Not that I ever put much forecasting faith in a groundhog who may or may not see his shadow on Feb. 2. But this time, maybe blinded by the TV klieg lights, Punxsutawney Phil couldn’t see a thing. Nevertheless, his early spring prediction has long passed us by. Yet winter now seems to be ebbing and spring may yet arrive for good sometime between two momentous events on the music and sports calendars.

First up – delayed one day because of the Leap Year Feb. 29 –  is the Elizabeth Loker International Concerto Competition, which has gained worldwide attention in this edition of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra annual event pitting young musicians, ages 12 to 25, for a cash prize and a chance to play with a full professional regional orchestra – the MSO. This year, however, in just the second season of maestro Michael Repper’s time as music director of the Easton-based orchestra, the competition has been expanded to a whole night of orchestral concerto competition with three finalists performing solo portions of their repertoire with the MSO under Repper’s baton.

This live competition among a trio of accomplished young musicians who have survived two previous rounds, which included a blind judging of tapes by a record 155 competitors to narrow the global field to 20 semifinalists among whom Repper selected the three finalists performing on March 24 at Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center at Wye Mills. 

The finalists are Sophia Geng of Andover, Massachusetts, performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major; harpist Rebekah Hou of Cleveland, who will play Ginastera’s Harp Concerto, followed by cellist Alejandro Gomez Pareja on Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. The three finalists compete for recognition as the top-prize winner for what has become a prestigious international competition, but also a cash prize of $5,000 with awards of $2,500 and $1,500 going to second and third finishers.

A three-person panel of jurists will decide the final awards: They are Edward Polochick, music director of Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra of Nebraska, James Kelly, executive director of the D.C.-area National Philharmonic Orchestra that performs at the Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda, and Sachi Marasugi, concertmaster of the Salisbury Symphony Orchestra of Maryland’s Salisbury University.

Awards will be announced shortly after the 3 p.m. concert at Chesapeake College.

midatlanticsymphony.org

As for the second momentous event marking, hopefully, the end of winter, the Eastern Division Champion Baltimore Orioles open at home for the first time in years against the Los Angeles Angels at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, 3 p.m. March 28. The O’s seek to improve their 101-win season by advancing far enough in the post-season to win the World Series for the first time in 41 years. The 2024 season also marks the 70th season of the Orioles’ return to major league baseball in 1954. The team lost 101 games that year but finished next to the last in the American League. We trust that whatever celebrity the new Oriole front-office brass chooses to sing the National Anthem will be forewarned of the roar of “O!” from the fans on the vocal beat of “Oh, say can you see!” It’s one of the hippest traditions in local MLB traditions ever. Baltimore owns the anthem. Check it out at Fort McHenry.

mlb.com/orioles

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Just as winter loosens its grip – it’s not even spring on the calendar yet – Chesapeake Music launches its spring-summer season, the first ever with recently retired Don Buxton not in charge. An Interlude Concert brings Ensemble/132, a rotating collection of 11 American soloists and chamber musicians, to the resplendent Ebenezer Theatre stage at 2 p.m. March 10 with a quintet. Pianist Sahun Sam Hong, violist Luther Warren, cellist Zachary Mowitz, and violinists Abi Fayette and Stephanie Zayzak present a program of Haydn Piano Trio in A Major, Robert Shumann’s “Carnaval” arranged by Hong for piano quartet, followed after intermission by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1 “Calvary” and Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka,” also arranged by Hong for piano quintet.

This Interlude Concert previews the astounding musicianship you can expect from Chesapeake Music’s upcoming marathon Chesapeake Music International Chamber Competition on Saturday, April 13, and the annual Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival, June 7-15, for whom the promotional phrase “experience the extraordinary” is well deserved.

Judges have already selected finalists for the chamber competition in April. Vying for the top juried prize and an audience choice award are five young professional chamber ensembles, including two violin, cello, and piano trios, a pair of quartets featuring two violins along with a cello and viola. Another quartet is all saxophones – soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. 

The day-long competition opens at 11 a.m. and continues through 6 p.m. with a break for late lunch/early dinner. Each chamber group in the competition plays a complete set of music. Judging begins after the final performance, and results are announced later that evening.

The nine-day, 39th annual Chesapeake Music Chamber Festival program has yet to be announced. The festival is led by co-artistic directors cellist Marcy Rosen and violinist-violist Catherine Cho, with several festival regulars returning year after year along with some notable guest performers.
chesapeakemusic.org

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For the second year in a row, the Ocean City Film Festival welcomes John Waters, widely known as the “Pope of Trash” and lately as the self-described “Filth Elder” of American movie-making – this time for its eighth annual edition of this cinematic celebration at the beach. Native Baltimorean and lifelong resident of Charm City, Waters appears live for a screening of his movie “Hairspray,” which also launched his hit Broadway musical. The film will be accompanied by Waters’ live commentary at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 9, at the Ocean City Performing Arts Center. 

