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Monday afternoon.
For some it began with a belly dancer revue. For many it was Johnny Hoy of the Bluefish singing a song dedicated to time slipping away.
Perched in the second row of a community hall at five o’clock in the afternoon, a plate of reconstituted Thanksgiving food balanced in one hand, and a decent glass of red in the other — it was an unusual way to take in a festival of modern music. No poorly maintained toilet facilities, no vomit, no overweight rave casualties passed out at your feet. Nevertheless, it was how Martha’s Vineyard’s musical elite saw fit to present themselves on Sunday.
The Vineyard is set to get a new radio station and the town of Tisbury to get an integrated information system following a couple of last-minute approvals this week.
On Tuesday, selectmen Tristan Israel and Denys Wortman (Thomas Pachico was absent) approved an easement at the department of public works site for a 70-foot pole which will be used by the station for its broadcasts and by public works to communicate with other town departments and the Tisbury school.
The Island Community Chorus will open the holiday season with a festive concert program, presented twice this weekend at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown.
At 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, and again at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 2, the chorus will sing under the baton of its artistic director Peter Boak, with accompanist Garrett Brown at the piano.
For this holiday concert, the chorus is bringing back a popular favorite it hasn’t performed for several years, singing selections from G.F. Handel’s Messiah.