Collaboration, guest conductor enliven annual 'Holiday Magic' concert
Dec. 2—Freshening up a traditional holiday concert is a tedious affair.
Such a show requires enough familiarity to draw people in, but a degree of innovation and alteration is needed to keep the audience engaged. That's what the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra aims to do with "Holiday Magic," this year's iteration of the beloved Christmas concert.
Guest conductor Scott O'Neil, who spent nine years as the resident conductor for the Colorado Symphony in Denver, is well accustomed to writing and rewriting compositions to reach a broader audience.
"I think you get the widest diversity audience for a program like this," O'Neil told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. "It's been my challenge ever since I started doing this. When someone comes to hear the symphony for the first time on this program, I want there to be so many hooks, so many different things where you may not like (one thing), but you're gonna love (another).
"As a curator for classical music, people always say, 'Well, how can we bring more people to classical music?' My thing is that, first, you bring them to live music. Trying to be the gateway to that is something I take seriously."
"Holiday Magic" is a melding of long-affiliated performing arts organizations around Cheyenne — the CSO pairing their symphonic styling with the vocal performances of the Cheyenne Chamber Singers and All City Children's Choir, and the dancers from En Avant Dance Studio.
The contributions of different entities allows for lively creativity from the group as a whole.
O'Neil and the symphony decided to restructure "12 Days of Christmas" so that each listed movement is played in a different musical style. Meanwhile, "Angel's Dance" is an uptempo interpretation of "Angels We Have Heard on High." They will perform a narrated piece in "The Night Before Christmas," where the musical elements primarily come in the form of adding instrumental flourishes to animate the events of the story.
En Avant joins the effort in a year where the group will perform more accompanying dances than ever before. A total of six dances will be paired with different pieces in the concert, from "The Nutcracker Suite" to an original of O'Neil's. Four of the dances are group numbers, while one is a solo, the other a duet.
Their involvement grants a significant opportunity for students of the local studio. It's not only the largest crowd many of them will perform in front of, it's also their chance to dance along to the ebbs and flows of live music. Along with O'Neil's slight variation on some popular Christmas themes, En Avant co-owner and instructor Tenacity Bricher-Wade has had to approach long-familiar pieces from a new perspective.
"The duet that we're doing is a beautiful piece of music," Bricher-Wade said. "But it's much slower than anything that we would have done in the past for a Christmas concert."
However, another dance calls for several lifts, movements that requires significant physical strength to execute. Without any male dancers in the troupe, she's had to rework the famous "Nutcracker" duet into a group piece.
"That was so hard to wrap my brain around — doing a group piece — because I'm so used to it being 'pas de deux,'" she continued. "It's not your typical thing. I had to really flip a switch and think about how to turn this into a group number."
Variation, and of course, entertainment, is of the utmost importance in "Holiday Magic." Where some pieces are recognizable, others will be a departure from what many attendees have come to expect from a traditional concert, but hopefully without losing the "heartwarming, Christmas-y feel."
"The number one goal is just to have people leave and say, 'Wow, that was great,'" O'Neil said. "I think whether you're listening to classical music, pop music or whatever kind of music, we go to concerts to punctuate our daily lives.
"Most people work really hard. They spend a lot of time working, and when they go to a concert, the most important thing is that they leave saying, 'You know what, that was great. I feel refreshed, I feel renewed.' Above anything else is just giving them that — a punctuation of daily life."
Will Carpenter is the Wyoming Tribune Eagle's Arts and Entertainment/Features Reporter. He can be reached by email at wcarpenter@wyomingnews.com or by phone at 307-633-3135. Follow him on Twitter @will_carp_.