Expect him to recall the under-the-boardwalk inspiration for “Hairspray,” which challenges both racism and “sizeism” as the teen heroine Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) and her mom, played by drag queen Divine, aim to promote acceptance and diversity. In his teens, Waters attended live performances of the after-school T.V. dance and top-40 program, “The Buddy Deane Show” in Baltimore. An all-white cast of teen regulars populated the Buddy Deane cast, which, once a month, declared “Negro Day” so black kids could show off their dance moves. But Deane’s producers refused calls to integrate, and the host called it quits. At a “Buddy Deane Show” reunion in the 1980s, Waters was inspired to create his most mainstream hit in his filmography of culturally edgy, to say the least, movies.

But there’s so much more to the star director promising “Hair-Raising Fun!” Among the eclectic lineup of feature films is “Ali vs. Ali,” from Iran, about a fan who embarks on a globe-trotting quest to meet Muhammad Ali, and “American Meltdown,” the “best picture” winner of the 2023 Chattanooga Film Festival, a “coming-of-age” movie about a young woman who, struggling to pay the rent after losing her job, befriends a pickpocket named Mari. Dozens of shorts range from “Heritage Award: Waterfowl Festival,” about the 2022 accolade bestowed on the Easton-based festival held each November since 1971, to “Salted Earth,” spotlighting the invisible threat of saline inundation poisoning water and land alike in the looming co-disaster of rising sea-levels in the Mid-Atlantic region. 

Check it out – more than 100 films, including shorts.

ocmdfilmfestival.com

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

The year 1965 was a very big deal in my life. I graduated from Easton Jr.-Sr. High School at what is now Easton Middle School across Peach Blossom Road from Easton YMCA and St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, where I attended Sunday school. My graduation date also corresponded with the Rolling Stones’ release of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” And it was the time of my first paycheck in a career that spanned 55 years and still counting if you include my current free-lance forays. What I remember of that time and place is that entering the new Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum was like wandering into the front yard of my grandfather’s farmhouse on Dutchman’s Lane. Only in this case, the lane was paved with pebbled stoneage.

Now, there’s a brand new gateway to the treasures of this museum dedicated to a way of life, a way of sustenance for landlubbers and watermen alike. My folks milked cows and grew corn. Here at the maritime museum, we celebrate those who harvested oysters and crabs–rockfish, too. What is new about the museum today is its entryway into a world most of us know, even lifelong Eastern Shore folks, only from restaurants and seafood aisles in supermarkets. I remember days when tides flowed out so fast that you couldn’t catch crabs fast enough to count. But we never did that for a living. We sold milk to Breyer’s ice cream on refrigerated trucks that hauled it back to Philadelphia. I was a farmboy and can’t tell you how I ended up reviewing musical theater, except that it was a lot less messy than milking 60 cows twice a day. 

What I so appreciate about the brand-new Visitors Center of Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is that it invites you into this realm most of us know little about firsthand. You drive into the museum’s main entrance, and there’s a parking lot, of course, and on summer weekends, it may be filled to the gills, as you might say in fish parlance. The exhibit now on display for an entrance fee, “Water Lines: Chesapeake Watercraft Traditions,” gives you a sense of what it takes to make a living by this means or to enjoy the sport of sailing, racing, or whatever on the bay. After that museum-style introduction, walk out onto the campus vista in front of you – the St. Michaels Harbor and Miles River, from which the British couldn’t shoot straight because they aimed too high due to lighting that fooled them. 

If you haven’t already done so, be sure not to miss the exhibit in the Steamboat Building just to your left as you exit the Visitors Center toward the harbor. “The Changing Chesapeake” is a wake-up call to what awaits us if we pay no attention to climate change. It’s a no-brainer to figure out that areas closer to sea level are at risk of inundation. It’s no exaggeration, for instance, that a quarter of Dorchester County will be under water within the lifetime of our next generation.

OK, so that’s a bummer for sure. But there may still be time to do something about it. And just to show what the historic spirit of St. Michaels is about, check out The Fool’s Lantern restaurant, paying tribute to the Revolutionary War diversion that spared the town of hostile onslaught. Talk about making America Great Again. Hey, you did that a long time ago, St. Michaels, so do it again. The sea is rising–time to rise again to the occasion.

cbmm.org

 ***

For a very different sea-going adventure, here’s your chance to see the next big – possibly – musical Broadway hit, “Swept Away,” with music and lyrics by The Avett Brothers. This East Coast premiere with a book by John Logan, whose Broadway credits include “Red” about the artist Mark Rothko, is directed by Michael Mayer, a Tony winner for directing “Spring Awakening,” which also won John Gallagher Jr. a Tony for featured actor in a musical. Gallagher now stars in the lead role in “Swept Away,” based on the story of an ill-fated 19th-century voyage out of New Bedford, Mass., ending in unspeakable tragedy that may or may not offer a chance at redemption. The show runs through Jan. 14 at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. A review by the Washington Post said “Swept Away” has “proved itself worthy of a Broadway christening.” For Gallagher, a native of Wilmington, Delaware, this would be his fifth Broadway credit in a leading or major supporting role.arenastage.com

