Jacob Branson
Harding University will host Dec. 5 Emmet Cahill and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra as part of the Arts and Life Performance Series. The director of this program and Chair of the Department of Music, Jay Walls, says “it’s going to be the largest Christmas concert that we’ve ever had at Harding.” Cahill is a member of Celtic Thunder, an Irish music group, who has just completed a 50-concert tour. “He’ll be singing with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and also with our Grand Chorus,” Walls said.
This will mark Cahill’s second time performing on Harding’s campus.
“He performed for us last December and it was very well received,” Walls said. “people were raving about it for months afterward.”
The goal of the Arts and Life Performance series is to bring global performances into the Harding community. “I think sometimes students get the feeling that they have to go to Little Rock or Memphis to see somebody of value,” Walls said. “They don’t realize that we bring some big-name people into Searcy.”
Cahill will be joined by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, which is currently the #1 orchestra in the state. They performed on campus last spring for the “Music of the Spheres” concert. This combined performance is possible thanks to local sponsors like the White County Citizen and Centennial Bank.
“Without the help that Centennial Bank gives us we wouldn’t be able to bring the Arkansas Symphony in or big names like Emmet Cahill,” Walls said.
Alongside these two guests will be Harding’s Grand Chorus, a combination of the Harding Chorus, directed by Kyle Pullen, and the Concert Choir, directed by Stacey Neely.
“The Grand Chorus will be singing five numbers and consists of around 107 students,” Pullen said.
He says the two groups have been working on their pieces for about a month, and that while “most of the time we do different repertoire, for this concert we’re combining.” Among these pieces is one in Scottish, for which Pullen says they prepared by having been “given a phonetic way of speaking the words.”
If those three participants weren’t enough, the Harding Orchestra is also lending some of its players to the performance.
Emily Palmer, a senior Cellist who has been playing with Harding for four years said, “we’ve had the music for a while and been working on it on our own, but we’ll be starting group rehearsals this week.”
Harding’s instrumentalist section will consist of about 15 players all of whom “were selected to perform in the concert, for the most part, it’s the first 2 or 3 chairs of each section,” Palmer said.
Walls said the Benson will be heavily decorated for the event, with Pullen expressing that “it will be a beautiful scene and beautiful music.”The concert will be at 7:30 PM on December 5th in the Benson Auditorium. Tickets are available now at hardingtickets.com for $20 with a half-price option for students. Including intermission, The show will last for roughly an hour and a half and will consist of pieces such as “Danny Boy,” “O Holy Night,” “Angels We Have Heard on High,” “Mary Did You Know” and a suite from The Polar Express.
