“Christmas on the Prairie” Dec. 3

Grand Hoven music in the air

Beautiful music will again reverberate through St. Anthony’s Church in Hoven on Sunday, Dec. 3. Beginning at 3 p.m., two large choirs and a 23-piece orchestra and two accomplished soloists will again be featured at a pre-Christmas grand concert whose theme this year is “Hope is Born Emmanuel.”

A 58-member All-Faiths Regional Festival Choir and Northern State University’s 38-member Chamber Singers are again honored to perform with the Sioux Falls Symphony Orchestra (SDSO).

One of last year’s concert goers wrote, “This yearly program has become a beloved part of Christmas to me.”

Hoven’s Michael Coyne for the 14th time this year is the Festival Choir director. Festival Choir Coordinator Mary Keller, who is also serving for the 14th time, says, “The choir represents 17 communities and they all love to sing. It’s good camaraderie. It is good for the body and soul.”

Rhonda Strouckel, Bowdle, Festival Choir practice accompanist, also wears the 14-year badge, as do several Festival Choir members and many  volunteers.

Dr. Timothy Woods, who was the concert guest soloist in 2015, brings Aberdeen’s NSU Chamber Singers for their ninth year. He considers his Hoven performances among career highlights. Thomas Fortner, as the SDSO’s new assistant conductor, comes to Hoven for the first time this year.

“Every minute of the concert and reception was pure bliss!” another of last year’s concert-goers wrote, adding, “I can’t imagine how much work this entails. Your parish and community have lots to be proud of.”

This year’s concert opens with a vigorously rhythmic anthem, “Let There be Light,” featuring the SDSO accompanying the combined choirs. Father Kevin Doyle follows with a St. Anthony’s welcome.

Two featured soloists

Featured concert soloists are Tenor Juan Ahumada and Soprano Lilly Karrer. Ahumada hails from Sioux City and returns this fall to New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Karrer, from St. Louis, carries impressive performance and award credits. She looks forward to following her parents, Don and Cindy Karrer, who sang at their wedding at St. Anthony’s Church in Hoven 30 years ago. Karrer’s grandparents are Hoven’s Marvin and Lillian Glatt.

Lending a dramatic air to the afternoon, Narrator Darrel Fickbohm, a Sioux Falls singer, songwriter, and professional actor, appears nine times using selections based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Traditionally, as the concert nears its end, the audience is invited to join the SDSO, both choruses, and both soloists in singing Silent Night and Joy to the World. For Joy to the World, St. Anthony’s Alice Simon adds organ accompaniment on the church’s 17-rank, 1,127-pipe organ.

The combined choruses and soloists join the SDSO for the grand finale, the crowd-pleasing “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah.

Concert general coordinators are St. Anthony’s office employees Dawn McClure and Noreen Glodt.

McClure says, “Though I have been a part of the Christmas on the Prairie concert for several years, I am still amazed at how seamlessly and selflessly the people of Hoven come together to create such a elegant and breathtaking event.”

Glodt adds, “Knowing I am helping secure the future of our parish is very rewarding. I also enjoy hearing the excitement in people’s voices when they call in to order tickets.”

Following the two-hour concert, which includes a 15-minute intermission, patron ticket holders will fill Hoven’s festively-decorated American Legion Hall for a meal of beef tips in Burgundy sauce, twice-baked potatoes, glazed carrots and a selection of cheesecakes or pies.

Credits to many

Affectionately called the “Cathedral on the Prairie” because of its mammoth size, many volunteers in the Hoven area are enthusiastically preparing to host this, St. Anthony’s 14th annual pre-Christmas Symphony Orchestra concert and gala reception.

Also credited in the concert’s program book are Michael Coyne, Sharon Rausch, Vicki Rausch, and Alice Simon, Festival Choir committee members; Gloria Duenwald, Dawn McClure and Noreen Glodt, concert book and publicity; Dave Griese and Darin Vetch, lights; Bob Keller, Torrey McClure, Vern Rausch, and Wayne Stuwe, staging, seating and parking; Amy Hartung, reception caterer and decorator; and St. Anthony’s Altar Society Circle 5, musicians’ luncheon.

Because of St. Anthony’s marvelous acoustics and the generous volunteer spirit of Hovenites and other area folks, every December for a few hours Hoven proudly takes its place among larger city concert halls. Hoven’s population, which is just over 400, will again swell to over 1,000.

Tickets are available by calling St. Anthony’s Rectory at 605-948-2451 during regular business hours 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Credit card payments are accepted.

BEHIND THE CURTAINS:

• The two concert choirs, their conductors, the soloists, and the orchestra and narrator have only one relatively brief opportunity to put it all together, when they meet for an hour and half on the day of the concert, before the doors open at 2:30 for the 3 o’clock concert.

• The NSU Chamber Singers make use of St.  Anthony’s large choir loft for special musical effects.

• St. Anthony’s first five pre-Christmas concerts, those featuring the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra from 2003 to 2007, were modeled after similar concerts at St. Joseph Cathedral in Sioux Falls.

• Including this year’s concert, nine more independent concerts have been held, every year from 2009-through 2017. There was no concert in 2008 because St. Anthony’s was installing geothermal heating and cooling. If there had been a concert scheduled that year, it likely would have been cancelled due to bad weather.

• Man, do the cookies and bars flow on the way to each of St. Anthony’s Christmas on the Prairie concerts! A conservative estimate says Festival choir members put away around 500. Add at least another couple hundred the day of the concert that are available to the crowd of musicians who meet in the church basement before the concert and during its intermission. Coffee, lemonade to go with…. Um-mmmmm!

• St. Anthony’s junior and senior religious education students are annually recruited for a variety of lifting and moving chores.

• Concerts have always featured a regional All-Faiths Festival Choir with many of the vocalists traveling long distances, including several who travel 80 miles from Pierre and Aberdeen, for many of the eight practices. Many Festival Choir members have impressive musical credentials on their resumes.

• All-Faiths Festival Choir Accompanist Rhonda Strouckel supplies every member with an accompaniment CD that contains his/her specific part, which sometimes adds up to eight different accompaniments--1st and 2nd bass, 1st and 2nd tenor, 1st and 2nd alto, and 1st and 2nd soprano.

• The SDSO conductor travels to Hoven and Aberdeen the week before the concert, practicing with Mike Coyne and his Festival Choir on Sunday and with Dr. Woods and the NSU Chamber Singers the following day. Bob Keller has homemade ice cream with a variety of toppings ready and waiting after that grueling Festival Choir practice.

• St. Anthony’s Church basement was completed in 1910 and used for worship until the first Mass in the upper edifice was celebrated on Holy Thursday, 1921.

• St. Anthony’s Altar Society Circles take turns hosting a soups/sandwichs/bars luncheon in the church basement for Symphony Orchestra members and their conductor and also for NSU’s Chamber Choir and their director. Festival Choir members who have traveled a long distance--or didn’t--are also welcome.

• Thirty-one intricately-detailed stained-glass windows and hundreds of stenciled designs decorate the church’s interior. Though Christmas is weeks away, some of St. Anthony’s Christmas finery is in place for the concert.

• St. Anthony’s twin towers reach 140 feet to the heavens. The church’s footprint is 161 feet long and 64 feet wide.

• Parish volunteers, working for five years, accomplished a major interior restoration in the early 1980s. A new half-million dollar roof and geothermal heating and cooling soon followed.