As the fraught 2024 presidential season opens with the Republican-only Iowa caucus on Jan. 15, a commentator with a sharp sense of humor and a perspective from outside an exclusively American perspective may be just the ticket. Not that Trevor Noah is on anyone’s ticket for president or VP. As a native of South Africa, the TV star who succeeded Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” is constitutionally ineligible for those offices. But Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center has just the ticket for his particular illumination, with shows running Jan. 11-14. Not that his commentary is apolitical. Noah offers an effectively non-partisan perspective, however socially relevant his views may be. Whether you agree or not, it’s refreshing to laugh at each other’s foibles and consider that disagreement does not make folks of an opposite opinion your sworn enemy.
france-merrickpac.org
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Main Street Gallery in Cambridge opens the new year with an aptly named show called “Serendipity,” dictionarily defined as “unplanned fortunate discovery.” First, if you’re unfamiliar, Main Street in Cambridge does not exist. The town’s only artist-owned-and-operated gallery is located on Poplar Street downtown. “You may discover a beautiful painting at a significant discount,” says director Linda Starling, “or a unique piece of knitwear perfect for a cold winter day.” Whatever the serendipitous surprises, the show and sale runs Jan. 4-Feb. 25, with Second Saturday of the month events planned for Jan. 13 when the gallery will stay open 5-8 p.m. during Cambridge’s Ice and Oyster Festival, and again for the same hours, Feb. 10 for pre-Valentine’s observance. Light refreshments and a chance to hear artists present brief chats about their works will be part of both free winter receptions.
mainstgallery.net
***
“Come to the Cabaret” at Church Hill Theatre. No, this is not a preview performance of the John Kander and Fred Ebb masterpiece to be revived once more on Broadway in April. But it is a chance to support a worthy local theater company with a one-night-only performance by local artists in a cabaret-style show preceded by an open-bar cocktail hour. It begins at 6:30 with curtain an hour later for $50 admission. Unlike the Broadway “Cabaret,” no Nazis or gorillas allowed.
churchhilltheatre.org
***
If you catch Improv Easton’s free First Night Talbot show at 7:45 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre’s Stoltz Listening Room – you may be inspired to see if you’re up to the improvisational challenge yourself. The next “Try-It” night is 6 p.m. on Jan. 16. Sign up by emailing [email protected]. Follow Improv Easton on Facebook or Instagram.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

You could call it a Sunday service, but if there was any sermon involved, it was largely unspoken. 

Chesapeake Music’s “Salute to Don Buxton” – presented by a stellar organization that would not exist without him – reminded me of religious services in the same space that was once the Ebenezer Methodist Church sanctuary, except that this event seemed personally inspired rather than worshipfully so. No choir, no organist at any Sunday service I can recall attending as a teen or tween in the late ’50s/early ’60s could hold a celestial candle to what I experienced on behalf of Buxton, retiring 38 years after he and his wife Meredith founded Chesapeake Music. (Full disclosure: What did I know when I was 10 or 13? Mostly, I couldn’t wait for it to be done.)

But in this case, much of the near-capacity audience on a rainy Sunday afternoon hung around long after the last note played, not so much for the champagne toast in Buxton’s honor but for a chance to speak to him, shake a hand, or just exchange memories with others about the musical legacy he has made possible.

So while the video tribute to Buxton that opened the program was a collective testament – from founding musicians to financial collaborators who contributed to the cultural landscape of a primarily rural mid-Shore region – the music was worth more than any thousand words I might bore you with. I’ll try to illuminate instead economically.

The concert, as billed, consisted of the Robert Schumann Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, which pianist Diane Walsh, who has played in Chesapeake Music’s Chamber Music Festival since its second season, described the piece as a complicated but – oh, let’s not give away the ending – romance. Robert – we suspect no one called him Bobby unless it was Claire – wanted to marry the young woman forbidden by her father to wed. The challenge went all the way to the courts, which, due to the slow wheels of justice, took the case almost to Claire’s 21st birthday, when her father’s blessing was legally irrelevant. Doesn’t sound so romantic, does it? But it’s just such stuff of life that inspires artistic masterpieces.

As played by Walsh on piano, and Marcy Rosen on cello, who performed in the inaugural Chesapeake Music Chamber Festival, and now co-artistic director Catherine Cho on violin, and fellow festival veteran Todd Phillips on viola, the performance of Schumann’s quartet was brought to vibrant new heights. I’ve always thought Schumann’s chamber works – not without exception – are superior to his complete symphonies. The emotion evoked in this piece attempts to transcend the complexity of what the composer must have felt in creating it. 

From the start, you can feel the urgency of what the couple felt for each other, tempered only by the paternal opposition they faced. Notes of despair emerge in the second movement, particularly on the cello, but later, in defiance, they are expressed on violin/viola determination. The third movement’s opening love-lost lamentation mellows into an irresistible romantic heart-plucking cello expectation. As promised by musical foreplay, the finale is more assertive and triumphant.

