The Beat Behind The Holiday Festival: Music!

By Shannon Hicks

Because no grand-scale event would ever be complete without music, planners of Newtown’s Holiday Festivals have always made a point of including music in their plans for one of the largest community celebrations of the year. When the festival returns to the Main Street area this weekend, there will be plenty to sing about once again.

Holiday Festival music chairman Jan Neuberger has lined up a number of area performers to provide music and dance performances for all hours and a number of locations of this year’s event.

Victorian Tea Room

Location: The Alexandria Room at Edmond Town Hall, 45 Main Street

11 am: Peter Obre (pronounced “oh-bree”) will open the stage at the Victorian Tea at 11 with a performance of Christmas carols on classical guitar. Mr Obre has performed at the festival in the past, and will repeat a second tradition of his when, following his Victorian Tea performance at 1 pm, he moves to one of the houses on this year’s tour to perform again. Mr Obre is a lifelong Newtown resident, a former band director in Avon and Norwalk, and former director of music at Newtown Middle School of the 1980s. Since leaving NMS in 1988, Mr Obre has been offering lessons out of his home studio on Baldwin Road.

In addition to the Christmas carols Sunday afternoon, Mr Obre will also include some transcribed lute music — music for the lute, transcribed for the classical guitar — in his performance.

At noon, students of Suzuki Talent Education School in Sandy Hook will also make a return performance for the Festival. The school’s directors, Helen Malyszka and Andrew Lafreniere, have created a program of works by J.S. Bach, Mozart, and holiday selections for their students to perform Sunday afternoon. Seven students will represent the school this year: Steven Berg, Kelsey Hopper, Morgan Hopper, Amanda Kloth, Jared Kloth, Brook Waltzer, and Justin Waltzer.

Students of Julie’s Piano Workshop will be on stage next. At 1 pm, a collective of students from Julie Cook’s Sandy Hook school, directed by Julie Cook, will take the stage to represent the school for the sixth year. Mrs Cook’s students have traditionally performed light classics and Christmas music for the visitors of the Victorian Tea.

Brookfield resident Catherine Iannone, a student of Sandra Buscher, is also returning to the festival’s stage at the Alexandria Room this year. Ms Iannone’s performance will begin at 2 pm. Festival-goers may remember Ms Iannone from last year’s festival, when she opened the Tea Room with the first performance of the day as part of a piano trio.

Ms Ianonne has been studying piano for ten years with Bethel teacher Sandra Buscher; she has been performing on piano for 15 years in total. She plans to perform a selection of Christmas and popular music for the tea room.

At 3 pm, Sandra Buscher & Family will take the stage for the final scheduled performance of the afternoon. The piano teacher will be joined by her daughter April, 10. The two musicians will perform on piano and vocals; “also a mixture of Christmas and popular songs,” Ms Buscher said this week. A former teacher with Julie’s Piano Workshop, Mrs Bruscher has participated in the festival a number of times in the past, as have a number of her students.

Sandra and April “both enjoy [the festival] very much,” Mrs Buscher added.

Vinny Buscher, Sandra’s husband and April’s father, may also join the performance for a few songs on harmonica.

 

Ballet Performances

Location: Edmond Town Hall Auditorium, 45 Main Street

1 and 3 pm — Malenkee Ballet Repertoire Company in Etudes and The Magic Key.

Dancers of the Malenkee Ballet Repertoire Company, who are students of the Marsha Ismailoff Mark School of Ballet in Newtown, will return to the stage at Edmond Town Hall to participate in the Holiday Festival for the second time this year. Last year’s performances of excerpts from The Nutcracker were so popular, it was a natural choice to invite the school to participate in the festival again.

Each performance will include the presentation of Etudes — A Ballet Class and The Magic Key. Both stories have been choreographed and staged by the school’s director, Marsha Ismailoff Mark.

In A Ballet Class, Jennifer Johnston will first take the stage in the role of Ballet Mistress and then watch as students perform five excerpts from the Bolshoi repertoire — “Pointe Show Trivia,” “Variation I,” “Variation II,” “Nayada é Rebok,” and “Coppélia — before the entire cast of dancers joins for a finalé.

