Kilgore Community Concert Association announces 2008-2009 season

The Kilgore Community Concert Association has launched a membership campaign for its 2008-2009 season which features five performances and a variety of vocalists, instrumentalists, and musical styles.

All five concerts will be held in Dodson Auditorium on the Kilgore College campus. Memberships in the association, available for $35 for adults or $80 for families, include admission to all five concerts. No individual tickets will b e sold.

Making a return trip to Kilgore this year to launch the new season will be The Vocal Majority, a men's chorus of more than 100 voices featuring the close harmonies of the barbershop music style. Based in Dallas,

Vocal Majority has won 10 international barbershop singing competitions and has recorded extensively. Members of the chorus come from a variety of professions and businesses and gather in Dallas weekly for rehearsals. The Vocal Majority will appear on September 6.

They will be followed on October 19 by Daniel Narducci, a classic American baritone whose talents have been showcased through live stage presentation, recordings, documentaries and television. He has sung with major symphony orchestras and opera companies around the country as well as on operetta and musical theater stages. His performance with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was filmed for nationwide broadcast in China.

 

Pavlo, a guitarist, performs along with four supporting musicians on November 7. Greek-Canadian, Pavlo began playing the guitar at age 10 and was composing his own music by age 13. He defines his style as "Mediterranean," but reviewers say his music transcends genre distinctions and may be an entirely new style of music. He recorded the Best Instrumental Album of the Year in 2000 in the Juno competition, Canada's equivalent of the Grammys. He was named touring artist of the year in 2006. Pavlo played a command performance for Prince Charles of England in 2001. Jade Simmons, a classical pianist, will appear in Kilgore on January 13, 2009. Trained at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and at the foundation Bell' Arte in Brussels, she made her debut with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2005. Since then her performance schedule has taken her across the Untie States and to Barcelona, the Canary Islands, Paris, and Greece. As Miss Illinois, she was first runner-up at the 2000 Miss America Pageant, where she performed Chopin's Etude in C Sharp Minor live before a television audience of millions.

 

The season's final concert on March 24, 2009 will feature Pianafiddle, piano and fiddle duo. The pianist is Lynn Wright who has enjoyed a long career as a jazz and ragtime pianist. The violinist is Adam DeGraff who is a classically-trained orchestra violinist and chamber musician. They met in West Virginia, where each recognized in the other a complementary talent: soulful, improvisational piano playing by Wright and technically superb violin playing by De- Graff. Working together as Pianafiddle, they engross audiences with traditionally grounded yet spontaneous musical creations that unfold on stage. New members joining Kilgore community concert Association by March 6 will get a bonus -- free admission to "On Broadway," a song and dance extravaganza

which will close the 2007-2008 season. Curtain time for "On Broadway" is 7:30 p.m. on March 67, and memberships for the 2008-2009 season will be available at the door.