Not satisfied with this 30-minute tribute to Buxton, the quartet rewarded their standing ovation with an encore, Dvorok’s Quartet in D-flat Major, which together with the Schumann would comprise at least full symphonic or quartet concert post- or pre-intermission concert.

This brings us to Don Buxton’s other significant contributions to classical musical resonance on the Delmarva Peninsula. He was also the first musical director of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, now the only such professional symphony orchestra south of Wilmington in this region, and by all means worthy of his progeny, now led by Grammy-winning maestro Michael Renner.

Fittingly, Buxton got — almost — the last word on stage when he asked his wife Meredith somewhere in the Ebenezer audience: “What’s the one word you never taught me to say?” Her answer: “No!” In this case, I feel sure from the full-house laughter it produced that Meredith Buxton would agree that her “no” was in no way a negative.

Steve Parks is a retired New York critic and editor now living in Easton.

 

In the last speech he delivered in Memphis the night before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled his Birmingham, Alabama nemesis, segregationist commissioner of public safety Bull Connor, siccing dogs and fire hoses on civil rights marchers. King proclaimed: “There was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptists or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.” 

Approaching a half-century after his April 4, 1968, murder, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art mounted a photographic testimonial to the authenticity of the nonviolent civil rights movement launched by King. I say “authenticity” because so much of what is fact and history today is questioned by those who would have us erase the reality that many African Americans who may or may not feel disadvantaged today are the progeny of those who were captured, transported across the Atlantic, and sold into slavery. Book banners and others seek to conceal parts of history that reflect poorly on the American dream, saying they want to spare young white people any hint of guilt or shame. But no one is blaming white children or adults, generations removed from the slave trade in America. But the truth still matters. And always will.

The exhibit that opened at Easton’s Academy Art Museum in this 55th year since the Rev. King’s murder records the struggle for justice by African-Americans who, especially in the South, never escaped the enforced disenfranchisement of Jim Crow “laws” rolling back the Civil War Proclamation of Emancipation.

Upon entering the AAM’s Lederer Gallery, we see Burk Uzzle’s black-and-white photo of black Americans attending a march for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where King showed up in support. Three blocks away, Uzzle also photographed white men lined up along the strikers’ march route. Meanwhile, Ernest Withers captures a still shot of strikers holding signs reading, “I am a man.” And then, mere hours later, news photographer Steve Schapiro records for the historic record a press conference outside the Lorraine Motel after King’s murder. King . was 39 at the time of his violent death. A series of funeral photos by Uzzle, Doris Derby, and Benedict Fernandez follows, picturing Coretta Scott King and two of their young sons. Also pictured are Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel. Kennedy was assassinated barely two months later, and to put a perspective on how relatively recent this hateful political slaughter occurred, Ethel, at age 95, is still among us. 

About halfway around the Lederer Gallery, the civil rights theme takes a distinct turn, marked by a demarcation from black-and-white to a 1956 color photograph by Gordon Parks of a segregated drinking fountain in Mobile, Alabama, starkly labeled as “Colored Only” and “White Only.” The visual record that follows depicts the discrimination and deprivation that motivated the movement toward equal but not separate treatment – from lunch-counter sit-ins in Portsmouth, Virginia, to the summer of 1965 “Freedom Bus Riders” in Oxford, Ohio. While the historical records of these photos, including uncredited newspaper stills, are important from an artistic perspective, one of the most unforgettable is James Korales’ “Selma to Montgomery March, 1965,” projecting a long line of citizen soldiers for equality moving along a steep ridge cast against a storm-threatening sky.

Across the hall in the Healy Gallery, the exhibit continues with Morton Broffman’s photo of a woman sobbing after reading a newspaper headline: “SEN. KENNEDY SHOT IN HEAD.” Hours after that front-page extra edition was printed, Bobby Kennedy died. Another Broffman photo of NAACP marchers in Washington, D.C., shows a placard proclaiming, “You Can Kill a Man, but You Can’t Kill an Idea.” 

A photographic series by Sheila Pree Bright references more recent deadly encounters involving civil rights violations, including a protest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in city police custody. The final image in this civil rights visual essay offers a peaceful footnote. It’s a color photo of a puppy asleep in a pew at the Rev. King’s former church, Ebenezer Baptist in Birmingham. 

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Aside from “A Fire That No Water Can Put Out,” there’s much more to see in new exhibits at AAM. In a show of sculptural pieces – mostly of marble – “Public/Private” by Sebastian Martorana, you’ll recognize the subject of a cartoonish bust in white marble mounted on cedar wood. In case you don’t get it right away, check the title: I won’t give it away here. In the next gallery, adorable baby boots and mittens along with busts of the “Friendly Ghost” and “Kermit” (the Muppet frog) are at the very least smile-worthy.