The Magic Key will also include a number of dancers portraying students. The students in this number are focused on bringing to life a number of life-size dolls, including Raggedy Ann, a Chinese doll, Coppélia, Tarantella, a Russian doll, a toy soldier, and a bluebird. The finalé of this story will also include its full cast.

 

Newtown Meeting House, 31 Main Street

The Girl Scouts in Junior Troop 820 will open the afternoon of music at Newtown Meeting House this year, singing Christmas carols beginning at 1:30 pm. All 15 girls in the troop — fourth graders from Hawley School — will offer the carols in a singalong format.

The crowd will be invited to sing with the Scouts or just enjoy the performance. “They will be hoping to gather attention not only for themselves, but also for the indoor performances that will follow them,” troop leader Maria Hutchinson said Tuesday afternoon.

The Silver Village Flute Choir will begin their indoor show at 2 pm. The choir is a group, averaging a dozen members, of flute players from a number of western Connecticut towns. It is a take-off of the Nashua (N.H.) Flute Choir, and while the Silver Village group began its rehearsals just four months ago, there have already been a number of public performances, according to member Pat Reinhardt.

Some members of the choir are professionals, others are amateurs (including some advanced students). The choir will play a variety of classical and contemporary Christmas music.

“The thing about a flute choir,” explained Mrs Reinhardt, “is it incorporates all instruments of the flute family, from the bass flute to the piccolo. That’s an unusual combination, not to mention the whole concept of a flute choir is a little unusual.”

At 2:40, Mrs Reinhardt will move from her role as a member of the flute choir and take on her part as a member of The Reinhardt Family Woodwind Quartet. The Newtown family will perform what Mrs Reinhardt called “contemporized Christmas carols, or contemporary arrangements of Christmas carols.”

On stage Sunday afternoon will Pat Reinhardt on flute and her husband David on saxophone. Jeff Reinhardt, a student at Newtown Middle School, will join the family on oboe, and Andrea Reinhardt, a freshman at the high school, will be playing on clarinet.

“We’ve played around town and in a lot of places together, including last year’s festival,” Mrs Reinhardt said.

Newtown Choral Society will then perform at 3:30, the afternoon following the group’s annual holiday concert at the same location.

“We purposely scheduled the holiday concert for the night before the Holiday Festival this year so as not to lose our steam,” Mary Andreotta, director of the choral society, admitted this week. It has been a number of years since NCS participated in the Holiday Festival, but it will be a welcome return. (Note: The performance Saturday night will be a full concert, with different selections than what is going to be performed Sunday afternoon; see separate story and calendar listings for details.)

The full choral society will be on hand Sunday afternoon for a selection of carols arranged by John Rutter and Sir David Willcocks, followed by spiritual selections. May Steinberg will accompany the group.

Ongoing Outdoor

Performances

Jack Tanner, the minister at Newtown Christian Church, has once again organized a group of strolling carolers for the festival. Mr Tanner will be joined again this year by three friends — Bob and Bonnie Stampp and Karen Michaels. The quartet will be in full costume and will be found making its way up and down Main Street beginning around 1 pm, singing traditional carols.

Also participating this year will be the NHS Trumpet Trio, organized this year by high school student John Ehlers. The Trio was introduced at last year’s festival, and it included Mr Ehlers, Mike Rostafin, and Dave Strong; Mr Rostafin was the creator of the original trio.

When music chairman Jan Neuberger began working on who would be invited to participate in the festival this year, she wanted to bring back the trio. Upon learning that Mr Rostafin had graduated in June, however, she turned to Mr Ehlers to pick up the reins. The NHS Trumpet Trio, in addition to John Ehlers and Dave Strong, now includes Margaret Ashey.

The trio will be performing classical selections at various locations along Main Street on Sunday afternoon. Before they begin the outdoor performances at 1 pm, though, the group will be stationed indoors for two hours at 59 Main Street, providing music for visitors to one of the stops on the festival’s historic homes tour.

“I was pretty happy that we were remembered from last year,” Mr Ehlers said Tuesday evening. “It must have meant we did something good.”