Moving on to the hallway gallery upstairs, “Immaculate Landscapes” by Brett Weston (1911-1993) takes you on a black-and-white pictorial travelog. Most images are shot in Alaska and Hawaii and points between and beyond. “Ice and Water, Alaska” captures 1970 ice floes that have melted long ago. Pity the polar bears. “Lava, Hawaii,” from 1982, depicts fascinating textures that make you wonder if they were solid or liquid at the time. Some images are cliches from early in his career, such as 1952’s “Farm Landscape,” with cloud formations competing with the pastures and fields below. More appealing is Weston’s “Building Reflection” series of glass-encased urban highrises photographed with fun-house mirror effects.

Before you leave, if you haven’t already done so, see what you make of the immersive “Dominion” installation in the museum’s entryway Atrium. Marty Two Bulls Jr. critiques American consumerism and its harmful environmental effects. He focuses on the barely averted extinction of bison herds that defined the livelihood of the nomadic Oglala Lakota tribe of the Northern Plains. As seen from above, paper cutouts of buffaloes are strewn on walls and windows of the Atrium – with bronze-colored beer bottles suspended as they appear to be falling out of overturned trash cans. Some “buffaloes” are branded with dollar signs, while others are marked with interactive QR codes. Take a picture of one or two on your cell phone to see what you may learn.

Marty Two Bulls Jr. will present an artist’s talk at AAM on March 1.

‘A Fire That No Water Could Put Out’
Photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, through March 10 at the Academy Art Museum, 106 South St., Easton. “King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis” will be screened, free, on February 17. Also exhibited now are “Sebastian Martorana: Public/Private” through March 24, “Brett Weston: Immaculate Landscapes” through March 31, and “Marty Two Bulls Jr.: Dominion” through September 1, 2024. academyartmuseum.org

 

Practically everyone who ever heard a Christmas song or tune knows that Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” and that Tchaikovsky composed “The Nutcracker Suite.” Although seasonal masterpieces get their due in the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s delightful “Holiday Joy” concert, Leroy Anderson is the star composer in this diverse and illuminating program.

Not exactly a household name, Anderson arranged a medley – first recorded by the Boston Pops in 1950 – into a classical overture he called “A Christmas Festival,” featuring the greatest holiday hits we all know (except maybe only Brits are familiar with “Good King Wenceslas”). After this collection opened “Holiday Joy,” MSO’s Grammy-winning music director confessed his love of Christmas music regardless of his Jewish heritage. Irving Berlin would very likely agree.

On a crowded Avalon Theatre stage with 39 musicians, including Repper, who played two pieces on a keyboard because there was no room for a sit down piano, the orchestra boldly proclaimed that “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” before another piece by Leroy Anderson riveted our attention thanks to the clarion call of three MSO trumpeters – Luis Engelke, Josh Carr, and Ross McCool. In fact, Anderson’s “Bugler’s Holiday” is more widely associated with Fourth of July fireworks than Christmas stockings hanging from a fireplace mantel. But as performed by the trumpet trio accompanied by a fulsome orchestra, the holiday spirit transposed seamlessly from a key of July to one of December.

But that was hardly the only liberty Repper took in presenting “Holiday Joy.” While the duet from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” starring soprano soloist Claire Galloway and baritone Rob McGinniss, has nothing to do with Christmas or any other holiday – unless there’s one on the Italian calendar I missed – this rendition of a scene from arguably the best comic operas ever created is worth celebrating any day or night it’s performed. Never mind that it’s all sung in Italian, the actorly skills of Galloway and McGinniss translate beyond language barriers, not to mention their sonorous and soaring tones. But if you insist, McGinniss, as Figaro declares, “Women, women – eternal gods!/Who can figure you out?”

The lovely “Christmas Waltz” by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne and McGinnis’s interpretation of “White Christmas” preceded the “Barber of Seville” diversion that returned to seasonal form with Galloway’s soulful “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Based on a poem by Christina Rossetti, originally titled “A Christmas Carol” before Charles Dickens published his Scrooge salvation saga, it was later set to music by Gustav Holst. 

More cheerfully, we were advised to have ourselves “A Merry Little Christmas” by Galloway and McGinniss, who, it turns out, were classmates with Repper at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University Conservatory of Music. 

Not forgetting his heritage, Repper led the orchestra in Robert Wendel’s “Hanukkah Overture,” comprised of liturgical pieces and more widely recognized portions of “Rock of Ages” and “I Have a Little Dreidel,” laced with jazzy overtones suitable for Hanukkah’s eight-night Festival of Lights, beginning this year on Dec. 7.

Leroy Anderson kicks off the second half of “Holiday Joy” with “Sleigh Ride,” which, for my money, is way more jingly than “Jingle Bells.” You’ll be convinced I’m right when you hear it led by Repper in his Santa hat. A nod to the “Nutcracker Suite” is inevitable in any Christmas concert. But the orchestra gave Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous melodies their due with four selections we know from Disney’s “Fantasia,” if not from ubiquitous holiday performances of the ballet. 

One of the few sacred songs on the program, “O Holy Night,” just about brought the full house at the Avalon down – you might say on our knees, except there was no room for that at our seats. Galloway brought both reverence and inspiration to the lyrics and their echoes in what believers and non-believers alike have heard and recited most of their lives. Through all three verses, she calibrated her soaring lyric soprano voice to enable a thrilling culmination. 

Next, the program incorrectly listed “White Christmas” a second time. Instead, with Repper at the keyboard, McGinniss sang my (and the music director’s) personal favorite. I have no nit to pick on the baritone’s interpretation of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” nor Repper’s accompaniment as the rest of the orchestra raptly listened along with the audience. But it’s not possible in my universe for anyone to top Nat King Cole on his simply perfect reading of Mel Torme’s all-time classic, “The Christmas Song.” 

The soprano and baritone returned with a “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which, compared to their earlier contributions, amounted to a live singing holiday card. But their finale, narrating the text of Clement Moore’s literally immortal words in “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” showed off the acting skills of McGinniss and Galloway. The orchestra became an extra character in the reading to music composed by Bill Holcombe, with sound-effect punctuations emanating from every section of players. 

After a well-deserved standing ovation, virtually everyone sat back in their seats for a singalong encore of first-verse-only versions of songs everyone who ever observed Christmas knows by heart. The evening fully lived up to its billing: “Holiday Joy.”

Note: The “Holiday Joy” concerts are dedicated to longtime MSO patron Norma Redele, who passed away recently. Repper said Redele introduced Jeffrey Parker, the current MSO board president, to the orchestra.

***

The MSO is not done with its season’s greetings after the weekend’s remaining “Holiday Joy” performances. As part of the orchestra’s Ensemble Series, a pair of “Holiday Quintet” concerts will be presented at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15, at Epworth United Methodist Church in Rehoboth Beach and at 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 17, at Christ Church in Easton. After that, at the same Easton venue, “A Toast to the New Year” concert, featuring the full orchestra and mezzo-soprano Taylor Hillary Boykins, offers a joyful, tuneful New Year’s Eve celebration starting at 7 p.m., time enough for you to welcome at midnight the year 2024 in your own way. Remember that admission to the MSO concert is separate from the First Night Talbot events happening up and down Harrison Street just outside Christ Church. 

‘Holiday Joy’ Concerts

Thursday night, Nov. 30, at Avalon Theatre, Easton. Also, 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 2, Epworth United Methodist Church, Rehoboth Beach, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, Ocean City Performing Arts Center, midatlanticsymphony.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.

 

Let’s start with First Night December – Dec. 1 in Rock Hall with pianist and impresario Joe Holt’s concert presentation of “It’s Almost Christmas, Charlie Brown.” The show is a tribute in song to Charles Schulz’s holiday TV classics by the late jazz pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi, who pretty much defined the “Peanuts” animated soundtrack. Drummer Greg Burrows and bassist Tom Baldwin join Holt at Rock Hall’s “home of musical magic,” The Mainstay, 5753 N. Main St. Showtime begins at 8.

mainstayrockhall.org

Chestertown’s Garfield Center for the Arts gift wraps its production of the 2019 screenplay adaptation based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel “Little Women,” which begins and ends on Christmas Day, 15 years apart. The Off-Broadway debut of Kate Hamill’s revision brings still-relevant women’s issues to light while still focusing on the March family of a mother and her daughters growing into adulthood while their father is off to defend the Union during the Civil War. The play runs on weekends, Dec. 1-17.

garfieldcenter.org 

’Peake Players, the student theater company of Chesapeake College at Wye Mills, brings “The Snow Show” – a mash-up of 18th- and 19th-century Christmas tales – to the stage of Todd Performing Arts Center, Dec. 7-9. The plot, such as it is, finds a family stuck in a snowbank on the way to Grandpa’s place. Pushing a wheelbarrow uphill, Grandpa struggles to come to their rescue. But he can’t make it without the help of dancers moving to tunes inspired by characters from “The Little Match Girl,” “Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox,” and “The Beggar King” in this multicultural celebration.

chesapeake.edu/peake-players

Church Hill Theatre’s holiday season offering is a staged version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” based on the 1938 radio version directed by Orson Welles and starring Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge. (No, we’re not expecting either of those late-greats to appear as the Ghost of Christmas Past.) But you can catch this adaptation at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Dec. 15 and 16, or matinees at 2 on Dec. 16 and 17 at 103 Walnut St., Church Hill.

churchhilltheatre.org

Adkins Arboretum in Ridgely invites you to ride along with them to Kennett Square, Pa., to enjoy the ever-popular, always-spectacular “A Longwood Christmas” – as in Longwood Gardens. Upon arrival, take a walk and a look around the botanical wonders, indoors and out, before settling down – maybe you can find a cozy spot next to a firepit – to experience the wondrous show of a half-million lights entwined in a botanically inspired configuration to create a visual rivaling the best Fourth of July fireworks you’ve ever seen. (Sunset at this post-daylight-savings time of year is 4:35 or so.)

The bus trip departs Aurora Park Drive in Easton at 1 p.m., 20 minutes later at the U.S. 50/Route 404 park and ride, and 1:45 at the park and ride at Routes 301/291, Millington. The return trip begins at 8 p.m. and arrives at 10-ish at Queen Anne’s and Talbot stops. Members of Adkins get a $40 discount on advance reservations. (If you miss the bus trip, “A Longwood Christmas” runs through Jan. 7 with Christmas Day and a few more days off.) Meanwhile, coming up at Adkins: Although it will still be several days short of winter on Sunday, Dec. 10, you can get a taste and up-close view of the season with a guided walk through the arboretum’s Caroline County meadows, woodland, and wetlands led by Margan Glover revealing sounds and sights of thrumming woodpeckers, dry forest weeds abloom and unfrozen creeks trickling. 

adkinsarboretum.org

Temple B’nai Israel in Easton, more widely known regionally as the Salter Center for Jewish Life on the Eastern Shore, holds an ecumenical Community Menorah Lighting, 5-6:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, led by Rabbi Peter Hyman. The first night of Hanukkah is observed at the temple on Dec. 8 with a candle lighting and a new-member Shabbat service with guest cantorial soloist Anita Stoll. Hanukkah observances will continue each evening through the eighth night, with a final candle lighting at 4:26.
bnaiisraeleaston.org

Easton Choral Arts Society didn’t steal my “Home for the Holidays” line for its annual Christmastime concerts at Christ Church. We both “borrowed” it from Perry Como’s holiday hit of the same name – “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” – released in 1954. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that classic made it to the playlist for performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10. Artistic director Alexis Renee Ward promises a musical travelog, from Southern gospel and Midwestern regional folk to Northeastern folk rock and West Coast cinematic soundtracks. But the highlight may well be the world premiere of “Santa Lucia” composed by Ward, based on the Festival of Lights first observed on these shores by 17th-century settlers along the Delaware River. The ecumenical program of secular and sacred music includes works celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, as well as Christmas. The winter holidays, indeed.

eastonchoralarts.org 

Dorchester Center for the Arts hosts its annual “Merry Market” show and sale where you can peruse potential holiday gifts no one else will find on Amazon or at whatever mall that still exists. That’s what Shop Small Saturday, the day after Black Friday, is all about. Member artists display various finely crafted art, including pottery, jewelry, candles, and more, along with paintings, small sculptures, and other art constructs. Meet many of the artists at DCA’s Second Saturday reception on Dec. 9. But while you’re at it, don’t overlook the center’s current exhibit, the “Red Zone Project,” drawn from the Human Trafficking Awareness Art Project as part of the partnership of the Talbot-based For All Seasons crisis center with the Dorchester Detention Center. Not so merry, merry. But, as they say, there but for the grace of God (or whomever) go I. Both shows run through Dec. 23 at 321 High St., Cambridge.

dorchesterarts.org

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It’s not exactly a holiday, but it’s well worth celebrating the career of Don Buxton, who is retiring from 30-plus years as executive director of Chesapeake Music. But his influence and leadership in music on the Shore stretches beyond his extraordinary accomplishments at CM. Besides establishing the top-notch Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival that ushers in the summertime with notes of inspiration and artistry, the springtime Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition for Young Professionals showcases the talents and promise of the next generation of virtuoso geniuses. 

But beyond Chesapeake Music, Buxton was a central figure in establishing a professional symphony orchestra in Easton and the Delmarva Peninsula, serving as conductor in the inaugural seasons of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. In celebration of his career, CM presents its “Salute to Don Buxton” with a video presentation too short to cover all his merits, but also a performance by Chesapeake Music co-artistic directors – cellist Marcy Rosen and violinist Catherine Cho – as well as fellow chamber festival stalwarts pianist Diana Walsh and violist Todd Phillips. Expect only the best in honor of Don Buxton, 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, at the elegant Ebenezer Theatre. Chesapeake Music headquarters are next door in downtown Easton.

chesapeakemusic.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Remarkably, 50 years after the assassination, seven of the surviving doctors who attended President John K. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas were interviewed for a documentary, “JFK: What the Doctors Saw,” now streaming a decade later on Parliament +. 

Several of those doctors – along with others who have since died – were among those I was scheduled to interview for the Baltimore Sun in 1976 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations was investigating the murders of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. (More later on what became – or didn’t – of my attempt to interview those who tried to save JFK’s life 60 years ago on Nov. 22.)

As directed by Barbara Shearer, “What the Doctors Saw” is just that. There is no sidetracking – nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald except his claim to be a “patsy” in denying that he was the assassin, whether alone or with help. We don’t even hear a word about what we’ve all known for six decades – that Jack Ruby murdered Oswald just two days after JFK was shot dead.

What we do hear over and over, almost ad nauseam is that each doctor observed what they consistently and unanimously maintain was a dime-sized entry wound at the president’s throat, subsequently obscured by a tracheotomy in a futile attempt to resuscitate him. The massive wound they observed on the right at the back of his skull was unquestionably, to all of them, an exit wound. Any such bullet entering and exiting in that manner would have to have come from the front or slightly to the right of the president from his back seat in the fatal limousine. It could not possibly have been shot from behind – a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald was working on the day of the assassination. Other shots causing a shallow wound in the president’s back and another that seriously wounded then-Texas Governor John Connally in the front seat of the limousine did come from that direction.

Most disturbing in the documentary are recollections by Dr. Robert McClellan and others that a dark-suited man they took to be a Secret Service agent approached Dr. Malcolm Perry, the lead surgeon of the Parkland team, in Trauma Room 1 after he announced the president’s death and described an entry wound to the throat. “You must never call that an entrance wound again if you know what’s good for you,” McClellan quoted the presumed member of JFK’s security detail.

More suspicious, if not downright conspiratorial, was the apparently botched presidential autopsy, as recalled by Jim Jenkins, the one surviving member of the naval team conducting it. Under Texas law, an autopsy resulting from a deadly crime must be conducted in the county of jurisdiction. But the Parkland doctors and investigators of the assassination say that the Secret Service muscled the president’s body into a vehicle bound for Love Field and a flight to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital by two military physicians who were not pathologists and had virtually no experience performing autopsies.

While the documentary strongly suggests a government coverup that resulted in a rubber-stamp lone-assassin verdict by the Warren Commission on Sept. 24, 1964 – barely two months before the presidential election that resulted in President Lyndon Johnson’s first full term in office – there are arguably benign motives behind this rush to judgment. The Cuban Missile Crisis, resolved peacefully just more than a year before JFK’s assassination, involved a former member of the Marine Corps – Oswald – who defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with no apparent action taken against him. Johnson is heard in a recorded conversation regarding the Warren report that it would help avert a third world war and save millions of lives. 

We’ll never know, of course. And most likely, after 60 years, we’ll never know the whole truth about the JFK assassination. 

But personally, I’m disappointed that the questions asked in this documentary were not asked before a half-century had passed. At least they were asked before all the Parkland doctors had passed on. The Sun was prepared to ask those questions of the same doctors – when, back in 1976, many of them were still working at Parkland. Based on my front-page story derived from House Select Assassinations Committee leaks and an interview with photographic expert witness Robert Grodin, Sun managing editor Paul Banker authorized my trip to Dallas with autopsy photographs turned over to the panel. My mission: Ask the doctors I had contacted – including one attending Connally – about what they saw when the president and the governor were brought to trauma rooms 1 and 2 on Nov. 22, 1963. 

Accompanied by an attorney who would notarize their comments about the photographs, I boarded a flight to Houston from Baltimore-Washington International with a subsequent connection to Dallas. The flight, however, was delayed more than three hours after a fuel truck struck a wing of our TWA jetliner. Engineers from McDonnell Douglas were consulted about safety concerns. We arrived in Houston too late for flight connections to Dallas and had little chance of getting there by car rental before the early Saturday tee times for four of the doctors I was to interview. 

In a 1975 TV interview with Geraldo Rivera, Grodin, and Dick Gregory introduced a home movie of the assassination, shot by Abraham Zapruder in shocking color. A year later, after being introduced by one of my sources, Grodin agreed to give me copies of JFK autopsy photos for the purpose of showing them to the Parkland doctors. In a minority report as part of the House probe, Grodin argued that the official autopsy photos were doctored to make the massive wound toward the back of Kennedy’s head – much of his brain was exposed with bits of it splattered on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit – to resemble a nickel-sized entry wound. 

The photos that the doctors called fakes in the Paramount + documentary appear to my eyes to be the same images I had in my possession 48 years ago. But, unbeknownst to me, my most conspiratorially minded source had made his own way to Dallas. Freaked out and suspecting some sort of foul play at BWI, he called my boss in the middle of the night, advising him to call the FBI and speculating that the CIA had targeted me. Though I had arranged interviews with Parkland doctors the following weekend, I was taken off the story. And the photocopies were returned. With nothing to show the doctors but grainy black-and-white Xeroxes, the reporter sent in my stead to Dallas came up empty.

So, that’s my excuse for never getting to ask the doctors what they saw. But what about the rest of the news media? Why didn’t anyone else step forward to ask the doctors what they saw on Nov. 22, 1963? I procured the photographs surreptitiously. But they’ve long since been published. Maybe it’s the mishandling of JFK assassination investigations that launched our national doubts about the official line fueling our current conspiracy-theory gullibility.

I have a novel on weird theories about JFK and 9/11. Unpublished – like my best shot in 1976 for a Pulitzer in investigative reporting. It’s called “Camelot and the Second Coming.” Tell me if you know a likely agent.

Steve Parks is a retired reporter, editor, and critic now living in Easton.